Clarksdale, the Crossroads & the Blues

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Suggested Listening for this Entry: "Cross Road Blues" and "Hell Hound on My Tail" by Robert Johnson. "I Can't Be Satisfied", "Rolling Stone" and "Long Distance Call" by Muddy Waters.

Suggested Food and Drink for this Entry: Surely, you're not tired of BBQ and beer yet?


Prior to leaving D.C., Ips, the Player and I decided we were going to take a side trip from Memphis into the Mississippi Delta in search of blues, hopefully to be heard in a juke joint. For those of you who don't know what a juke joint is, I offer you Wikipedia's very scientific definition:

Juke joint (or jook joint) is the vernacular term for an informal establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, primarily operated by African American people in the southeastern United States. The term "juke" is believed to derive from the Gullah word joog, meaning rowdy or disorderly. A juke joint may also be called a "barrelhouse".

Classic juke joints found, for example, at rural crossroads, catered to the rural work force that began to emerge after Emancipation. Plantations workers and sharecroppers needed a place to relax and socialize following a hard week, particularly since they were barred from most white establishments by Jim Crow laws. Set up on the outskirts of town, often in ramshackle buildings or private houses, juke joints offered food, drink, dancing and gambling for weary workers. Owners made extra money selling groceries or moonshine to patrons, or providing cheap room and board.

At 10:30 Saturday morning, Ips, The Player and I crawled into the Suzuki SUV and headed out for the Delta. To be honest, I was still shaking the cobwebs loose from all those Beale Big Ass Beers and getting back to the hotel sometime after three in the morning. It wasn't until I got a good blast of caffiene and sugar in me that I was sure this wasn't going to be a hungover trip from hell. We crossed the border into Mississippi on Highway 61 a little while later while listening to a mix of blues, rockabilly and cheesy Elvis songs from the 70's provided by my iPod.

The primary topic of conversation for the first few miles was the happenings the prior night on Beale Street and, in particular, what was going on with that group at the Doctor "Feelgood" Potts gig. Even sober, and with Ips' non-alcohol influenced memory, I still couldn't get a fix on it. Maybe they were involved with some new offshoot of polygamist Mormons or something. But, as we rolled further into Mississippi, the conversation turned to Clarksdale, the crossroads and the blues.

Although Memphis is often thought of as the birthplace of the blues, the Mississippi Delta produced the great majority of the performing pioneers who brought the blues to prominence from the 1920s through the 1950s. Most of these performers left the area to pursue their careers somewhere north of the Delta. Some went only as far as Memphis, while others, such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, found themselves in Chicago, where they played a major role in the birth of the Chicago blues style.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, early blues men such as Son House, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson travelled the Delta playing juke joints and laying the foundation for Waters and Howlin' Wolf. The early blues men played accoustic instruments, obviously because of the limitations of the time. Whereas Waters, the Wolf and their contemporaries were able to perform using electric instruments, thus being audible over the din of the bars and jukes they played in. The step toward electicification was a major point in the development of rock and roll.

Nowadays, Robert Johnson is remembered as the most famous, if not infamous, of the early blues men. Many legends of rock guitar, including Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, site Robert Johnson as a major influence on their styles and hail Johnson as one of the greatest guitar players to walk the face of the earth. Both Clapton and the Rolling Stones have recorded Johnson's songs. But beyond Johnson's guitar playing, he is remembered for allegedly selling his soul to the devil in exchange for gaining his guitar skills and for the mystery surrounding his death.

According to legend, while Johnson was living on a plantation near Clarksdale, he made his desire to be a great musician known to those around him. Someone, or something, instructed him to go the crossroads of highways 61 and 49 outside Clarksdale at midnight where he was met by the Devil. The devil took Johnson's guitar, tuned it, and then returned it to Johnson in exchange for his soul. After Johnson's meeting with the Devil, his guitar and singing skills improved to a level beyond this world.

Johnson spent the early and mid-1930's travelling and performing in the Delta, often in towns on street corners and in rural juke joints. It was during a performance in a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi in 1938, when Johnson was supposedly poisoned by the husband of a woman with whom he had been flirting. Johnson died three days later, giving birth to the legend of the greatest blues man of all time.

We rolled into Clarksdale about ninety minutes after leaving Memphis. Our first stop was Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art, owned by Roger & Jennifer Stolle. I had read Cat Head should be a visitor's first stop in Clarksdale for anyone who wanted to learn about performances in the area. Unfortunately for us, the Stolles were out of town when we visited. The store was being manned by a nice enough young lady, but her answers to all of our questions was "I don't know." Of course, shortly after entering Cat Head, The Player found a book with photos taken in area juke joints. The Player carried the book to the counter with it opened to a picture showing a woman shaking her backside for the camera while a man felt her up and asked "honey, do you know where I could find this?" while pointing to the picture. Maybe the young shopkeeper decided to keep her knowledge to herself after that!

We looked around for a while, bought some CDs and then moved on down the street to the Delta Blues Musuem. Although established in 1979, the Delta blues museum re-organized as a stand alone museum in 1999 when it moved into the Clarksdale freight depot. The museum houses many exhibits paying tribute to legendary blues performers from the Delta. The museum's most interesting display is the cabin in which Muddy Waters lived on the nearby Stovall Plantation. Inside the cabin, a wax statue of Waters looks over visitors while they view a short film on Waters' life. A visit to the museum is required for any blues fan visiting the area and highly reccomended to any visitor who wants an introduction to the history of the blues.

While The Player and Ips had visited the breakfast buffet in our Memphis hotel for the second straight morning, I had been running off of the soda and candy bar I grabbed prior to leaving Memphis. So, I needed to, as Jerry Reed once said, "stick some groceries down my neck" by the time we finished our visit to the Delta Blues Museum. I had singled out Abe's Barbecue as the spot in Clarskdale for BBQ in my pre-trip reading seeing that Abe's had been in business since 1924. And convienently, Abe's was located at the crossroads of routes 49 and old 61 (a bypass has been built for route 61 around Clarskdale) where it has been since World War II. We made the short drive out to Abe's and filed in. It was great to see I had already been a bad influece on Ips and The Player as they ordered up lunch right after they told me how they had made multiple trips to breakfast buffet that morning.

We all ordered up barbecue sandwiches and had our food in short order. I'd like to tell you the food at Abe's was a barbecue epiphany given Abe's long history and its location. But, I can't. The food was good and very affordable, but again a restaurant didn't live up to its reputation.

After this late lunch/early dinner, we went back to downtown Clarksdale where we grabbed a beer at the Delta Amusement Club while trying to determine if we wanted to make a trip further into the Delta later that night to visit the Po' Monkey outside Merigold. The Delta Amusement Club was what any small town bar should be on a Saturday afternoon in the fall. A group of people gathered around the bar watching college football, drinking beer from cans and talking sh*t. Oh, and paying no mind to the raging poker game going on in the other room. The Player asked the bar's owner if he knew how to get to Merigold. The gruff response we got was "y'all must want to go to the Po' Monkey. Merigold is about 35 miles straight down 61". Not exactly, the best directions in the world, but it would be a start. As we finished our beers, I started to get the feeling we weren't exactly the bar's favorite patrons, so we moved on in search of Red's Blues Club, a supposed juke joint in Clarksdale. We found Red's around 5:00, but it was still hours until it opened. It was decision time.....

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Photos

Blues Man
On the front porch of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale

Bobby Rush Autographed Photo...
in the mens room of Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art

Muddy Waters
Muddy's wax statue holds court in the cabin Muddy lived in on the Stovall Plantation. Today, the cabin is on display in the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale.

Sign at the Crossroads
You can't miss it with this sign standing there.

Abe's BBQ
A Clarksdale tradition since 1924.

Commercialism at the Crossroads
A blues man couldn't sell his soul in peace in today's world.