Delta towns: The Delta blues

As recently as 1900, much of the Mississippi Delta remained an impenetrable wilderness of cypress and gum trees, roamed by panthers and bears and plagued with mosquitoes. Bit by bit land was cleared for cotton plantations, but, though the soil was fertile, white laborers could not be enticed to work in this godforsaken backcountry. After emancipation, the economy came to depend on black share-croppers , who would work a portion of the land on a white-owned plantation in return for a share (often pitifully small) of the eventual crop. As a rule, this lifestyle ensured long periods of poverty and debt interspersed with occasional windfalls; but in the Delta the returns tended to be greater than elsewhere, and blacks moved here from all over Mississippi.

In 1903, W.C. Handy, often credited as "the Father of the Blues" but at that time the leader of a vaudeville orchestra, found himself waiting for a train in Tutwiler, fifteen miles southeast of Clarksdale. At some point in the night, a ragged black man carrying a guitar sat down next to him and began to play what Handy called "the weirdest music I had ever heard." Using a pocketknife pressed against the guitar strings to accentuate his mournful vocal style, the man sang that he was "Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog."

This was the Delta blues , characterized by the interplay between words and music, with the guitar aiming to parallel and complement the singing rather than simply provide a backing. Though a local, place-specific music - the "Southern" and the "Dog" were railroads that crossed a short way south at Moorhead - it did not simply appear from nowhere, but combined traditional African instrumental and vocal techniques with the "field hollers" chanted by slaves and the reels and jigs then at the basis of popular entertainment.

The blues started out as young people's music; the old folk liked the banjo, fife and drum, but the younger generation were crazy for the wild showmanship of bluesmen such as Charley Patton . Born in April 1891, Patton was the classic itinerant bluesman, moving from plantation to plantation and wife to wife, and playing Saturday-night dances with a repertoire that extended from rollicking dance pieces to documentary songs such as High Water Everywhere , about the bursting of the Mississippi levees in April 1927. The enigmatic Robert Johnson was rumored to have sold his soul to the Devil in return for a few brief years of writing songs such as Love in Vain and Stop Breakin' Down . His Crossroads Blues spoke of being stranded at night in the chilling emptiness of the Delta; themes carried to metaphysical extremes in Hellhound on My Trail and Me and the Devil Blues - "you may bury my body down by the highway side/So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride."

Both Patton and Johnson died in the 1930s. However, within a few years the Delta blues had been carried north to Chicago by men such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf . Their electrified urban blues was the most immediate ancestor of rock 'n' roll.

In addition to towns such as Clarksdale and Helena, blues enthusiasts may want to search out the following rural sites:

Stovall Plantation Stovall Road, 7 miles northwest of Clarksdale. Where tractor-driver Muddy Waters was first recorded; his cabin is still (just) standing.

Sonny Boy Williamson II's Grave Outside Tutwiler, 13 miles southeast of Clarksdale.

Parchman Farm Junction US-49 W and Hwy-32. Mississippi State penitentiary, immortalized by former prisoner Bukka White.

Dockery Plantation On Hwy-8, between Cleveland and Ruleville. One of Patton's few long-term bases, also home to Howlin' Wolf and Roebuck "Pops" Staples.

Charley Patton's Grave New Jerusalem Church, Holly Ridge, off US-82 6 miles west of Indianola.

Robert Johnson's Grave Payne Chapel in Quito, off Hwy-7, roughly 6 miles southwest of Greenwood, where he was poisoned.

Getting to hear live blues music

Managing to hear live blues music in the Delta is rarely straightforward. Half the time nobody seems to know who is playing where, let alone when, and many of the jook-joints themselves - which can be dark, rudimentary, even intimidating places, making few concessions to decor or comfort - don't have phones. Most "jookin" gets done at weekends; we've listed a few likely venues under the specific Delta towns. With public transportation - even taxis - being all but nonexistent, a car is essential. Useful sources of information are the Delta Blues Museum , (tel 662/627-6820) in Clarksdale, the Memphis Blues Foundation (tel 901/527-2583), Shangrila Records , 1916 Madison Ave (tel 901/274-1916), also in Memphis, and the website .

Delta towns: The Delta blues

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