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Published: February 3rd 2012
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Ground Zero Blues Club
Local high school students performing at the Ground Zero benefit concert (with the contest winner second from the left) Mississippi Delta
Today I explored the famous
Mississippi Delta.
The name is something of a misnomer, since it is actually a
flood plain.
All those floods laid down rich soil, which turned into swamps.
Southern planters forced their slaves to clear and drain these swamps just before the Civil War, creating one of the richest cotton growing regions in the country.
After the war, the relatively predictable growing conditions attracted sharecroppers from throughout the South.
The area has been poor, rural, and primarily African American ever since.
These poor farm laborers created the area’s most famous export,
Blues music.
The Delta is both a landscape and a culture.
They are intricately linked, so the only way to fully appreciate it is to experience it in person.
The Delta landscape is unlike any other in the US.
The land is perfectly flat, for starters.
Hour after hour of driving, and the view remains basically unchanged.
The vegetation is all cotton fields, alternating with clumps of trees.
Given the storms yesterday, many of the fields were flooded.
The road occasionally crossed shallow creeks.
These were
House in Mississippi delta
The typical scene in the Mississippi delta, a small house surrounded by cotton fields (which are wet from last night's rain). fast moving, very brown, and spread into nearby fields.
The most typical building in the Delta is a small farmhouse, located in the middle of a vast field.
Occasionally, there were small country stores with hand-lettered signs.
I had lunch in one of them.
The other main sight was the tiny rural churches.
The road did pass through some towns, often just a clump of houses around a street crossing.
Eventually, it reached the town called the crossroads of the Blues, Clarksdale.
Clarksdale
As much as the Blues can be said to have a home,
Clarksdale is it.
It’s located at the crossroads of two major highways (the famous 49 and 61) and two major railroads.
The city became a place for Delta residents to meet, socialize, and be entertained.
It still has some of the region’s most significant
Blues clubs.
For a through introduction, this is the place.
To truly understand the music, one must live the life of the people who create it, at least for a night.
The place to do that is the
Shack Up Inn, one
Onward General Store
The Onward store in the Mississippi delta. of the most memorable lodgings of the entire trip so far.
The Inn is a group of old sharecropper shacks located on a former cotton plantation.
The shacks have been modernized with electricity and running water, but have otherwise been left
as they were.
From the outside, they look almost exactly like the slave cabins I saw at Laura.
The walls and floors are unfinished cypress logs.
The roofs are sheets of tin.
Inside each is an old bed, a piano, a CD player with a stack of blues CDs, a rickety old TV that only plays blues music(!) and lots of memorabilia.
I was quite used to this type of environment from camping trips, but it’s been known to freak others out.
If it looks primitive, think of the families who spent their entire lives in shacks like this.
This night, I wanted to hear blues music.
Most happens on the weekends, but the
Ground Zero Club had a show tonight.
The club was founded by Morgan Freeman, who lives nearby.
A local high school student had won a singing contest earlier in the year, and the prize is
The Shack Up Inn
Sharecropper shacks at the Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale MS a free summer at
Berklee School of Music (in Boston, ironically enough).
She needs cash for expenses, and a group of local musicians organized the concert to raise it.
I enjoyed the show because it covered a wide range of musical styles and performers.
Several times, local musicians who just happened to be in the audience were called on stage to play.
The final set was by the guest of honor herself, accompanied by her older brother on guitar.
She certainly has pipes.
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