THE BLUES

Tales of Southern Hospitality and Gentlemanly conduct, Part II

"The Blues is a low-down achin' feeling." 

Being a good ole Chi-town boy, I grew up with the Blues. It's really a Mississippi vibe, electrified. It was Muddy and Junior and Howlin Wolf with their old hickory guitars that plugged them in and elevated the blues to what they are today. But the roots are all still there, in Mississippi, in the poorest section of the poorest state in the Union. It was poor a hundred years ago and it's poor now always will be I suppose. But it keeps it honest not shiny it keeps its soul on edge.

Mississippi and Chicago have this kinship with the Blues. It's probably the only real thing in common with Mississippi. In the migrations that happened during the wars, the railroads linked Sippi to Memphis and Chicago. Going north meant just that, straight north. Chicago and New York weren't any different. They were North and North meant jobs and family and jobs again. And maybe a temporal replenishment of hope. The blacks from Georgia went to New York, from Bama to Cincy and Cleveland, from Sippi to Chi-town. Family ties between the two stayed around (to this day). It was a Chicago kid (Emmett Till) who was visiting family in Mississippi that was killed in 1954 for whistling at a white woman. The South side of Chicago still has some of the best grits north of the Mason-Dixon. Little threads.

The first of the Delta blues players to strike out in famousity was Robert Johnson. But when he first started playing, he sucked he couldn't play a guitar to save his life. But he disappeared for a year and came back then he could play. He played so spectacularly that the running gag was that he sold his soul to the Devil and he probably did, with the gravel in his voice becoming spookier than a quiet October night. I hope Tom Waits bought it back for him he can afford it. Regardless of the state of RJ's afterlife soul, he also helped spring the Delta Blues from his skull and unleash every piece of electric guitar music that has existed to this day. That's a beautiful thing about music, every piece will persist and affect every other piece either directly or indirectly for eternity, or til the music dies. You don't need to be perfect you just need to try and to endure. Just like people.

I headed out from Oxford and the mind flowed from Faulkner to Clarksdale going down to the crossroads looking for a soul to steal. Myth become legend become cheesy travel tip has it that the crossroads are a little outside of Rosedale, near the town of Bealuh, MS, so if you want to sell your soul, there's your place though I suppose you can sell it anywhere anyhow anyway he's always looking for a bargain.

Listening to the Mississippi public radio I heard a godsend, BB King was coming home to Indianola tonight for a small home-town concert in the city park. I hit highway 61 if I come back I'll be Dylan and headed into the town beaten up dusty sooty bricks falling apart. Downtown stood a Delta Blues Museum came in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds playing "Murder Ballads" Nick Cave is one fucked up dude. Bought a tape of Harmonica blues to pop in the player for the drive down to Indianola passing the jook joints dusk settling young black men sitting on their 70s autos waiting for the place to open up black women dolled up leaning on the car waiting for something else. Cotton not that tall not that much edge in the air, wait until August.

Driving through Greenville the darkness descends both real and imagined. The town bursting behind a levee on the Mississippi not much to it, downtown shelled out nothing at all, casino on the river, and swaths of boxes that they call houses. This part of Mississippi has some of the most dire poverty I've ever seen, the system is frozen in place. At least in a city you can see where you can try to go; growing up here I wouldn't even know where to try. I head out and some toughs in a Barracuda offer to sell me a beeper, then a radar detector but "I always know where the cops are." Don't like that answer much.

I enter Indianola and head for the edge of town to the park. It's a small town affair it's a summer night. The 8 year old girl takes my $5 and stamps my hand and I load up on fried catfish. Sitting there on the grass 20 feet from BB King kids playing old men sitting in their lawn chairs warm summer night fireflies clouds and a full moon the electricity of the strings shooting out and his voice like a booming kind voice of God. He spoke of love and Love and Looooooooove, the last one more of an ache than anything. He kept on it, in the middle of songs screaming "You KNOW, you KNOW, you should .... NEVER be afraid to tell someone you love them!" This seventy year old fat man with an ache in his heart is the happiest man alive and he ended with the Thrill is Gone he must always and you just walk out of that field with an understanding. And you drive at 2 AM with the moon and the fields and nothing else.

And you're on your way to Lousiana and Margo is telling you not to go back to New Orleans but you have no choice and you have a sore throat and the radio has a guy singin in French and English Cajun really and the air kind of hangs and then it drizzles and then you watch the clouds roll in and the levee bounces as the road stays still and the huge fat river just goes up and down up and down and the lightning hits and the fires in the fields roll and pass you by and you sit in N'Orleans with a fever and a coffee and a muggy afternoon why here in June and you listen to an old black man play as time goes by and you write and you sweat and you write in a sweat and you wait for the fever to lift. And the jazz just sits there like a tone.