, 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.
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"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."
