The Blues Is Alright Blues Music as a Root for Cultural Tourism and Public History
Hey Hey, Is the Blues Alright?
Red's
Written by Ben Schulman | Photography by Joe Crimmings
To get to Clarksdale, Mississippi from Memphis, you take Highway 61. As you travel south, the wide streets of the Bluff City, studded with strip mall splendor and blighted sprawl, give way to a ghostly blue two-lane blacktop (in either direction) that grows darker as it draws you in.
Clarksdale is a city of roughly 18,000 on the banks of the Sunflower River, a tributary of the Yazoo. It's a northern gateway to the heart of the Mississippi Delta. It's the city where Robert Johnson sold his soul. Where Bessie Smith died. Where Muddy Waters, then still McKinley Morganfield, lived as a kid. Tennessee Williams lived here as a kid too. Son House, Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, Eddie Boyd, and many more - all made their way in Clarksdale, lending a certain sort of vaunted and haunted celebrity, for those in the know, to the town.
Deak's Mississippi Saxophones & Blues Emporium
This cultural might is expressed in the landscape. It's seen in the Mississippi Blues Trail markers and memorials to local civil rights heroes that dot the downtown, between ramshackle harmonica and guitar shops, bespoke clothing boutiques, decaying movie theaters and hotels and vacant storefronts. In the remaining juke joint, Red's, and the newer clubs, like Ground Zero and Shack Up Inn, that cater to folks coming worldwide for a taste of the blues. And Clarksdale has plenty of blues - 365 nights of live music according to its boosters, such as Roger Stolle of Cat Head Records.
Roger Stolle, owner of Cat Head Records
Stolle moved to Clarksdale in 2002, establishing Cat Head as a catch-all for all things blues: record store, label, concert promoter, film producer, cultural clearinghouse. Before Clarksdale, Stolle was an adman, living in St. Louis. He immersed himself in the St. Louis blues scene after moving there in 1995.
"I discovered there were a bunch of Mississippi guys who moved to St. Louis and never made it to Chicago," he says. "But also, I realized, in five hours, you could be in Mississippi. It hadn't really occurred to me to go see where all the music I was into had come from. So I made the 'Dead Man Blues Tour' which really just meant exploring where they came from, assuming that I'd find something from the past."
There was little to find. In the mid-'90s, formalized memorials or markers to bluesmen were scarce. "Only half the guys who had died down here already had headstones," Stolle says. "No Mississippi Blues Trail marker system - no markers really for blues at all. And finding live blues was difficult. You kinda had to stumble upon it."
But a rich network of still-extant juke joints belied the unmarked spaces Stolle initially found. On a subsequent visit, Stolle stumbled into bluesman Junior Kimbrough's juke joint in Chulahoma, an unincorporated community in Marshall County, in the hill country of Mississippi.
"It was mind-blowing. It was like walking into an Alan Lomax story," Stolle waxes. "Everything you associate from Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House - it was happening in a modern sense. R.L Burnside was playing along Kimbrough. Their kids were there. Grandkids. Everyone was playing."
"Everything you associate from Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House - it was happening in a modern sense. R.L Burnside was playing along Kimbrough. Their kids were there. Grandkids. Everyone was playing."
Stolle went home to St. Louis after that trip but couldn't shake the feeling of that evening. "It taught me that the real thing - the culture that happens to have this voice that is blues music - it still exists, it's just below the radar." He made it his livelihood to let that culture be heard.
Cat Head's storefront occupies a building on Delta Ave., one of downtown Clarksdale's main commercial drags. Up near the register of the store, a small printout lists the week's musical happenings. Outside on the surrounding streets are occasional plaques - the Mississippi Blues Trail markers now in place, of which Stolle had a role in establishing - that act as both wayfinding and historical narrative devices. The signs bring people in and through the city.
Bubba O'Keefe, executive director of the Clarksdale and Coahoma County Tourism Office
Bringing people into the city is the job of Bubba O'Keefe. O'Keefe is the executive director of the Clarksdale and Coahoma County Tourism Office. A native son of Clarksdale and real estate developer by trade, O'Keefe is a gregarious, welcoming presence with a hint of avuncular wildness that sifts out of his Southern drawl. "I always tried to get things that were of the place," O'Keefe reminiscences about his childhood travels in Europe and Japan. In a back room of his office, he's explaining how these formative travels influenced the approach to tourism - to capture the feel of a place, to "not be a tourist," he says - that informs his work today.
"We don't want to the be the GreyLine bus tour town," he says. "We don't want to sell out to be something we're not, but tourism has been very good to Clarksdale and Coahoma County. We have enough infrastructure now - restaurants, hotels, enough diversification of those things and things to do, that I hate to label it as a product, but we've got a good product."
Along with Stolle, O'Keefe co-founded the Juke Joint Festival, an annual blues celebration held every April, about to enter its 17th year. Clarksdale has become a successful export. International tourists - particularly from Australia and the U.K - have had Clarksdale in their sights for years. O'Keefe is still in awe of the reconstructed "juke joint" he saw down in Brazil. Having recently returned from a tourism expo in London, he says, "these people wanted us. The whole thing is 'Be authentic. Tell the story. Music. And Southern culture.'"
Shack Up Inn
A form of Southern culture is what's served at the Shack Up Inn, a hotel-restaurant-bar-music venue complex on the outskirts of town, out past the Crossroads, where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul and a Sonic Drive-Thru is just around the bend. Shack Up offers visitors repurposed sharecropper shacks with tin roofs as Delta-kitsch accommodation. A restored cotton gin houses the bar and music venue, the walls festooned with cheeky bric-a-brac signage of gift shop variety - old cigar shop signs, mismatched license plates, old Coca-Cola and beer advertisements. An actual gift shop of beat up guitars and tchotchke folk art is tucked in the corner. A festive air hangs over the packed crowd on a cold winter Saturday night. The room is bouncing. An all-you-can-eat BBQ spread is placed out for an extra $15. The predominately white audience sways along as a cover band plays country classics like Hank Williams' "Jumbalaya."
Across town at the venerable and vulnerable Red's, one of the last original juke joints, the bluesman Frank "Guitar" Rimmer and his band are playing. Red's is named after Red Paden, the proprietor and personality behind the joint. The room glows electric with warmth, red string lights strewn about forming quarter notes and treble clefs, framing "Happy Birthday" banners that were never taken down after a party, Christmas decorations, and a hall-of-fame worthy family wall of pictures and posters of the past shows of blues legends. The band sets up on the floor. A metal basket is set out for tips. A glamorous grandmother who performs under the moniker "Mz. Ann" works the door and treats everyone as one of her own.
But there's very few of anyone. An Asian couple wanders in and out. Two middle-aged women. Local musician and mainstay, Watermelon Slim, a guitar and harmonica player who holds court at the Bluesberry Cafe a few blocks away, stops by with a trucker friend for a few songs and splits. Rimmer's multigenerational band pours out its set with professional swagger and studio-crisp musicianship, enthusiasm and tension building in the call-and-response chorus of a song that joyously declares, "Hey, hey, the blues is alright."
The band stops to take a break as the crowd dwindles down to two. "The crowds come when it warms up," is the prevailing sentiment among band members and the bartender, who has seen it all over his 30-plus years at Red's. Conversation and beer bottle clanks pick up. A small crowd filters in as the band's second set begins, and the dancing on the floor picks up.
"Given the deeply personal quality of blues-singing there could no particular method for learning blues," wrote Amiri Baraka (then still LeRoi Jones), in his 1963 book, Blues People. "As a verse form, it was the lyrics which were most important, and they issued from life." Baraka goes on to trace the evolution of blues music into a professionalized art form of an emerging artisan and urbanite class, and its attendant effect on the structure of blues music. His insights and questions into the continued evolution of blues music resonate in contemporary Clarksdale.
Is the blues a commodity, part of a product in which to increase cultural tourism and drive economic development, even as the pool of traditional practitioners dies? Or is the blues, even if and as its musical contours change, still a living medium, intended to, as Baraka intimates, tell the stories "issued from life"?
Chandra Williams is the executive director of the Crossroads Cultural Art Center. The center is a space for both locals and tourists - Black, white, all - to come together to learn about, appreciate, and make art of every variety. It's intended to foster a relationship that brings into dialogue disparate parts of the Clarksdale community, as well as make relevant Clarksdale's historic role as a place of and for artists by weaving art and art practice into the city's present.
Chandra Williams, executive director of the Crossroads Cultural Art Center
"I do think that Clarksdale is using cultural tourism as an economic engine," Williams says, "but that cultural tourism, I do think, is very disconnected form the authentic culture. There's a great representation of the culture historically, but most of the people who are representing the culture in tourism are people from other places or other cultures."
Williams, who gives each word weight with thoughtful pause, doesn't disparage this effort. It brings people into and supports the town. "But I do wish there was a better connection between the people of Clarksdale, the people of the Delta, and the people who are doing tourism. Tourism has a great potential and it is doing things here, but I think the potential would be achieved in a more effective way if people were more engaged in the actual people and residents of Clarskdale who are playing this music," Williams says.
"I do think that Clarksdale is using cultural tourism as an economic engine but that cultural tourism, I do think, is very disconnected form the authentic culture. There's a great representation of the culture historically, but most of the people who are representing the culture in tourism are people from other places or other cultures."
The paradox of representation is on full display at the Delta Blues Museum, just down the street from the Crossroads Cultural Art Center, and across the street from Ground Zero, a club opened by actor Morgan Freeman and former Clarksdale mayor Bill Luckett in 2001. The museum is housed in an old freight depot, and through its relatively small footprint, stewards the incredibly complex, dispiriting, resilient and ultimately affirming history of the blues through its careful curation of artifacts. The museum sees a steady drumbeat of ardent blues aficionados visit, and while its presence is valued by local residents, its engagement with the local populace, particularly of school age, is, according to its executive director, Shelley Ritter, another connection to cultivate.
Shelly Ritter, executive director Delta Blues Museum
"When we can get local school groups in, they don't have a frame of reference, except sometimes they recognize their uncle's name on the wall. But [the local history] is not in the curriculum locally," says Ritter. "It's disturbing that a child growing up in Clarksdale, MS, thinks that Muddy Waters is from Chicago. But not bringing people in here to learn about this history, that is their history, and then having someone go off to school or go down to the state capital or Memphis or New York or wherever to learn something or discover something that has its roots here - whether it's Tennessee Williams, civil rights, blues history - there's just a lot."
A populist music is - should be - a popular music, for and by its people. Just like history.
New real estate developments are slowly and seamlessly fitting into Clarksdale's cityscape. The developments bring people in and through the city. The vacant storefronts provide the patina that this is still a sleepy Delta town, the impoverished home of the blues, where it remains, alive.
Source: https://www.justplace.us/the-blues-alright-clarksdale-ms