Highway 61 Revisited - Part 2

This is Part 2 of the tale of my recent trip to Mississippi where I attended the Deep Blues Festival in Clarksdale, which was headlined by Scott H. Biram. But there were a lot of other acts, and I got out to the countryside quite a bit as well. See Part 1 here. Recall that, for some reason I can’t remember, I am telling the story backwards.

The second night of the festival featured Howlin Hurd. I enjoyed his show. He played the old timey Blues with talent and flair, and maybe a little rockabilly vibe. Earlier he told me they did drone, so I was expecting some Velvet Underground vibe, but as the show progressed I realized he had just been fucking with me.

As a Benefactor of the Deep Blues Festival, I had access to a VIP area with lots of alcohol and I found I really liked 4 Roses bourbon. I was pouring another one and I met a guy who was there with his 15 year old kid. I asked the kid what kind of music he listened to and he said Rock. I was like, really? Isn’t that like Grandpa music to you? Dad chimed in that the kid was really into rock and then listed all these classic rock shows they’d seen, which was all the big acts from the seventies like Eric Clapton and Elton John. I told the kid not to worry, he’d be into rap in the next year or so, if he wasn’t already. Dad hustled the kid away and shot me daggers every time I saw him after that. Poor guy. I always knew I’d lose my children to stuff of their generation around that age, but I considered it a good thing that they wouldn’t want to hang out with dad anymore or listen to his old-timey music. This guy didn’t seem to have figured it out yet and looked like he had some hurt coming just over the horizon.

Maybe I was just in an asshole kinda mood. The photographer guy who nobody could help but notice from the first night, and who had made an ass of himself at the Benefactor party, was at the Howlin Hurd show doing his same schtick. He walked by me and nodded and on a whim I buttonholed him to see some of his photos. He was resistant but I persisted. The previous night he had insisted I show him the photos I’d taken of A.J. Haynes and then he criticized what he saw, implying they were amateurish. Anyway, he gave in, chimped through a bunch and then showed me one. It was, as expected, a closeup of the performer’s face. "Really nice shot," I said.

I had met Howlin’ Hurd earlier at the Benefactor party. You can see them both right there in the photograph. The photographer is the skinny guy with the hat. Howlin Hurd is the rock star. I’d never been a Benefactor before, which is apparently a more polite term for VIP but really means someone who paid more for their tickets in exchange for a few perks. I’ve been to a few VIP functions over the years, and all the time I spent at private school events in New York had prepared me for that sort of thing. The most important thing is to drink all the free booze you can, which I did. And I was comfortable with the wealthier folk. I knew their type. I wasn't there to socialize with the VIPs, but strangely, people kept talking to me, which I found a little odd and somewhat unnerving.

I sat down at the head of an empty table to get away from it all. But it turned out I had inadvertently sat down at the festival bigwig table and I soon found myself surrounded by the festival bigwigs. I had a nice chat with a lady from Kansas City who was about my age. It was pleasant chat, mostly about cities and museums and music. The owner of the Shack Up Inn was to my left and we’d both spent some time in Paris around the same years, so we talked about that. The Shack Up Inn is made up of a lot of literal shacks from the Mississippi countryside that he had bought and transported to his place outside of Clarksdale to rent to tourists. There was a music venue there as well, which you'll see below. He told me about how he had bought the shacks and how they were really hard to find these days, which I had noticed earlier during my ride down Highway 1 to Greenville.

I’m not entirely socially incompetent, not always anyway, it’s just that I usually don’t want any part of society. I’m an observer, not a participant. I used to be a critic, or certainly much more of a critic. These days I’m very accepting for the most part. When things aren't to my taste I just chuckle rather than get all het up about it.

So I’m standing in line next to Howlin Hurd and I’m not at all wanting to have a conversation but I feel kind of obligated. Howlin Hurd dresses like a rock star, and I appreciate the 'fake it till you make it vibe.' I’ve been around enough famous or famous-ish people to know that they tend to like being acknowledged, so I thought I should say something. But in my state of mind, such as it was, I could only come up with some inanity akin to "so you’re in a band?”

”How could you tell,” he practically sneered. Heh, right. We were standing in the line for wine and cheese and southern dishes including fried fish and grits. I asked him what kind of music he played. He said a lot of drone and northern Mississippi hill country blues, but especially drone. Not the answer I was expecting, but cool. He was from New York, or Saint Louis but lived in New York, so he must be into the Velvet Underground I thought.

Little Willie Farmer, pictured above, played an exclusive show for us Benefactors, regurgitating all the old Delta Blues standards. By this point I’d fully realized that the Delta Blues were long dead and entombed in whatever museum depreciated musical genres go to gather dust. The Blues festival was only half over and I’d already heard the same song from Muddy Waters five times. Maybe I just can't be satisfied, eh. I’m sorry to confess that despite being a Benefactor for the Delta Blues Fest, I’m not any kind of Delta Blues aficionado. I listened to it way back when I was discovering rock history, starting with Robert Johnson and Son House, but that was a long time ago. Scott H. Biram does a lot of Delta Blues and does them incredibly well, bringing them into the present legitimately, not as some kind of museum piece, but I think in general the genre has become the stuff of old white guys. The Delta Blues folk got old and died and the following generations moved on to other kinds of music, or just regurgitate the old stuff for the tourists. That ain’t what they play in the Greenville clubs where people who live there now go. That would be hip-hop, or whatever they’re calling its successor these days.

I spent the days before the shows driving the backroads between Clarksdale and Greenville. I shouldn’t have been surprised to come across a place like Winterville Mounds which is a significant Mound complex with a museum. For all you new subscribers, I have an odd interest in the mound building cultures that populated the midwestern and southern United States for many thousands of years before the European conquest. Knowledge about these civilizations has been actively squashed in service of the false narrative that the inhabitants of North America were un-civilized. They were at least as civilized as the Europeans that conquered them. They were just far behind in military technology. And more importantly, they were far behind in building immunity to European diseases.

It would have been incredible to be alive back in the Eastern American prehistory. Not much is known about those peoples lives, but one thing they do know is that they got around, routinely traveling widely from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Imagine what that would take, essentially a hiking, canoeing maybe, camping trip that takes months to travel more than 500 miles round trip and you have to catch and gather your own food all along the way while dodging lions, bears, and other dangerous wildlife. It would be a major adventure.

Driving between Clarksdale and Greenville I stopped in a few little towns along the way. That’s Papa Richard tipping his hat in Gunnison. There are a lot of historic Delta Blues sites along the way. The people I spoke with were polite but clearly not interested in conversation with some clown with a camera passing through on the tourist trail.

That’s Clementine Robinson from Beulah, which is the next little town down the road from Rosedale. She manages the Blue Levee restaurant and juke joint in Rosedale. They call her miss Clementine. I kind of recoil when people call older black women Miss Whatever, but they don’t seem to mind so I guess I shouldn’t either. Blues related art covers the walls. The fried fish and sides are up to snuff. Great place for a southern meal if you’re ever in Rosedale. The customers were mixed back-woodsy whites and small town black folk. Seemed like they all mostly knew each other and made polite chit chat. I’ve often heard that despite the very real horror show shit that goes on in the South, people get along just fine superficially. That appears to be true based on my wanderings throughout the South. Black and white folk seem much more comfortable with each other than what I’ve witnessed in other parts of the country.

Much of the Mississippi Delta environment is similar to the Ohio River valley where I’m from. It looks so humdrum at a glance, but there are times, instants really, when the light shows it to be special. That specialness can be hard to see as we tend to compare everything to the most spectacular places on earth, like the high mountains, vast deserts, Egyptian Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. The Native American mounds are just piles of dirt almost indistinguishable from a landfill, natural hill, or any other pile of dirt. But they are not just any pile of dirt. They are the last remnants of a vibrant culture that has otherwise been wiped from the face of the earth. They are a reminder of our mortality, but also that the way we live now is not the only possible way to live.

Away from the bottomland forests abutting the rivers, I find myself way down yonder in the land of cotton. The white cotton remaining from the harvest contrasts starkly against the rich, dark soil. I worked in the fields as a kid, detasseling corn and hoeing beans, so I can legitimately imagine what a nightmare picking cotton must have been. The essence of this landscape encompasses the stark realities of harsh labor under an unforgiving sun and the expansive beauty of the Mississippi River lowland environment. There is a haunting stillness here. It was stiflingly hot and humid in the Indiana cornfields, but the Mississippi Delta in summer no doubt takes the misery up few notches. And we usually quit in the early afternoon, at the latest, whereas the cotton pickers worked dawn til dusk. I'd love to find the photograph that communicates the weight of the past that permeates these fields. Maybe next time.

Below is A.J. Haynes of the Seratones. She was the headliner for the first night of the Deep Blues Festival at the Shack Up Inn just outside of Clarksdale, and my favorite act not named Scott H. Biram.

After the show I was just standing around and saw this composition. She was kind enough to let me take a few quick photos. There was a bizarre little event surrounding it. There was a photographer who was taking a lot of pictures. He’d park in one position and train his camera on the performer’s face and not move for 5 to 10 minutes except to presumably press the shutter and take 100’s of photos from the same angle. You couldn’t help but notice. Anyway, after I took the 5 or 6 shots of A. J. Haynes in front of the purple lights he came up and just about demanded that I show him the photos I’d just taken. Mmmmkay, fine. He was clearly disappointed in my skills. “You’ll have to Photoshop those,” he said. "No, I think they’re fine how they are," I said. He persisted in telling me I needed to Photoshop them. "Even if I wanted to," I said, "I don't have Photoshop." He snorted and didn’t actually say "fucking amateur," but that's what he was thinking. That's actually what I was thinking as well. But instead of saying anything, I just chuckled.

A.J. Haynes really brought her own life experiences to the blues covers and original music she sang. The overall vibe was David Lynchian Roadhouse-like. I loved it.

The crowd was mostly a bunch of old white guys and I'd guess more than a few doctors. I fit right in, of course, visually at least. All of us old white guys were bummed that the bar was full of those other old white guys instead of a younger, more diverse audience. But that ship sailed around the time Muddy Waters died. That younger, diverse audience is listening to hip hop or whatever else is current, not the Delta Blues, or even its legacy acts creating new music based on the old style, which describes most of the acts at the Festival.

When I walk in all the tables are taken. I see an empty chair at a table with an old white guy and his poor wife who looks like she'd rather be just about any place but there. I ask the guy if it's okay if I join them, sitting down before he can say no, which he was about to do. You can see them in the above pic, just to the right of the middle. That's my wine glass on the table.

The first act is a young, very talented black guitar player, Angel Ocasio, Jr. of Cash's Juke Joint, who seemed to me kind of like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and The Isley Brothers. The old guy complains incessantly throughout his whole set, constantly telling his wife he wants to leave but will stick around a little bit longer. Between sets I say something like "I gather you didn't enjoy the first act," and he went off on how he came to see real Delta Blues, not some distantly related modern interpretation. I told him that was pretty unlikely as all the real Delta Blues guys are dead. I could tell he regretting letting me sit at his table.

I rolled into Clarksdale just before dark, got situated in the hotel, and went out to find some southern food. Turned out all I could find was in a Chinese place, but their menu was almost half southern food. Later I learned that the Chinese there had their own long history. The fried fish, mashed potatoes and collard greens were legitimate.

I went down to Mississippi, ostensively to see Scott H. Biram and other acts at the Deep Blues Festival in Clarksdale. But it was much more complicated than that. I've started exploring the Deep South and have now been to Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, Jackson, and now Clarksdale. And I get out in the countryside a lot, exploring the back roads and swamps.

The Beginning