, Miss. --
James "T-Model" Ford was waiting in the afternoon
shade of his front yard, sipping Jack Daniel's with a splash
from a white plastic cup.
Which was fitting, because I had listened to his CD, "Jack
Daniel Time," on the drive down Highway 61 from Clarksdale.
At 88, Ford moves slowly, so he asked me to fetch his guitar
and amplifier from the back of the van in the carport. Inside
the tidy house, Stella, his common-law wife -- "Five marriages
is enough," he said -- gave me a power cord and pointed
into the bedroom.
"Look here," she said. "I laid out clean clothes,
but he wouldn't put them on. Stubborn ol' man."
Plugged in, Ford began playing and singing. A late bloomer,
he picked up the guitar at age 58. Ford isn't quite as accomplished
as other Mississippi legends like Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton,
Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Albert King, Son Thomas, Howlin' Wolf,
Jimmy Reed, Pinetop Perkins, Ike Turner, R.L. Burnside and John
Lee Hooker. But his raw, driving guitar and growling vocals
were pure down-home Delta blues.
"I got my mojo workin', jes won't work on you."
The epicenter of the blues was, and is, Clarksdale -- one reason
actor Morgan Freeman named his club there the Ground Zero Blues
Club. Ironically, Clarksdale was home to the Hopson Plantation,
which in 1944 produced the first cotton crop with mechanical
equipment. That led to the Great Migration of blacks from the
South in search of jobs in northern cities. They traveled up
Highway 61, the "Blues Highway," taking their music
to cities like St. Louis, Memphis and Chicago. Somewhere along
the way, the blues gave birth to rock 'n' roll.
Rave reviews about the B.B. King Museum, which opened in Indianola
in September, inspired me to head out on a road trip through
Mississippi, which is busy setting up highway markers for a
Blues Trail. But I didn't want to make a dead-man's tour of
markers, museums and grave sites. I wanted live legends, "real-deal"
Delta bluesmen, as Roger Stolle calls them.
Stolle owns Cat Head's Delta Blues & Folk Art in what is
left of downtown Clarksdale. In the spring of 2008, he teamed
up with Jeff Konkel, who runs Broke & Hungry Records in
St. Louis. They roamed the Delta, followed by engineer Bill
Abel in a Volvo turned into a mobile recording studio and cinematographer
Damien Blaylock. The result is a CD and DVD titled "M for
Mississippi," showcasing the state's bluesmen performing
at house parties, juke joints and in their living rooms and
front yards.
Stolle, a white guy who left a job in marketing, moved to Clarksdale
in 2002 in search of the blues.
"Of the real-deal solo blues musicians, still active,
there are probably about 15, not counting bands," Stolle
said. "The blues will never go away, most of the bands
have somebody young in them. What you won't have is another
guy like T-Model Ford, or Robert Belfour, coming up. Those guys
are what they are because of really hard times."
CHASING THE BLUES
In the shade of his front yard, with Stella watching from the
screened porch, Ford would have played all afternoon but stopped
to talk.
"I was born in Forest, Miss., picked cotton, plowed mules,
worked in a sawmill," he said. "Can't read, can't
write, never been to school a day in my life. Taught myself
how to play the guitar. When I was 18, guy tried to kill me.
I killed him and went on the chain gang in Tennessee. It didn't
make a bad man out of me, made me a good man. I been quiet ever
since."
Although his doctor told him to cut back on the Jack, Ford
still tours and just got back "from this place with a great
big blue lake." He couldn't remember the name, but Stella,
who is 50ish, yelled from the porch, "Barbados."
Ford rattled off the names of the bluesmen who grew up around
Greenville, and explained why the Delta was the source of a
sound that resonated in the works of the Rolling Stones, Eric
Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Bonnie Raitt, J.J. Cale and nearly every
other modern-day musician.
"The cotton fields, that's where the music came from,"
he said. "Chopping cotton, picking cotton, had to have
a good mule to stand up in front of you. Soon, everybody be
singing to chase away those blues."
ME AND MUDDY
The Riverside Hotel "Home of the Delta Blues" is
another of Clarksdale's legends, but I almost bolted. From the
outside, the place looked grungy, the door was locked and nobody
answered when I followed the directions on the scrawled sign:
"Top red bell to see Rat."
I was back in my car when a black pickup pulled up with Frank
"Rat" Ratliff driving. He is the son of Z.L. Ratliff
Hill, who in 1944 bought the two-story building that once housed
the city's African-American hospital. Blues singer Bessie Smith
died in the hospital after a car accident in 1937. Mrs. Hill
ran a hotel that catered to black musicians who came through
town.
"Once people come in, they satisfied," Rat said as
he ushered me inside. "I ain't never had anybody walk back
out that door."
A corridor with a worn wood floor led by a wall of celebrity
photos to rooms that had the doors wide open, revealing neatly
made beds and the original wood dressers and nightstands. The
hotel has communal bathrooms, updated and clean.
John F. Kennedy Jr. "stayed one night in this room; he
was here for the King Biscuit Festival," Rat said as he
led a tour. "John Lee Hooker and the original Blind Boys
of Alabama stayed here. Sam Cooke stayed in Room 7. Room 9 is
Ike Turner's room. Room 4 had the Siamese Twins from Chicago.
Their mother put the beds together so they could sleep. That
was back in the '50s."
I chose Room 5, which, Rat said, had served extended stays
to Muddy Waters, Robert Nighthawk and Sonny Boy Williamson II.
"I'm known all over the world," Rat said. "I
don't do any advertising. Word of mouth sends them here."
Indeed, the name above mine in the guest book was Caupil Edmard
of Paris, France. If the Riverside was good enough for Caupil
, it was good enough for me. The charge was $65 a night, cash
only, and I stayed two nights.
I wonder if Muddy and me really slept in the same bed.
GETTING THAT SOUND
Clarksdale has two blues museums, three if you count Red's
Lounge, a classic juke joint where T-Model Ford and others have
recorded albums.
The centerpiece of the Delta Blues Museum is a cypress log
cabin that once stood on Stovall Plantation and was part of
the home of McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters.
His likeness sits inside, guitar in hand, while a video overhead
shows vintage performances and homages from rockers like Keith
Richards and Bonnie Raitt. "Muddy was playing when I was
plowing," said B.B. King.
The Rock 'n Roll & Blues Heritage Museum is the pride and
joy of Theo Dasbach, who first heard the blues some 50 years
ago on a crystal receiver that brought Radio Luxembourg into
his childhood home in the Netherlands. During a career in law,
Dasbach bought every rare record, poster and piece of music
memorabilia he could afford and now displays his coveted collection
in a storefront in Clarksdale, after rejecting Memphis as too
commercial.
"I always thought, 'Where is this great music coming from?'"
Dasbach said. "We wanted to do the museum in a place with
historical significance."
Red's certainly has historical significance, but not much else.
While the Ground Zero Blues Club is a busy nightclub, you wouldn't
know Red's was even open, except for the cars parked out front.
The building looks dark and foreboding, then the door opens
and the music flows out onto Sunflower Avenue. Inside are bar
stools, sofas and a tip bucket on the dance floor.
Maybe 50 customers crowd in on a good night, paying $5 admission
and sipping 24-ounce beers, while listening to music that won't
let you sit still. On two visits, I heard Robert "Wolfman"
Belfour, who played a sizzling guitar and moaned the blues,
and the Robert "Bilbo" Walker Blues Revue.
Two young musicians, one from Toronto the other from Japan,
sat at the bar and stared intently at Belfour's fretwork. "He's
basically playing one chord," the Canadian said. "But
how does he get that sound?"
THE GRAND MASTER
The second room of the B.B. King Museum in Indianola has a
receipt showing a young Riley B. King borrowed 40 cents to buy
a cotton sack for picking that fall's crop. A later video shows
B.B. meeting the pope and standing before the Eiffel Tower.
A whole lot of ground is covered in between, and the museum
tells, and shows, it all with memorabilia and slick videos.
"The earliest source of the blues I can remember is one
guy plowing by himself," B.B. says in a video. "And,
usually, you can hear this guy singing."
King gave the museum his blessing, and his horde of personal
items, including the entire recording studio from his Las Vegas
home. Still touring at the age of 83, he is the star of the
videos, which begin with his first visit to the spot where he
was born at Berclair, 16 miles east of Indianola.
Jim Abbott, a retired newspaper editor and one of the movers
in creating the $14 million museum, said King returns to Indianola
each June to play a concert in the town park. The museum's goal,
Abbott said, is to be the southern anchor in Mississippi's Blues
Trail, an attraction that will draw tourists worldwide.
"There's still too much poverty in the Delta, and a huge
disparity in incomes," Abbott said. "We could use
a shot in the arm."
Motherless at 9, Riley King lived with his grandmother, who
died when he was a 14. He then was brought up by a white family,
which insisted he went to school. After performing with the
Famous St. Johns Gospel Singers and at the classy Club Ebony,
he hitchhiked to Memphis. He named his guitar Lucille after
a woman who caused a fight, and almost got him killed, in a
juke joint where he was playing in Twist, Ark. The black radio
station WDIA broadcast his records in 1947 and made him a hit.
He needed a catchy radio name so Riley became Beale Street Blues
Boy, then Blues Boy, then B.B.
A turning point in his career came in February 1967 when Bill
Graham booked him into the Fillmore in San Francisco. When his
bus pulled up, and B.B. saw white people lined up to get in,
he sent his road manager to make sure they were at the right
place. "This is us, boss," the manager reported. B.B.
says in a video: "All these white kids, they stood up and
applauded. That got to me so much, I stood up there and cried."
He appeared on Ed Sullivan, opened for the Stones, and was
the first performer to go behind bars to entertain prisoners.
Clapton says on a video: "I can tell B.B. from one note.
Most of us can. He's the grand master."
