Mississippi, The Birthplace Of American Music

All The Way To Memphis

2009-05-08T22:52:00.010-05:00

The Mississippi Blues Trail officially crossed state lines today at the Rock 'n' Soul Museum at the Fed Ex Forum on Beale Street in Memphis. Local Fox 13 station covered the event with this news story.

photo courtesy Merete Eide

Como's Mississippi Fred McDowell

2009-05-05T20:59:00.019-05:00

Fred McDowell lived in Tennessee until he was nearly forty. But as proof that a man can accomplish a lot after his thirtieth birthday, McDowell moved to Mississippi, played the hell out of a blues slide guitar, and attracted the art form's most famous (some say notorious) talent scout to his front door.

Until then, Fred McDowell played guitar only for himself and his friends. He played old style blues. Delta blues. Mississippi blues. When Alan Lomax came back through the deep south in 1959 looking for bluesmen that other archivists had overlooked in previous visits, he was astonished to find Mississippi Fred McDowell living in Como and pumping gas.

McDowell had undeniable musical talent, but unlike decades worth of other delta blues musicians, McDowell stayed on the farm and did not drive north on Highway 61 to make records. At least not until Lomax coaxed him into a recording studio. Fred continued farming and playing for tips until Chris Strachwitz went looking for Fred in 1964 and recorded "Fred McDowell. Volume 1 and Volume 2" on Arhoolie. Things really took off after those recordings and McDowell became a sensation in the blues/folk revival of the early 1960's.

Music author Ted Gioia writes about McDowell in "Delta Blues", (see earlier post here) his recent history of the music:

"He moved to Memphis around the time he turned twenty-one, and finally settled in Como, Mississippi, in the early 1940's. But his music was infused with the free-spirited intensity of the Delta tradition, even if his geographical connections to that heart of the region are weak ones at best, and his name is usually one of the first mentioned by blues fans when the conversation turns to the subject of their favorite Delta guitarists."

McDowell's famous fans include Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and Grammy winner Bonnie Raitt. McDowell gave a young Raitt Delta slide guitar lessons. The Stones covered McDowell's "You Gotta Move" on their "Sticky Fingers" album.

On Thursday afternoon, Bonnie Raitt will return to Como to honor her friend and mentor as the state gives McDowell a plaque on the Mississippi Blues Trail.(read Jackson Clarion Ledger story here)

Rev. John Wilkins, Alex Thomas, Bonnie Raitt, Hubert Sumlin photo by Melanie Young

McDowell's musical success came late in life. He toured frequently but always came back home to Mississippi. Gioia writes about McDowell's final days:

"McDowell stopped touring in November of 1971, when stomach pains forced him to cancel his performances and seek medical treatment. Although he told many people that he suffered from an ulcer, the real diagnosis was stomach cancer, and despite surgery, doctors were unable to halt it's spread. He died on July 3, 1972 at the Baptist Hospital, and was buried -- not on Highway 61 -- but at the Hammond Hill Baptist Church, between Como and Senatobia, Mississippi. He was reportedly laid to rest wearing a silver lame' suit, given to him by the Rolling Stones. But the adulation fo the famous did little to prevent the guitarist's name being misspelled (McDewell) on the simple gravestone, an error that persisted many years before steps were taken to erect a more respectable tribute to one of Mississippi's greatest musical talents. On this new memorial, we find again that a lyric -- drawn from McDowell's best known composition -- served as a fitting epitaph.

You may be high,
You may be low.
You may be rich, child,
You may be poor.
But when the Lord gets ready,
You got to move.

Click to hear "You Gotta Move."

Pontiac Blues

2009-05-02T18:49:00.013-05:00

General Motors announced this past week that after the end of this year they no longer will produce Pontiacs. The muscular, gas-guzzling, V-8 vehicles have long been immortalized in songs, perhaps none better than by Glendora's Sonny Boy Williamson II.

"Pontiac Blues", Recorded August 5, 1951 on Farish Street at Trumpet Records in Jackson, Mississippi, was an homage to Trumpet Records owner Lillian McMurry's new Pontiac convertible. It was a chrome laden black Silver streak, that according to author Marc W. Ryan in his book Trumpet Records "embodied all the luxury and stylish mobility that he (Sonny Boy) craved."

Ryan goes on to tell us:

He would try to wheedle a ride in the sparkling beauty, but Lillian didn't often trust the freewheeling bluesman behind the wheel. "When I used to let him drive it," she recalled, "man, he really thought he was uptown. Sonny Boy still had a pride that a lot of musicians don't have." That pride was showing when, in keeping with the prevailing vogue of using flashy automobiles as lyrical themes, he proclaimed: "Mmmm, I found out what my baby likes. That's a while lotta lovin' and a straight-eight Pontiac.

If they play only one song at Pontiac's public funeral, they could do a whole lot worse than blaring out the harmonica sounds of Sonny Boy Williamson's fitting 1951 epitaph "Pontiac Blues"

Pinetop Perkins has another date with Grammy

2009-02-08T14:08:00.006-06:00

Tonight there's a great reason to watch the 51st annual Grammy Awards on CBS. "Pinetop Perkins and Friends" is one of five nominees for Best Traditional Blues Album.

Born in Belzoni in 1931, Pinetop is 95 years old. Should he win, he will be the oldest person to win a Grammy. George Burns also won the award at age 95. But George 95 years and one month old. Pinetop was born 95 years and seven months ago.

National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" recently wrote this about Pinetop's Grammy chances:

The Grammys are often contests for young talent, but this year, Perkins — the year's oldest Grammy nominee — is one to watch. It's not just a sentimental choice; on the album, Perkins collaborates with fellow blues veteran B.B. King on guitar.

You can read the full story here, and hear some music from Pinetop's Grammy nominated album.

Pinetop won a lifetime Grammy Award in 2005 and a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album last year.

Shake Rag

2009-01-08T10:04:00.021-06:00

Today would have been Elvis Presley's 74th birthday, and much as his mother Gladys clings to a young Elvis in the photo above, hundreds of adoring Elvis fans are in Tupelo clinging to his memory and marking the occasion.

But that's not the only celebration going on today. Tupelo also gets it's second blues marker on the historical Mississippi blues trail. The first one was placed last year on this day at the Elvis Presley birthplace museum, noting Elvis' debt to and love for blues music. The second Tupelo marker also honors Elvis in a roundabout way. It's as 399 East Main St and commemorates the neighborhood of Shake Rag. Elvis and his family lived close to the segregated African American community for a very short time.

Elaine Dundy describes the community as a nice place to live in her biography "Elvis and Gladys."

"Living in Mulberry Alley and then moving to 1010 North Green Street, the Presleys were living on the edge of Tupelo's blacks section, Shakerag. This was a community of house servants, cooks, and nurses -- as well, if not better, off than the Presleys -- who worked for Tupelo's wealthier families. A self-contained, well-mannered community, they had their own stores and their own Sanctified Church, which was a tent with one side rolled up."

A submitted report in the Hatiesburg American gives a brief description of the musical history:

By the 1920s blues and jazz flowed freely from performers at Shake Rag restaurants, cafes, and house parties, and later from jukeboxes, while the sounds of gospel music filled the churches. The neighborhood was leveled and its residents relocated during an urban renewal project initiated in the late 1960s.

A far different, and far less flattering portrait is drawn from Albert Goldman's controversial biography of Elvis:

Though Elvis is always associated with Tupelo, he lived in the city less than three years. According to the Myth, those years were spent in a horrid black slum known by the pungently Dickensian name of Shakerag. Though the ordeal of living in a black slum is something every true fan is supposed to grieve over, at the same time -- by the paradox of felix culpa, the fortunate fall -- this descent to the depths is regarded as the source of Elvis's extraordinary mastery of the black musical idiom, to say nothing of all the jivey dance steps he cut. As always, the Myth is mistaken. Elvis did live in a slum, but it was not the notorious black slum in the northwest quarter of the city; it was on the east side of town on Commerce Street, where the shopping mall stands today. The family did not remain long at this address; they moved several times, their next house being in Mobile Alley a narrow lane that ran at right angles to the railroad tracks near the fairgrounds. Finally they wound up in the northeast quarter near the slaughterhouse on North Green Street. All of these neighborhoods were white, all were poor and ugly.

Goldman seems to take quite an interest in embarrassing Presley in his book, which was published after Presley's death. It was and remains roundly rejected by fans the world over as innaccurate. But there's no disputing that Presley and his family had hard times in Tupelo and left town under the threat of police action.

Goldman, of course, writes about how the Presleys left Tupelo:

In September 1948, the Presleys packed up their few belongings in a decrepit 1937 Plymouth and took off for Memphis. Elvis said in later years that they were broke and that Vernon was hoping to find a job in the big city. The move -- made abruptly after the school year had commenced and surrounded subsequently with a cloud of secrecy -- suggests some fresh misfortune was about to descend upon the family, which they averted by flight. The Tupelo police told the compilers of All About Elvis that Vernon Presley had been caught selling moonshine and was given two weeks to get out of town.

Despite what Goldman writes about Presley's ties to Tupelo being tenuous, Presley returned to Tupelo at the height of his new found fame in 1956 for his "Homecoming" concert then came back in 1957 for a second show. Both shows took place near his old house at the Fairgrounds. Elvis took more with him to Memphis than what he put in a box in the old Plymouth. He told a reporter for the Charlotte Observer in June, 1956, he took along a love of blues music.

"The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and juke joints and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goose it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw."

Most, if not all, Elvis fans know that his first single on Sun records of course was "That's All Right, Mama" an Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup song, something he learned to love in Tupelo.

(Click to hear Elvis Presley sing That's All Right Mama)

A Christmas Cooke

2008-12-23T23:27:00.007-06:00

"You Send Me" Daniel Wolff's definitive biography of Sam Cooke begins the second chapter with a description of the birth of Samuel Cook and his delivery "by a midwife in Clarksdale at 2:10 in the afternoon on January 22, 1931."

Wolff goes on to describe Clarksdale of the early 1930's:

"Out of these elements -- a large colored population, a little spending money, the exhaustion of picking cotton and the exhilaration of cheap whiskey -- came a music historians have called the Delta Blues. Legendary practioners like Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and Skip James were drawn -- like the Reverend Cook (Samuel's father) -- to the relative prosperity of Clarksdale. Here they traded lyrics and played all night dances, till the music reached a zenith of moaning double-entendres, secret protest, and contagious gut-bucket beats."

The twin of the delta blues, Wolff notes, was the church song: the spiritual. And the two were not to be crossed.

The Reverend Cook left his Clarksdale church at 2303 7th Street and hoboed up to Chicago with just thirty-five cents in his pocket. After finding work in the Chicago stockyards, he came back for his family.

This was how Sam Cooke (he added an e to his name after turning professional) made it to Chicago and the Soul Stirrers where on December 1, 1950 he replaced gospel legend R.H. Harris as lead singer. In March 1951 at 20-years-old a nervous Sam Cooke made his professional recording debut, a fact that Wolff writes did not sit well with producer Art Rupe who didn't know Harris had been replaced by a kid.

"Can he sing?" Rupe wanted to know.
"Yes sir, he can sing," Rupe was told.
"Okay" a disappointed Rupe replied angrily, "I'll allow you one mistake."

It was a decision Art Rupe of Specialty Records never regretted. There was no mistake.

Sam Cooke sang lead on eleven songs during that first session including "Peace in the Valley" and what would become the hit of the session, and Sam's breakout gospel song "Jesus Gave Me Water".

Wolff writes:

"The Sweet Mississippi accent he got from his parents dwells on each syllable and calls for attention. The third time through the chorus, Sam lets the group start and, by coming in a beat later, kicks up the excitement. And when he sings "I want to let His praises swell," Sam's voice does just that. If Art Rupe didn't know he had a hit here, he wasn't listening."

Rupe was listening. So were thousands of impressed gospel fans who made "Jesus Gave Me Water" more popular than anthing R.H. Harris had ever recorded with the quartet. More than five decades later, as another Christmas approaches, we're still moved by the spirit in Sam Cooke's voice. And we're still listening.

(Click to hear Jesus Gave Me Water by The Soul Stirrers)

(Click to hear The Soul Stirrers sing Peace in the Valley)

A Christmas Staple

2008-12-22T18:39:00.010-06:00

They called him "pops", out of respect. But he was born Roebuck Staples near Winona, Mississippi on a plantation with 13 older brothers and sisters. When he was eight, his family moved to the more affluent Dockery Plantation where he was influenced by the great delta blues guitarists Charley Patton and Son House.

Roebuck Staples remembers it like this:

I was raised on the Will Dockery place from the time I was eight till I got to be 20 years old. Charley Patton stayed on what we called the Lower Dockery place, and we stayed on the Upper Dockery.

He was one of my great persons that inspired me to try to play guitar. He was really a great man.

At first I was too small to go hear him on a Saturday night. But on Saturday afternoons, everybody would go into town, and those fellows like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf would be playin' on the streets, standin' by the railroad tracks, people pitchin' 'em nickels and dimes, white and black people both.

The train came through town maybe once that afternoon, and when it was time, everybody would gather around, just to see that train pull up. They'd play around there, before and after the train came, and announce where they'd be that night, and that's where the crowd would go.

They'd have a plank nailed across the door to the kitchen, and be selling fish and chitlins, with dancin' in the front room, gamblin' in the side room, and maybe two or three gas or coal-oil lamps on the mantelpiece in front of the mirror, powerful lights.

It was different people's houses--no clubs or nothin'. And I finally grew up to play.

Like so many Delta bluesmen would do, Roebuck Staples left Mississippi for Chicago when he was 20. But Roebuck did not follow the blues path. He went the other direction, toward gospel.

Pops, with his children, Cleotha, Mavis, and Purvis became the Staple signers, recording for several Chicago record labels. One of their songs recorded in 1955 was "This May Be My Last Time," later recorded by the Rolling Stones.

The Staple Singers recorded an album of Christmas songs in 1962 called "The 25th Day of December". That's where they recorded "The Last Month of the Year".

The last month of the year has special significance in the Staples family. Pops was born in the last month of the year, on December 28th. He died in the last month of the year as well, December 19, eight years ago.

(Click to hear The Last Month of the Year)

(Click to hear This May Be My Last Time by the Staple Singers)

Christmas With A Milkman

2008-12-20T22:16:00.032-06:00

William Ferris was a 30-year-old man when this photo was taken back in 1972. By that time he already was a veteran blues researcher and scholar.

Ferris discovered blues as a teenager in Vicksburg, Mississippi. For the next forty plus years he photographed, recorded, and filmed blues and blues artists in his home state. Some of his best work can be found in the book Blues From The Delta.

In a soon to be released retrospective of his career, a new book called Mississippi Blues: Voices and Roots , Ferris explains:

...what led a privileged, white Mississippian to work with black musicians in the 1960s. Drawn to the Civil Rights Movement as an undergraduate student, I recorded the voices and music of black musicians whose lives I felt were missing in American and southern history. These artists spoke and sang about violence, about suffering, about love with an eloquence that resonated in my ear. They taught me about worlds that were both at my doorstep and far removed from my own experience.

What began as a fascination with the delta blues culture evolved to become his life's calling.

Ferris and Judy Peiser co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee and, with Charles Reagan Wilson, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He and Wilson are co-editors of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The book earned them a nomination for the Pulitzer.

Along with other blues researchers Mack McCormick, Jim O'Neal and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Ferris helped put blues music and culture into context for the rest of the world.

You can see some of what William Ferris saw in his documentary films like Give My Poor Heart Ease. This and other of his documentaries can be viewed on line at the Folkstreams website , and with the release of his new book, for the first time they also will be available on DVD.

There are some who question why we are so willing to applaud those who "discover" the artist as much as the artist himself. They call it celebrating the milkman, instead of the milk.

William Ferris' work has put a lot of milk on a lot of tables for over 40 years. And for that we should be thankful. One person who believes that is Dick Gordon of American Public Radio. Gordon's show is called "The Story." He spoke with Ferris last Christmas about blues Christmas music as William Ferris did what he does best, he told stories. And they played a lot of great blues music.

The interview is still available online, so if you want to spend a little of your Christmas with the milkman, you can. And you even get some free milk to go along with it.

(Click here to hear Dick Gordon interview William Ferris about Blues Christmas music)

(Click to hear NPR story on Folkstreams)

Santa Claus is Back In Town

2008-12-19T00:04:00.002-06:00

It's not easy being King.

In September 1957 Elvis Presley went into a Hollywood recording studio to cut a Christmas album. After three days in the studio, he ran out of material. But still he needed one more song. So Rock and Roll Hall of Fame songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller (Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, Smokey Joe's Cafe) went away together and quickly came back with a classic double-entendre blues number for Elvis called "Santa Claus is Back in Town."

It would become the last song of the session, and very nearly the last song ever to feature Elvis' original sidemen, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black.

As Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick tells in "Last Train to Memphis" the band had been promised they could make some extra money by cutting some instrumentals for an album with the remaining studio time. But when they were instead suddenly denied the opportunity, both men wrote a letter of resignation and quit in disgust. They had to be pretty angry in order to leave the biggest selling music act in the world.

Elvis at first wished them luck in finding new jobs, but eventually offered each a $50 raise. They each declined. A few weeks later on September 27 when Elvis played a second (and final) homecoming concert in his hometown of Tupelo, Scotty and Bill were nowhere to be seen. In their places for the first time ever, Hank Garland played guitar and Chuck Wiginton was on bass. They played well, but one week later Elvis relented and hired Scotty and Bill back on a per diem basis.

It was a rough year for Elvis. In December he got a letter from Uncle Sam informing him that he'd just been drafted. For the King of Rock and Roll, it would be a blue Christmas.

(Click to hear Elvis sing Santa Claus is Back in Town)

(Click to hear Elvis sing Blue Christmas)

Merry Christmas, Pretty Baby

2008-12-17T21:32:00.014-06:00

How might music history be different if Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins wasn't such a nice guy? Born in Belzoni, Ms. in 1913, the affable piano man got his start playing the keyboards for Robert Nighthawk's KFFA radio show in 1943. Then a short time later Sonny Boy Williamson offered Pinetop more money to play with him on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. Pinetop's boogie woogie piano style was in high demand then and would be for many decades to come.

When Otis Spann left Muddy Waters in 1969 to go out on his own, Muddy didn't have to look long for a replacement, he wanted the man with the old-school Delta style, Pinetop Perkins. Pinetop contributed to Muddy's sound for the next ten years.

But it was back at a dance in Moorehead in the 40's when Pinetop was flying high as Sonny Boy's boogie woogie right hand man that a single act of generosity perhaps turned out to be his greatest contribution to music. As Robert Palmer tells it in his essential blues history "Deep Blues" Pinetop befriended a precocious kid from Clarksdale who idolized the piano star and wanted to learn to how to play that boogie woogie piano. The kid was Ike Turner.

Pinetop didn't have to take the time to give some kid free music lessons, but he did. And they took. Ike of course went on to become quite a good musician and while still a teenager wrote and recorded in 1951 what is largely regarded as the first rock and roll song "Rocket 88" with his saxophone player Jackie Brenston on lead vocals at Sun Studio with Sam Phillips. Phillips leased the song to Chess Records in Chicago, it hit number one and Phillips used the money to start his own record label, Sun Records.

Music fans the world over would be indebted for years to come.

Most remember Ike today because he went on to have a successful career with another lead singer, Anna Mae Bullock, whom he married and gave the stage name Tina Turner.

At 95, Pinetop still has that boogie woogie going on. He records and tours and is now considered an elder statesman of the blues. Ike died a year ago this month.

Both men recorded the classic 1947 Charles Brown song "Merry Christmas Baby."

Turner's 1964 arrangement is soulful and intense, as you might expect. Perkins' version from just a few years ago is laid back and cool, just like the man. Both draw from a piano style learned years before in the Mississippi Delta.

They take different stylistic paths, but both the teacher and the student eventually arrive at the same location, just like they did back in Moorehead in the early 40's. Merry Christmas, baby.

(Click to hear Pinetop Perkins' Merry Christmas Baby)

(Click to hear Ike & Tina Turner's Merry Christmas Baby)

Blues For Christmas

2008-12-16T07:51:00.028-06:00

Born in 1917 near Clarksdale, John Lee Hooker had 10 older brothers and sisters. His first instrument was an inner tube nailed to the barn. His first father was not musically inclined. Luckily, his mother then married a man who was. Hooker's step-father, William Moore was a guitar player. William Moore played fish fries and parties, sometimes joining blues legends Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake. William Moore also taught young John Lee how to play the blues.

It was a lesson that lasted a lifetime.

John Lee ran away from his Clarksdale home at either 14 or 15 to play the blues in Memphis. He wound up working as a movie usher, but also working with Robert Nighthawk. Then he moved to Cinncinnati to live with relatives. For the next ten years John Lee sang gospel and worked a variety of manual labor jobs.

But it wasn't enough to hold him, after a stint in the army, he settled in Detroit, working at a receiving hospital and later at Dodge and Comco Steel (possibly also as a janitor at the Chrysler car plant). Through it all, however he paid the rent, John Lee never put down his guitar. He played in clubs, but it took a little luck before John Lee got to really boogie.

Someone with connections to a local record distributor heard him playing at a house party, noticed that he was very good, and in 1948 John Lee Hooker recorded his first hit record, the classic "Boogie Chillen." It was in a style he learned long ago from his step-father back in Clarksdale.

"Blues for Christmas" isn't a boogie tune. it's far from it. "Blues for Christmas" is a laid back drinking blues with a jazzy feel augmented by Bob Thurman on piano, Jimmy Miller on trumpet and Johnny Hooks on tenor saxophone. Hooker wrote and recorded it in Detroit in 1954.

William Moore never got to hear this or any other John Lee Hooker record. He died before his step-son got to Detroit.

(Click to hear John Lee Hooker's Blues for Christmas)

Click here for John Lee Hooker Tribute Page

Bawdy BB The Back Door Santa

2008-12-15T10:08:00.017-06:00

Surely the most recognizable blues musician alive in the world today has to be B.B. King. The man from Itta Bena, Mississippi has said that as a young man he would sing gospel songs on the street corner in Indianola and the passersby would applaud or shake his hand and tell him how wonderful it was to hear such songs. But they didn't drop any coins into his hat.

When he went across the street to sing blues songs, that's when he made his money. Playing the blues paid better than gospel. And it sure paid better than sharecropping.

The blues are what took Riley King out of Indianola to Memphis. And the blues are what made B.B. King an international star. Along with his obvious talent as a blues singer and guitarist is B.B.'s image as one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet. Regal, just like his name, but folksy at the same time.

But don't be fooled. B.B. knows how to get down and dirty with the blues. Even at Christmastime.

Take for example, "Back Door Santa," a song written in 1968 by Clarence Carter, which obviously is molded after Vicksburg native Willie Dixon's classic "Back Door Man" from a decade earlier.

Back Door Santa Lyrics:

They call me back door Santa,
I make my runs about the break of day,
They call me back door Santa,
I make my runs about the break of day.
I make all the ladies happy,
while the men are out to play.
Well I ain't like old Saint Nick,
he don't come but once a year
Well I ain't like old Saint Nick,
he don't come but once a year.
But I'll come runnin' with my presents,
every time you call me dear.

B.B. King recorded "Back Door Santa" in 2001 for an album called "Christmas Celebration of Hope." All the money went to the charity "City of Hope," a world-renowned biomedical research and treatment center for people with HIV/AIDS and cancer.

Sure, he could have recorded a nice gospel album for the charity. But you know what? The blues pay better.

To enjoy B.B. King's "Back Door Santa", click here.

Bo Knows Santa Claus

2008-12-13T02:17:00.023-06:00

He was born Armenter Chatmon to former slaves in 1893 at a plantation between Bolton and Edwards, Mississippi. Both his mother and father sang and played music. But it was "Bo" who made the family famous. Well, Bo and his half brother Charley Patton.

As Bo Carter he made over 100 blues or "race" records in the 1930's. Many of those records were as a solo artist. But he also sang and recorded with his brothers in a group they called the "Mississippi Sheiks." They were a famous string band and their "Sitting On Top of the World" is in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

As a solo artist in 1928, Bo was the first to record the blues standard "Corinne, Corinna." But music historians mostly remember Bo as the man who sang bawdy blues songs like "Let Me Put My Banana in Your Fruit Basket" and "Your Biscuits Are Big Enough For Me".

Bo obviously didn't know subtlety.

Even in his 1938 Christmas song, when he sings, "when I get to using your Santa Claus, wanna use him different ways. I wanna use your Santa Claus baby both night and day," you what Bo's talking about, and it aint a fat man in a red suit.

So here's a little gift, mama, that Bo Carter wants to stuff into your Christmas stocking tonight.

(click here to hear Bo Carter's Santa Claus)

Sonny Boy and Santa Claus

2008-12-11T19:23:00.012-06:00

Seeing as how we just missed posting anything about the birthday of Glendora's own Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller Dec. 5, 1897) and beginning with Bobby Lounge we're starting to post Christmas songs, I'd like to try and rectify the inexcusable ommission of Sonny Boy with a seasonal post and a tip of the bowler hat dedicated to the King of the Harmonica.

Sonny Boy recorded "Santa Claus" in April, 1960 and he sounds a little bit like Howlin' Wolf. Kind of funny 'cause it was Sonny Boy who taught Wolf how to play harmonica. But then you could argue that Sonny Boy taught the world.

Merry Christmas, baby. Many more songs to follow.

(Click here to hear Sonny Boy's Santa Claus)

FYI: The term "Santa Claus" is often used in blues and gospel to mean the Christmas gift, not Mr. Claus himself.

The lyrics:

My baby went shoppin yesterday,
Said, "I'm gonna buy what you need for Santa Claus."
My baby went shoppin yesterday,
Said, "I'm gonna buy what you need for Santa Claus."
"I'm gonna take mine with me,"
"But I'll leave yours in my dresser drawer."
So, that started me to ramblin,
Lookin in all of my baby's dresser drawers.
Wow, that started me to ramblin,
Lookin all in my baby's dresser drawers.
Tryin to find out,
What did she bought me for Santa Claus.
When I pulled out the bottom dresser drawer,
The landlady got mad and called the law.
When I pulled out the bottom dresser drawer,
The landlady got mad and called the law.
I was just tryin to find,
What did she bought me for Santa Claus.
The police walked in and jarred me on the shoulder,
"What you doing with your hand in that woman's dresser drawer?"
I hand the police a letter my baby wrote me,
Showin where I should find my Santa Claus.
I just kept on pullin out all of my baby's dresser drawers.
I walked out and left the police and the landlady arguin,
Said, "Look at the man done pull out all the lady's dresser drawers."
Yes, I walked out and left the police and the landlady arguin,
Said, "Look at the man done pull out all the lady's dresser drawers."
But he said, "I got the letter and show the judge."
"The boy just tryin to find his Santa Claus."
Oh yeah.

It Aint Gene Autry

2008-12-10T16:30:00.017-06:00

McComb's playful piano pumper Bobby Lounge (aka Dub Brock) never met an unusal character he couldn't relate to or sing about with soul. Such is the case with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Back when Gene Autry sang about the classic caribou in 1949 it was a quaint tale about how our individual characteristics, no matter how different they may be, are strengths rather than weaknesses, if only the world allowed us to use them correctly.

Put Bobby Lounge behind the piano and Rudolph not only rocks, he gains even more underdog strength and respectable coolness.

NPR has taken note of the Lounge act before with a 2006 feature story on All Things Considered called "Wild Man of Jazz Fest." Most recently the public radio network shone a light on Lounge back in October when they chose Lounge's version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer as the NPR Song of the Day. (Click here to listen)

Said writer Marc Silver:

A pianist hammers out a jaunty intro that sounds familiar, yet seems hard to place. There are octave runs and an insistent bass line, as well as repeated chords that conjure up "Heart and Soul." Wait, could it be? It sure could, as Bobby Lounge begins yelping like Jerry Lee Lewis and singing words that everyone knows by heart: "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer / Ow, he had a shiny nose..."

Silver goes on to explain the not so subtle differences between the Gene Autry and Bobby Lounge versions:

In case you were wondering, "Lord, they loved that boy" is not part of the original lyric. Nor is the scat-filled ending, as Lounge growls and howls a "Shab a dap" denouement as bright as Rudy's shiny schnoz.

Lounge recorded Rudolph for his latest CD "Somethin's Wrong". It aint Gene Autry. And there's nothing wrong with that.

(Read the full article here.)

Rolling Out The Red Carpet In Rolling Fork

2008-12-03T10:44:00.027-06:00

Today Muddy Waters recieved his blues marker in Rolling Fork as the birthplace of McKinley A. Morganfield. Eleanor Barkhorn writes about the big day in yesterday's Delta Democrat:

“We're just so excited to have this tangible evidence of Muddy Waters here in Rolling Fork,” said Meg Cooper, coordinator for the Mississippi Lower Delta Partnership, who spearheaded efforts to bring the blues marker to Rolling Fork.

Cooper said international tourists flock to Rolling Fork, searching for signs of Waters, who was born McKinley Morganfield in 1913 and lived in the Delta until the 1940s, before moving to Chicago.

That's fine, except, Muddy was not born in Rolling Fork.

Muddy Waters biographer Robert Gordon was on hand for the ceremony, so nobody's trying to fool tourists. Because the first page in Gordon's biography of Muddy details where Muddy was born and why so many wrongly believe it to be Rolling Fork. Apparently the marker will explain that while Muddy often said he was born in Rolling Fork, he actually was born in neighboring Issaquena County at a place called Jug's Corner and Rolling Fork was the nearest post office. Here's an excerpt of an interview with Muddy's brother Robert Morganfield for Robert Gordon's 2002 documentary "Can't Be Satisfied", a companion to the biography of the same name.
If you really want to see where Muddy Waters was born, Click here to see unused video and interviews from Robert Gordon's American Masters documentary on Muddy Waters.

And if you really want to find out how it really wasn't Alan Lomax who "discovered" Muddy Waters, then read Gordon's bio. Here's what music writer and historian Dave Marsh had to say about it following Lomax's death in 2002:

Lomax's obit made the front page mainly because he "discovered" Son House and Muddy Waters. But in Can't Be Satisfied, his new Muddy Waters biography, Robert Gordon shows that Lomax's discoveries weren't the serendipitous events the great white hunter portrayed. Lomax was led to House and then Waters by the great Negro scholar, John Work III of Fisk University. Gordon even shows Lomax plagiarizing Work, and not on a minor point. (See page 51) In his book, Lomax offers precisely one sentence about Work. He eliminated Work from his second Mississippi trip. He also burned Muddy Waters for the $20 he promised for making the records.

Click here to read the full Marsh article.

Yes, they rolled out the red carpet today for Muddy Waters in Rolling Fork. Hopefully, it's a really long carpet that stretches all the way to Jug's Corner. Like the $20 Lomax never paid him, Muddy deserves it, and so much more.

Click to see the PBS American Masters Muddy Waters page.

Click here to hear a young Muddy sing "Country Blues" as recorded by Alan Lomax on the Stovall Plantation.

Mannish Boy

2008-12-01T18:31:00.018-06:00

The earliest known photograph of Muddy Waters is with his first true love; the first recording he ever made. It would be a beautiful and lasting relationship, Muddy and blues records. He would of course become one of the most influential musicians ever to strike a chord.

Hollywood is late in telling the Muddy Waters story with the release this weekend of "Cadillac Records", but music writers have been telling his story for decades. Still, it took a long time for a proper biography to emerge.

"Muddy Waters usually told people that he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi," begins Robert Gordon's 2002 biography of Muddy called "Can't Be Satisfied".

He continues:

Rolling Fork is where the train stopped, where Muddy's family would get their mail and do their shopping. Rolling Fork was on the map. But Muddy's actual birthplace is to the west and north of there, in the next county over -- Issaquena, pronounced "Essaquena," the initial "e" the only thing soft in this hard land."

On Wednesday, December 3rd at 10:30 a.m., Rolling Fork once again will be called the birthplace of Muddy Waters, this time by the state of Mississippi with another historic marker along the growing blues trail. Waters already has a marker in his name in Clarksdale, six miles from where he grew up at the Stovall Plantation, where he lived and worked and learned to play the delta blues by watching and listening to his idol Son House.

Later, Gordon writes inaccuracies in Muddy's life story were not uncommon, sometimes with Muddy acting as the innacurate source:

"Although his parents never married, the child was given his father's last name: McKinley A. Morganfield. In years to come, after he moved to Chicago, Muddy usually told people he was born in 1915, oddly shaving only two years off his age (if his goal was to appear younger for the entertainment field). He thus became a man born in a year he wasn't born in, from a town where he wasn't born, carrying a name he wasn't born with."

That nickname, Muddy Waters, was given to him by his grandmother, Della Grant. And that is the name that today the world remembers him by. Whether the world remembers that he actually was born a county away from Rolling Fork, at a bend in the road next to the Cottonwood Plantation in an area known as Jug's Corner is of little consequence. Robert Johnson, after all, lays claim to three burial sites. Giving Muddy two birth sites is the least the blues world can do.

Click to hear Robert Gordon October 3, 2002 interview on NPR.

Click to hear Muddy's "Mannish Boy"

B.B. King Drawing Fans South

2008-11-30T21:40:00.011-06:00

Word has spread about the new B.B. King museum in Indianola. And the word is good. It's been open for less than three months and blues fans from all over are feeling a pull to the delta to pay homage to the man and the delta blues art form.

Tom Uhlenbrock of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a recent visitor. But he wanted to see more than artifacts and photographs in a museum honoring the past.

Here's an excerpt:

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.

Uhlenbrock also mentions the new documentary "M for Mississippi" and interviews one of the bluesmen featured, T-Model Ford:

"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."

Read the full article here.

Click here to hear B.B. King's 3 O'Clock Blues

Forty Days With Muddy Waters

2008-11-24T10:28:00.024-06:00

What would it have been like to watch Muddy Waters cut one of his many classic records in the legendary Chess Records studio at 2120 South Michigan in Chicago?

A new movie attempts to show us how "Forty Days and Forty Nights" might have went down in 1956 with Muddy and Little Walter.

Cadillac Records Exclusive Clip

The movie is Cadillac Records, the story of Chess Records. (see earlier blog mention) That's Jeffery Wright portraying Muddy Waters and Columbus Short as Little Walter. That's Buddy Guy's vocal on the soundtrack. The movie opens December 5th, just two days after Mississippi once again honors Muddy with a second blues trail marker. The first marker is placed at Muddy's cabin site on the Stovall Plantation in Clarksdale. This time around, a blues trail marker will be unveiled at his birthplace in Rolling Forks.

From the Clarksdale Press Register we find that the Delta Blues Museum has secured $1.8 million in grants to expand the museum, including a new home for the Muddy Water's cabin exhibit where it can be erected to its actual height. Right now, the top section of the cabin is not included, as the ceiling height of the museum is too low.

Will this star-studded new movie renew interest in Mississippi's blues greats like Muddy Waters? Absolutely. And many of those will come to check out the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale and the blues trail markers across the state. With 58 markers now in place, to view them all, it just might take someone, oh I don't know, something like forty days and forty nights.

Click to hear Muddy's Forty Days and Forty Nights.

Elvis Gets Planted

2008-11-22T11:06:00.029-06:00

Who is the greatest singer in the rock and roll era? In it's newest edition, Rolling Stone Magazine tries to settle the question, or at least start another worthwhile debate. The magazine polled singers, producers, journalists and other music insiders to find out who is the most respected singer. For Led Zepplin's Robert Plant, there is only one answer - Tupelo's Elvis Presley.

Says Plant:

"Anyway You Want Me" (click to hear) is one of the most moving vocal performances I've ever heard. There is no touching "Jailhouse Rock" and the stuff recorded at the King Creole sessions. I can study the Sun sessions as a middle-aged guy looking back at a bloke's career and go, "Wow, what a great way to start." But I liked the modernity of the RCA stuff. "I Need Your Love Tonight" and "A Big Hunk o' Love" were so powerful — those sessions sounded like the greatest place to be on the planet.

This of course means that when Rolling Stone's panel of experts looked at every remarkable singer from the past 70 years, they collectively decided on the top five singers, and three have Mississippi roots: Clarksdale born and bred Reverend C.L. Franklin's daughter Aretha finished first, Ray Charles second, and Elvis third. Sam Cooke, also born in Clarksdale, finished fourth.

Other notable mentions: Howlin' Wolf at 31, Muddy Waters at 53, and John Lee Hooker at 81.

Vanity, Thy Name Is Blues

2008-11-20T13:24:00.025-06:00

Who knew Vanity Fair was a blues publication? Last month the magazine which bills itself as one of of culture, fashion, and politics, published an extensive article on a purported new photograph of Robert Johnson.

And now this.

When Roger Stolle and Jeff Konkel sat down at Ground Zero blues club to speak with Terry Harmonica Bean for their documentary "M for Mississippi", they weren't concerned with their own vanity. But they are today, after what can truthfully be called a vanity printing featuring the two.

Normally, that's a derogatory term meant to diminish the work of an artist as he or she builds up the ego with blatant and usually undeserved self promotion made at the artist's expense. But this is no slap at the producers of "M for Mississippi". Quite the contrary. While it's more than fair to call this latest interview a vanity printing, it's still nothing but a good thing and definately a tribute to the good work of Cat Head Record's Roger Stolle and Jeff Konkel, owner of Broke and Hungry Records.

Both men sat down for an interview with a writer for Vanity Fair online to discuss their new documentary of Mississippi blues called "M for Mississippi". (see earlier blog mention)

And you know what? They didn't have to pay a single penny for this Vanity printing. Obviously Vanity Fair is loving it some Mississippi blues.

Here's an excerpt:

VF Daily: One of the interesting things about this movie is how well you captured the essence of real-life juke joints. I think many people nowadays think of a juke joint as being House of Blues or B.B. King’s club in Times Square.

Roger Stolle: I think that’s true. I think the term “juke” has just been abused. People started calling a regular old club a juke joint. But if you look at these real joints, these rag-tag places, it’s totally different. You get the crowds that talk back to the acts. You have lighting that’s very dim. There’s a real atmosphere.

Sometimes you see the spotlight behind the artist, shining in the audience’s faces, and sometimes there’s no real stage, just a patch of carpet, and when you look around, you can’t help but think, How is it possible that a fire marshal didn’t get involved here? But I’m grateful for that, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The audience really becomes a part of what’s going on. They are not just the observer; they’re the participants.

The Book on Delta Blues

2008-11-13T12:37:00.017-06:00

Does the world really need another book about the history of the Delta Blues? Ted Gioia thinks so. "Delta Blues" is Gioia's sixth non-fiction book. His "The History of Jazz" was selected as one of the twenty best books of 1997 by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, and was also chosen as a notable book of the year in The New York Times. Gioia’s new book, "Delta Blues", published in October by Norton, is getting good reviews too.

Here's an excerpt from Ben Ratliff's November 7 review in the New York Times:

The chapter on John Lee Hooker — and here Gioia really hits his stride — deals with Hooker’s endless variations on a one-chord groove, but also with the profligacy of his recording career. He could make dozens of records in a single year, some under different names, sometimes lending himself to producers who had no idea what to do with him. There’s an embedded narrative here about the way certain blues musicians — not just Hooker, but Son House and others — might have taken too much pride in the quantity of their work, and not enough in the quality, as an emotional defense against exploitation. But there’s another, too, about the opportunism of both Hooker and his employers. Gioia follows Hooker to the end of his long life with a clear fascination for even some of his lesser achievements, through his ’70s recordings with Canned Heat and his Grammy-winning final days.

And in this YouTube video, Gioia himself explains what motivated him to write "Delta Blues."

Gioia is in Oxford tonight at 6 p.m. at "Off Square Books" 129 Courthouse. Tomorrow night at 5:00 he's in Jackson at "Lemuria Books" off I-55 North.

This may be the latest of many books, but it's certain that it will not be the last word on the Mississippi Delta blues.

Cadillac Records

2008-11-12T15:56:00.022-06:00

If you know who plays the bass drum on the Muddy Waters song "She Moves Me", then you can safely say that you do indeed know a lot about Leonard Chess and Chicago's famed Chess Records. This Christmas season, a lot more people will know a lot more about Chess Records.

There are a lot of great stories to tell about Chess Records. I'm not sure if this latest film is one of them, but we'll find out when TriStar Pictures releases "Cadillac Records" the story of Chess Records.
The movie stars Academy Award winner Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess and Shiloh Fernandez as brother Phil. Beyoncé Knowles is Etta James. With the exception of James and Chuck Berry, the musicians who made Chess records famous are almost exclusively from Mississippi, including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, James Cotton, Jimmie Rogers, Hubert Sumlin, and more. Some of the filming took part in Mississippi.

Here's the trailer:

The film premieres on December 5th. Then we'll find out if like Muddy says, "She Moves Me." (click to listen to Muddy on guitar, Little Walter on harmonica and Leonard Chess on bass drum)

Bobby Lounge

2008-10-31T15:14:00.011-05:00

Boomp3.com
Dub Brock from McComb performs as Bobby Lounge, but it's a rare treat. Once a year you can catch "Bobby Lounge" at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival where he has recieved enthusiastic reviews from Downbeat Magazine, Rolling Stone and the New York Times and USA Today.

Here's an excerpt by Edna Gundersen about his 2008 appearance:

•Even with its staggering diversity of artists, Jazz Fest seldom serves up anyone as eccentric as Bobby Lounge, the singer/pianist who made his third consecutive Jazz Fest appearance before a large, enthusiastic throng.

Introducing the reclusive McComb, Miss., resident, toastmaster Calvin Tubbs, said, "I've been paid an amazing amount of money to lend some gravitas to these proceedings." Fat chance.

Lounge, wearing feathery wings on his shirt, was wheeled on stage in an iron lung (that's actually an old gym steam chamber with added knobs). He introduces his "closest companion," a primly dressed woman whom he also describes as a lawn jockey, auto mechanic, parole officer, nurse and contortionist who collects Hummel figurines.

She sits and reads a book as he launches into a new song about a Barry Manilow statue made of cheese. He hauls out other Southern Gothic boogie-woogie marvels, including I Remember the Night Your Trailer Burned Down and the epic Take Me Back to Abita Springs. The humor is swift, smart, surreal and often salacious, and his piano playing recalls the prime of Jerry Lee Lewis. No words can describe the freak performance piece that entails Lounge galloping on the keys and spinning a yarn about a Sasquatch-like squirrel while a man in a huge squirrel costume chases a woman, clad only in bra and panties, through the audience until his tail falls off. Now that's Southern-fried entertainment.

Bobby Lounge is scheduled to perform in Covington on November 22nd.

Happy Halloween

2008-10-30T17:05:00.011-05:00

Top Ten Halloween Blues songs… subject to debate, of course

1) Haunted House Blues - Bessie Smith
2) Devil Got My Woman - Skip James
3) Two Headed Woman - Junior Wells
4) Evil - Howlin’ Wolf
5) Bo Meets the Monster - Bo Diddley
6) Haunted House - B.B. King
7) Hellhound On My Trail - Robert Johnson
8) She’s Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight - Lonnie Johnson
9) She Brought Life Back to the Dead - Sonny Boy Williamson
10) Devil's Son-In-Law - Peetie Wheatstraw

Still King of the 9 String

2008-10-29T09:50:00.025-05:00

On his headstone Big Joe Williams is proclaimed to be "King of the 9 String Guitar." It's doubtful that anyone disagrees. It's probably even safer to say that nobody really knows the name of whoever claimed to be second best.

A contemporary of Lonnie Johnson, Honeyboy Edwards, Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, Peetie Wheatstraw, Robert Nighthawk, and a very young Muddy Waters who played harmonica for Big Joe Williams in the early '40's at juke joints around Mississippi. Williams created the 9 string guitar to make his sound original. But he didn't need a novelty string instrument to make himself a standout and an eventual W.C. Handy Blues Hall of Fame singer/songwriter/guitarist. One of 16 children, he was a talented bluesman from Crawford, Mississippi who taught himself to play on a homemade guitar at the age of five. His very first hit in 1935, "Baby Please Don't Go" became a shortlist blues standard, covered by his one-time harmonica player Muddy Waters, among many others.

Here's Big Joe's version from 1963 on YouTube.

On Monday November 3rd in his hometown of Crawford at four in the afternoon, Big Joe Williams once again will be proclaimed "King of the 9 String" with a Blues Heritage Trail Marker.

Don't expect anyone to challenge it. Not on Monday. Not ever.

Chicago Gets Clearwater News

2008-10-28T22:20:00.008-05:00

And we're not talking about Lake Michigan.

Longtime channel seven news reporter Harry Porterfield tapped Macon, Mississippi native Eddy Clearwater for his popular "Someone You Should Know" series on Chicago television Tuesday night at 5:15.

The story (you can see it by clicking the link above) includes video from Eddy's latest DVD Live at the Rawa Blues Festival in Poland. Clearwater now calls suburban Skokie, Illinois home, but insists his heart is in his music, and in his Mississippi roots.

From Porterfield's story:

"I want give as much back to the blues as the blues has given to me because it's very important for the younger generation to hear. This is where we came from this is our culture. I want make sure it continues into the next generation," said Clearwater.

Eddie Shaw A Budding Movie Star with Sax Appeal

2008-10-28T10:50:00.026-05:00

Like Father like son? After years as a successful blues musician, Benoit's Eddie Shaw appears to be going the other direction, following in his film star son's footsteps onto the big screen.

Like so many bluesmen before him, saxophonist Eddie Shaw went from Mississippi to Chicago to play the blues. Eddie is of course well known for his solo work and also for his earlier career work playing tenor sax behind Hound Dog Taylor, Freddie King, Otis Rush, Earl Hooker, Magic Sam and most notably Howlin' Wolf. He took over Howlin' Wolf's band, the Wolf Gang, and became the Wolf's personal manager. Eddie also arranged the tunes on The Howlin' Wolf London Sessions (with Eric Clapton) and Muddy Waters' Unk and Funk album.

Not a bad resume.

Eddie's son Stan Shaw went in another direction, from Chicago to Hollywood. You've seen Stan in "Fried Green Tomatoes" "The Boys in Company C" (Where Stan's character does sing a little blues) and "Harlem Nights".

Now more than 30 years after Stan broke into acting, Eddie is turning up on the big screen. First, there was last year's natural performance as elder bluesman Time Trenier in the terrific but sadly overlooked John Sayles independent film "Honeydripper." (do yourself a favor, rent it)

Here's a clip from the film courtesy YouTube complete with Spanish subtitles and commentary about Eddie from writer/director John Sayles:

This won't be the last we see of Eddie Shaw at the movies. Stan is working to get his dad back up on the big screen, and this time in an even more comfortable role: himself. Stan is in the final production stages of a soon-to-be released blues documentary called "Roots of my Father, Blues Royalty."

According to an earlier story in the Illinois Entertainer, Stan Shaw has interviewed friends in and around Benoit, Mississippi. The film will of course include concert footage and interviews with Eddie about his lengthy music career.

He's a bluesman, not a movie star. But who says he can't be both?

Look for the film to be released early next year.

Updating R.L. Burnside

2008-10-27T15:55:00.013-05:00

Northern Mississippi Hills guitarist R.L. Burnside tried to make his mark as a blues artist in Chicago during the heyday of Chicago blues in the 1950's but left a broken hearted man. It wasn't that his music talent when unrecognized. It was because while in Chicago, Burnside's father, brother and uncle all were murdered within a month of each other. R.L. decided to get out alive. He left the big city and returned home to farming. But he never stopped playing his guitar, and his influence on generations of other hills blues guitarists is legendary.

Now here it is 2008 and Burnside's grandson has released his own brand of blues. Count a Boston Globe music reviewer as a fan of the Juke Joint Duo Cedric Burnside and Lightin' Malcom. In a Boston Globe review of the new CD "2 Man Wrecking Crew" reviewer Tristram Lozaw writes:

If there was any doubt about the inspiration for this debut, it's dispelled in the album's first track, an ode to legendary Delta bluesman R.L. Burnside. Working in memory of the electric gut-bucket blues of Big Daddy, drummer Cedric's granddad, this Mississippi duo casts its own heady spell of juke-joint blues stripped down to the fuzz and guts. Schooled in supporting roles for R.L., Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford, Otha Turner, Hubert Sumlin, and others, the young Burnside and guitarist Lightnin' Malcolm add a wonderfully ragged and Hendrix-like rhythmic crunch to the entrancing circular moans of their Hill Country blues teachers.

You don't have to take Lozaw's word for it. If you want to see and hear for yourself what the new generation of R.L. Burnside blues sounds like here's your chance. Cedric and Malcom, who perform as "The Juke Joint Duo" will be playing Martin's in Jackson on Saturday November 1st at 10 p.m.

Is This Man Robert Johnson?

2008-10-23T10:24:00.014-05:00

There are two verified photographs of blues legend Robert Johnson. Vanity Fair might have just published a third. In a fascinating article in the November issue of Vanity Fair (available online here) Contributing Editor Frank DiGiacomo writes about how a New York guitar salesman bought the photograph on eBay for several thousand dollars, (where it was erroneously suggested the guitarist pictured might be B.B. King) then set about trying to authenticate it.

Steven “Zeke” Schein believes that's Robert Johnson on the left and another delta bluesman, Johnny Shines on the right. And Schein makes a great case for it, but you'll have to read the 5 page Vanity Fair article for details about why. The story also includes the detailed copyright history which began when Steve LaVere bought the only other two known photographs of Robert Johnson from his half-sister Carrie Thompson in 1974 and the Mississippi Supreme Court decision that gave Crystal Springs native and Johnson' heir Claud Johnson ownership of Robert Johnson's image.

Here's a brief passage:

In late summer 2007, Schein’s attorney, John Pelosi, submitted the photograph to John Kitchens, the lawyer for the Johnson estate, to see if there was any way of authenticating it. Kitchens’s father, Jim Kitchens, had been the lead attorney in Claud Johnson’s fight to be named heir of the Johnson estate, but he had since turned the day-to-day handling of the estate over to his son, who turned 30 this year and was all of 12 when the Johnson boxed set was released. Not surprisingly, when John Kitchens saw a copy of the photo, he wasn’t exactly floored. “I didn’t know who it was,” he says. But Kitchens remembered reading about a forensic artist who, that August, had reportedly determined the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Life-magazine photo of Times Square on the day World War II ended. The artist’s name is Lois Gibson and she works for the Houston Police Department. She is also a graduate of the F.B.I. Academy Forensic Artist Course and was deemed “The World’s Most Successful Forensic Artist” in The 2005 Guinness Book of World Records because, at the time, her sketches and facial reconstructions had helped net more than 1,062 criminals.

Kitchens sent Gibson a copy of Schein’s photo, along with reproductions of the Hooks Bros. portrait and the photo-booth shot. Gibson compared the facial features in each of the three photos and reported back with a pretty startling conclusion: “My only problem with this determination is the lack of certainty about the date of the questioned photo,” she wrote in her report to Kitchens. But, she continued, if Schein’s photo “was taken about the same time as, or a little earlier than,” the photo-booth self-portrait, “it appears the individual in [Schein’s photo] is Robert Johnson. All the features are consistent if not identical.”

(Click to hear Robert Johnson's Terraplane Blues)

Making Jamz On The Today Show

2008-10-22T20:44:00.025-05:00

Viewers of NBC's Today Show got a dose of homemade Mississippi Blues via Tupelo last week. American Story reporter Bob Dotson is the latest national reporter to tell the tale of Renaud Perry and his three children, ten-year-old Taya, Kyle, 14 and Ryan, 16.

They began playing the blues with homemade guitars their father constructed out of parts from his auto parts store.

Taught to play by Jabbo Harris, The Homemade Jamz Blues Band recently finished second at the Memphis International Blues Challenge, beating out 92 other bands.

Here's a sample:

“We would sweat and we would work,” recalls Jabbo, pushing back his battered straw cowboy hat. “Then we would practice and sweat some more. I said, ‘This guy’s gonna make a guitar player because his fingers are as fast as lightning.’

“Next thing I know, here comes his little brother, Kyle, carrying a bass guitar. Bass was way longer than he was. Looks like the bass should have been carrying him. He picked up strumming right away.

“Finally, their little sister, Taya. She’s the drummer. Just 7 at the time. Reminded me of Willie ‘Big Eyes’ Smith; just a natural.”

Read the full text and watch the video of Bob Dotson's NBC story here.

NBC isn't the first national media to discover The Homemade Jamz Blues Band. In July, correspondent Michele Norris featured the band on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" show.
An exerpt:

I decided I had to meet the three kids who make up the Homemade Jamz Blues Band, so we invited Ryan, Kyle and Taya Perry to visit our studios. I had the pleasure of watching the adults in the room go through the same jaw-dropping experience. Faces twisted. Eyebrows raised. Are these kids really playing this music? It was rich.

Who knows if these kids will get rich playing their music? I got the sense it's not what drives them. They're not even old enough to vote, and they've already found their talent and their passion. And anybody who listens — well, they're made richer by the experience.

In August, Modern Guitars Magazine featured the band on their website with this story.

Last December, it was CBS news featuring the band.

You also can count blues legend B.B. King and Jesse Robinson as fans, as evidenced in this popular YouTube clip:

The title of The Homemade Jamz Blues Band's CD is "Pay Me No Mind." But with this kind of national exposure, that's not very likely.

M for Mississippi

2008-10-17T15:38:00.005-05:00

M for Mississippi: A Road Trip through the Birthplace of the Blues, is a new documentary "celebrating the raw, raucous spirit of Mississippi's surviving blues scene." This isn't about the history of the blues, this is about the present blues.

Ron Brown reports on it for Mississippi Public Broadcasting: Audio Link

Find out more at MforMississippi.com

Blues Trail: Roots of Rock and Roll

2008-10-17T15:34:00.002-05:00

Saturday at 8:30am the Roots of Rock and Roll Blues Trail marker will be unveiled at 614 Mobile Street.

BB's Museum

2008-09-16T16:29:00.002-05:00

Ron Brown at Mississippi Public Broadcasting shares the story of the new BB King Museum. For more of the story read Billy Watkins' interview of BB in the Jackson Clarion Ledger or this report from Rolling Stone.

Blues Trail - Freedom Village

2008-09-16T16:26:00.001-05:00

On Wednesday, September 17, at 5:30 p.m., the Greenville Convention and Visitors Bureau will unveil the latest Mississippi Blues Trail marker, honoring Freedom Village.

Black Prairie Kings

2008-08-28T09:13:00.003-05:00

Scott Barretta writes about the Black Prairie Blues with a picture of the historic performance of Steve Bell, Eddy Clearwater, and Willie King at the recent BPB Mississippi Blues Trail marker dedication in Macon.

On Aug. 19 several hundred people gathered in downtown Macon for the unveiling of a Mississippi Blues Trail marker acknowledging "Black Prairie Blues." On Friday night, marker honoree Willie King headlines the 13th annual Howlin' Wolf Memorial Blues Festival in West Point as part of the "Black Prairie Kings," which also includes harmonica player Blind Mississippi Morris.

Although the Delta dominates public imagery of Mississippi blues, many important artists came from the prairies. Honored in Macon alongside King were natives Eddy Clearwater, who drove down from Illinois for the unveiling, and the late harmonica great Carey Bell, represented by his harmonica-playing son Steve of Kosciusko.

Forthcoming markers in Crawford for Big Joe Williams and in Aberdeen for Booker White will highlight the area's rich blues heritage, while Howlin' Wolf's legacy in West Point is secured. A statue of the bluesman - Chester Arthur Burnett - stands next to a Blues Trail marker in his honor, and the nearby Howlin' Wolf Blues Museum has amassed an impressive collection of Wolf-related artifacts from around the world.

RIP Little Arthur Duncan

2008-08-25T15:13:00.003-05:00

Sad news from the Chicago Tribune:

Little Arthur Duncan left Mississippi as a teenager for Chicago, where he befriended blues giant Little Walter and learned to play the harmonica. Mr. Duncan became an accomplished harp player and gutbucket blues singer who performed across the city and in Europe and ran two clubs on the West Side for many years. Mr. Duncan, 74, died Wednesday, Aug. 20, in Kindred Hospital in Northlake of complications from brain surgery, said Rick Kreher, a guitarist who often played with Mr. Duncan.

Born in Indianola, Miss., the hometown of B.B. King, Mr. Duncan came to Chicago when he was 16 and did construction work while playing in bars and clubs around Chicago.

He went into business about 1980, running two West Side clubs—the Artesian Lounge on Lake Street and Backscratcher's Social Club on Madison Street. The club, like his backing band, The Backscratchers, took its name from one of his signature numbers, Slim Harpo's "Baby Scratch My Back."

He played regularly at Rosa's Lounge and Buddy Guy's Legends and in Europe. He threw parties, which were renowned for their lavish spreads of Southern food he prepared, for the city's blues communities at his South Side home.

Visitation will be held at 4 p.m. Aug. 29 at A.A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home, 318 E. 71st St. A one-hour visitation will precede 11 a.m. services Aug. 30 at Second Mt. Vernon Missionary Baptist Church, 7922 S. Hoyne Ave.

The money blues

2008-08-24T15:08:00.003-05:00

Alex "Lil' Bill" Wallace has made a lot of music, and a lot of musicians. But he hasn't made a lot of money.

He taught Greenville artist Eden Brent to play the organ. Her latest album, "Mississippi Number One" currently sits on top of the state's roots music chart. And Wallace is credited with convincing B.B. King he should stop playing gospel music and start singing the blues - a switch that brought King fortune and international fame.

Despite the success he nurtured in others, Wallace did not make much money of his own. After Wallace died earlier this month at the age of 83, local blues artists and fans sponsored a benefit concert to help his family pay funeral expenses.

According to Albert Folk, president and CEO of Greenville label G-Town Records, Wallace's financial woes are typical of the Delta's blues artists. He cited legendary musicians Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson as examples of other bluesmen who died penniless.

"Blues is a multi-billion dollar industry," Folk said. "Unfortunately, the artists don't see none of that money."

Billy Johnson, founder of the Highway 61 Blues Museum in Leland, said blues musicians face challenges beyond dishonest executives and unsympathetic festival organizers. "Blues is just a minute part of record sales today," he said. He also said that piracy and illegal downloading cut into music sales, which hurts all musicians.

Though Folk and Johnson may disagree on the source of Delta blues artists' financial troubles, they agree on one thing: People are willing to travel from far and wide to hear the blues performed in the land where it was born.

"People across the country are crazy about our culture here," said Folk.

Read the full story here: Blues singing not a lucrative gig

King, Clearwater and Bell honored with Blues Trail Marker

2008-08-23T14:45:00.001-05:00

Starkville Daily News reports on the Noxubee marker:

History was made Tuesday in the Black Prairie region of the state [with]...a Mississippi Blues Trail Marker unveiling ceremony in Downtown Macon. The Black Prairie Blues marker will honor legendary bluesmen Willie King, Eddie “The Chief” Clearwater and Carey Bell. King and Clearwater were on-hand for the ceremonies and were joined by the late Bell’s son Steve, a talented harmonica player in his own right. Among those in attendance were legendary Jackson bluesman and Blues Commissioner Jesse Robinson, Highway 61 Radio Host and Living Blues Magazine Editor Scott Baretta, Co-founder of Rooster Blues Records and Living Blues Magazine Jim O’Neal, Howlin’ Wolf Blues Society Director Richard Ramsey, Philadelphia blues prodigy Caleb Childs and Waverly Waters Resort and 2 Brothers BBQ CEO Mike Reilly. Several family members of King, Clearwater and Bell were also on hand. Tuesday’s Black Prairie Blues Trail Marker unveiling was the 46th Blues Trail Marker unveiling ceremony, and its crowd of roughly 160 visitors made it the largest crowd for an event of its kind to date, according to Baretta and Heritage Trails Program Manager Alex Thomas. “Although, collectively, the three blues artists have performed at venues from Jackson to Stockholm, Sweden, they always make sure people know they are from Noxubee County,” said Noxubee Alliance Director Brian Wilson during the opening ceremonies. “And it means so much to have them back here in Noxubee County today.”

Marty Stuart and Mississippi's Musical Genres

2008-08-22T15:04:00.002-05:00

Philadelphia native Marty Stuart performs in Little Rock Arkansas this weekend.

The Old State Museum is an unlikely venue for a concert. However, the museum has housed Stuart’s exhibit, “Sparkle & Twang: Marty Stuart’s American Musical Odyssey,” since April. The exhibit will run through Oct. 5.

With instruments, rare photographs, hand-written song lyrics, stage costumes and more, the exhibit is fine sampling of unique artifacts of country, bluegrass and rock and roll music.

“Those belongings look like treasures to me,” Stuart said. “I got pieces from family members and thrift stores and pawn shops. In a simple form, it’s honoring the people that gave me a job. Certain bits and pieces of our culture get overlooked. I think it’s great for us to make new records and stay creative but at the same time, it’s important to me to keep the tradition and our musical history alive.”

Growing up in Mississippi, Stuart was surrounded by an array musical genres. Naturally, he was influenced by all of the sounds of the region.

“I was exposed to Dixieland music, the Blues, gospel and of course, a lot of country music,” he stated. “We had a local radio station, WHOC. As a youngster, I listened to that station and I loved their format. In the morning, they played country music. That was followed by the farm report then the gospel hour. Later, they played rock and then soul. In the evening, it was easy listening. I enjoyed all of it and all of those sounds are a part of me and my music today.”

Read the full story here: ‘Mainstream’ Marty Stuart to appear in Little Rock

WCBI in Macon

2008-08-21T07:39:00.000-05:00

WCBI covered the Mississippi Blues Trail event in Noxubee County and gave this report: Noxubee County on the Blues Trail

Blues Makin in Macon

2008-08-20T14:10:00.002-05:00

Several hundred folks turned out yesterday in Macon for the dedication of the Black Praire Blues marker on Mississippi's Blues Trail honoring Noxubee County natives Eddy Clearwarter, Carey Bell, and Willie King.

The Commercial Dispatch has a great article on it:

“It’s important for us to keep the spirit of the blues alive,” Willie King said as he stood next to a freshly unveiled historical marker displaying his name. “It tells the story of reality.”

King, 65, and fellow Noxubee County blues musicians Eddy Clearwater, 78, and the late Carey Bell dedicated nearly all their lives attempting to paint a picture of their realities in East Mississippi using their music. And on Tuesday, the trio of artists permanently became icons of the reality and history of the small Noxubee County city. The marker will serve as a permanent symbol of East Mississippi’s Black Prairie region, which produced several of the world’s most well-known blues artists.

Clearwater, a blues guitarist and songwriter who was born in Macon in 1935 and has been bestowed with several blues honors — including the Chicago Music Award, grinned and laughed as he explained his love for Macon. “If heaven is better than this, then that’s a place I want to go,” Clearwater said in reference to Macon. “This is like heaven here today." “When I was young, we would go down the street here to the movie theater and see cowboy movies,” Clearwater added as he pointed northward on Jefferson Street. “This honor means so much to me and I will always uphold the name of Macon, Miss., wherever I go.”

Bell died last year at the age of 70, though several of his family members assured the blues harmonica legend was watching the ceremony from above. “Carey has passed on, but I know he is smiling from above,” said Vanessa Carson, Bell’s aunt, said in reference to the Macon native whose death garnered national media attention. “We are so proud of him and we know he is proud of Macon and Mississippi as he’s smiling down from heaven,” Carson added. “Thank you, Macon, for putting out a man like Carey Bell.”

“We are here today to honor three blues legends who are Noxubee County natives,” Noxubee Alliance Director Brian Wilson said as he looked at the three blues musicians. “These three men have meant so much to the world of music, and they always do so while representing Noxubee County. “Whether it’s Stockholm, Jackson or Italy, they always make it known that they are from Noxubee County, Miss., while they are rocking out the world,” Wilson repeated.

The Macon blues marker will join similar monuments in Meridian, Columbus and West Point in directing visitors through the hometowns of many of the state’s blues legends, explained Scott Baretta, research coordinator of the Mississippi Blues Trail. “Mississippi blues is mostly associated with the Delta,” Baretta said. “But the markers we now have in the Black Prairie and other areas in East Mississippi will hopefully draw a lot of blues tourists who would normally veer west. “This has to be the largest marker unveiling I’ve been to, as far as the number of people who came to the ceremony,” Baretta added. “The markers are a showcase of the heritage of Mississippi, and today we will certainly add to that.”

(Read the full article here.)

Blues Trail Marker in Noxubee County

2008-08-19T14:18:00.001-05:00

A few pictures from today's event in Macon honoring the Black Prairie Blues, Eddy Clearwater, Carey Bell, and Willie King.

A Native Son Paints the Blues

2008-08-15T07:00:00.001-05:00

In coordinatin with the Black Prairie Blues trail marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail, the Macon Welcome Center will exhibit works by native son James Conner.

Twenty-eight pieces by Conner, a widely known artist and lecturer, will be exhibited from August 19 to September 17, 2008. Conner, a native of Shuqualak, Mississippi, holds a B.F.A. degree from Wayne State University, and a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of Mississippi. He served two tours in Vietnam and one in Germany as a member of the U.S. Army 423rd Ordnance Supply. He has been an art instructor at Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, and Meridian Community College. He is presently a spring lecturer at the University of Alabama where he and his family live.

The exhibit is divided into three sections: THE BLUES, executed with rhythmic strokes in deep brooding color; HERITAGE, which includes poignant paintings from Conner’s childhood memories; and TUSKEEGEE AIRMEN, three paintings memorializing the renowned World War II aviators.

The Macon Welcome Center is open 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday - Friday, or by appointment. For more information contact: maconmainstreet@aol.com; or call 662-694-1094.

Historic Joint Peformance by Black Prairie Blues Legends

2008-08-14T15:52:00.007-05:00

It is homecoming time, blues style, in Noxubee County. Blues legends Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater and Willie King will perform together for the first time ever on Tuesday, August 19 at 11 a.m. during the Black Prairie Blues marker dedication ceremony in downtown Macon, Mississippi. The Black Prairie Blues marker is the newest addition to the Mississippi Blues Trail and will honor Noxubee County natives and Blues legends Carey Bell, Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater, and Willie King. In addition to the Clearwater King performance, Steve Bell, son of deceased honoree Carey Bell, will represent his father and perform with Jesse Robinson and the 500 Pounds of Blues Band. Scott Barretta, host of Highway 61 radio show on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and former editor of Living Blues magazine, will make a special presentation. And there will be lots of BBQ and cold drinks on this hot and bluesy Mississippi reunion.

Eddy Clearwater
Willie King
Carey Bell
Jesse Robinson

Two Great Blogs

2008-08-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

I just added these to the link list. But check out Jim O'Neal's "Stackhouse & BluEsoterica" and for sure you need to visit Jim and Scott Barretta's unofficial "Mississippi Blues Trail" blog.

Black Prairie Blues

2008-08-13T15:51:00.003-05:00

The Black Prairie Blues Marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail will be unveiled Tuesday in Noxubee County. The marker honors Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater, Carey Bell, and Willie King: 11am - Corner of Green and Jefferson in Macon, Mississippi. There will be BBQ plate lunches available for $7, live music, and lots of folks ready to boogie.

RIP Alex "Little Bill" Wallace

2008-08-13T10:04:00.002-05:00

Delta Blues native Alex "Little Bill" Wallace of Leland, Mississippi passed away on Sunday, August 10, 2009. "Little Bill" was one of the first delta blues men to play the electric guitar. Wallace influenced and performed with many great musicians including BB King, whom he played with in their younger days.
Photo: Alex "Little Bill" Wallace with Alex Thomas, Mississippi Blues Trail Director at the David "Honeyboy" Edwards marker ceremony on April 13, 2007.

T-Model Ford Hospitalized

2008-08-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

Alex Thomas, Program Manager for the Mississippi Division of Tourism's Heritage Trails, passes this note along regarding T-Model Ford:

Greenville blues musician James "T-Model" Ford was hospitalized Thursday with heart complications. I was informed by T-Model's family that he will undergo surgery Friday morning at Delta Regional Hospital. He is scheduled to be honored on the Mississippi Blues Trail on September 26, 2008 at his birthplace in Forest, MS. Please keep T-Model and his family in your prayers.

Blues Trail License Plate

2008-08-04T10:00:00.003-05:00

The Mississippi Blues Commission has designed a Mississippi Blues Trail license plate. They need commitments of those who would purchase them as their tags before they can proceed with the license plate process. If you are interested in the Mississippi Blues Trail license plate for your automobile, contact Leigh Portwood at the Heritage Trails Program at MDA.

Blues for Israel

2008-07-21T10:56:00.002-05:00

Mississippian and grammy-winner James Cotton is taking the Mississippi blues to the Middle East:

Cotton will play three dates (six shows) in Israel with his band, Super Harp. Born in Mississippi in 1935, Cotton is a legendary harmonica player who recorded four songs for Sun Records by the age of 15. He was given his own 15-minute radio show in Memphis at 17, which opened more doors for him. By the late '60s, Cotton had six albums under his belt. Cotton, known as "Superharp," was Muddy Waters's harmonica player for 12 years, and he collaborated with other blues legends, too. In addition, Cotton has played with and opened for Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Santana, Steve Miller and B.B. King, among others. He became famous for his wild showmanship, which sometimes included backflips. While the acrobatics are no longer part of the routine and the volume has been toned down, Cotton is still touring.

Read the full story here: Blues singer James Cotton coming to Israel

Elvis Lives

2008-07-21T10:46:00.004-05:00

What does an 82 year old man do with a private museum dedicated to the proposition that Elvis Presley is alive? He put it up for sale on e-bay.

And that's where 39-year-old father of five and Mississippi manufactured home salesman Andy Key saw the offer. "My eldest son is a huge Elvis fan, so I thought I'd put in a bid...we'd see it as a high bid for a day, and it would give us something to talk about," Key now recalls. He put in his bid of $8,300 — $100 more than the last bidder — and no one bid any higher. "It was a whim...a spur of the moment thing," he says of offering up $8,300 he really didn't have. He could have backed out. He could have lived with a bad buyers rap on eBay. But he had an idea. What would he risk — besides every cent he had and a full-time job and the security of his family — by taking over the preacher's mission? "To say (my wife) was shocked that I bought an Elvis museum is an understatement," he cringes. "She was not happy with me."

She relented, and late last year, they borrowed what money they needed and drove in a truck to pick up the proof of what is either one of the world's silliest myths or signs of an amazing truth most people would love to believe. All of it, they brought back to Hattiesburg, Miss., where they've rented out an old house to continue Beeny's bid to keep Elvis alive. Last month, three miles off the interstate, they opened the doors (theelvisisalivemuseum.com).

Read the full story here: Elvis lives!

Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Ron Brown did this story on Laurel's Andy Key, the new proprietor of the museum.

Upcoming Blues Trail Marker Events

2008-07-19T14:26:00.003-05:00

The Mississippi Blues Trail will be adding these two markers in August.

Black Prairie Blues Marker featuring Eddy Clearwater, Willie King and Carey Bell
August 19, 2008; 11:00 AM
Macon Welcome Center (Corner of Green Street and Jefferson Street)
Macon, Mississippi

Piney Woods Marker featuring Blind Boys of Mississippi and Sam Myers
August 29,2008; 9:00 AM
Piney Woods School (23 miles South of Jackson, Mississippi on Highway 49)

News Roundup

2008-07-11T13:50:00.003-05:00

A Mississippi Public Broadcasting story, the “Kids Write the Blues”, by Ron Brown recently won an Edward R. Murrow Award. The story features fourth graders from the Matty Akin Elementary School in Greenville reading their songs celebrating the Delta blues and heritage. “This is a positive story that hopefully inspired those who heard it,” explains Brown. “I know these kids touched my heart. If I passed that feeling along, then I did a good job. I am honored by the recognition of a national Murrow award.” Brown’s art reports are funded by the Wallace Foundation through the Mississippi Arts Commission.

Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett will be adding a Ground Zero Blues Club in 2009 in Philadelphia, Mississippi at the Pearl River Resort. Currently, in addition to the original in Clarksdale, Freeman and Luckett also have a GZBC in Memphis.

Clarksdale's Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art is one of the top 17 cool record stores in the country according to Paste Magazine.

In this inteview with rapper David Banner, the Mississippi native reflects on the future of hip-hop in the South.

The Bolivar Commercial is reporting on renovations at Dockery Farms:

The Dockery Farms Foundation is getting ready to begin phase one of an estimated $800,000 refurbishing and revitalization project. The buildings to be preserved include the Seed House, Cotton Gin, Cotton Storage Shed, Hay Barn and Fertilizer Shed as well as the Old Service Station. The foundation would also like to rebuild the Commissary, which was part of the original Dockery Farms property but was destroyed by a fire years ago. “This will provide a place for other universities and any groups that want to come to Dockery for a place to study the history of the Delta and the Blues,” he said. Dockery Farms was established by Will Dockery in 1895 to produce cotton. African Americans who came to Dockery to cultivate cotton created a culture that inspired the music known as the Blues. It was home to a number of Blues pioneers. “Dockery is considered the birthplace of the Blues,” said Lester. “Charley Patton, Pops Stables, Willie Brown and others are all folks who played the Blues that has influenced popular music. It all started right here.” It was at Dockery that these musicians lived and learned from one another. In turn they left Dockery and traveled north to record. Their songs influenced the development of popular music all over the world.

Read the full story here: Dockery Farms shakes blues with restoration

Thursday in Leland is Jimmy Reed Day

2008-06-18T16:27:00.004-05:00

The Delta Democrat Times reports that Leland's board of aldermen has proclaimed Thursday to be Jimmy Reed Day. Reed is a member of the Blues Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Reed, one of the most influential of all the Delta bluesmen, was the first to cross over on to the R&B and pop charts. Reed scored a remarkable 18 top twenty hits on the R&B charts in a period from 1955-1961. He also had a dozen hits on the pop charts.

The popularity of his music in both white and black audiences led him to play such hallowed venues as Carnegie Hall and The Apollo Theater. His songs have been covered by The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, The Grateful Dead, and Elvis Presley.

A Mississippi Blues trail marker will be unveiled in his honor on Collier Road at Dunleith Thursday at 4 p.m. The ceremony will be followed by the dedication of a mural of the famous Washington County native at 101 North Broad in Leland at 5 p.m., immediately to be followed by a reception at the Highway 61 Blues Museum.

Read the full story here: Leland to honor native bluesman Thursday

New Yorker: Reluctant Diva

2008-06-18T16:21:00.002-05:00

The New Yorker has this "Loverly" piece on Jackson, Mississippi native and Jazz diva Cassandra Wilson.

In a world of niche audiences, the singer who refuses to go gently into a particular niche and stay there is at best a challenge and at worst a double agent. Cassandra Wilson, the willfully original jazz singer, has been puzzling her audiences for nearly half of her fifty-two years. Jazz radar first picked her up as a member of the nineteen-eighties collective M-Base, whose name, an acronym for MacroBasic Array of Structured Extemporizations, signalled its attempt to promulgate new ways of thinking about improvisation. With M-Base she worked as both leader and sideman in styles from avant-garde jazz to funk. Her originality, irresistibly evident in her confidential smokehouse contralto, spurred admirers to coax her into a more glamorous career—as a star. A beautiful, voluptuous woman, with a golden complexion and an inviting smile, she has now been a star for two decades, but a reluctant one, known for her expansion of the jazz repertory and her eagerness to lose herself in an ensemble. She seems intent on maintaining the attitude of a sideman. If it isn’t a team effort, where’s the fun? If you can’t take risks, what’s the point?

Wilson’s refusal to accept any single idea of how to steer her career was apparent last week with the release of a new album and two very different New York appearances. The album, “Loverly,” is an unalloyed triumph, and her record company, Blue Note, is promoting it as her first album of standards in twenty years. (The claim is off by a decade—everyone seems to want to forget her 1997 record, “Rendezvous”—but still.) Singing during an air-conditioning failure at the Blue Note (the club—no relation to the record label), she gave a glowing account of the material from the album. Despite the steam-bath ambience—standards, she noted, were written before air-conditioning—she sang with open-throated, pitch-perfect vivacity, nailing every song. But two days before, at BAM, as the climax of a monthlong festival devoted to the heritage of the Mississippi Delta—Wilson is a native of Jackson, Mississippi—her intonation wavered a bit as she indulged in endless vamping grooves, sacrificing melodic concision for rhythmic repetition. Wilson has always thrived on rhythmic complexity, but her best work, including “Loverly,” balances it with melodic, harmonic, and verbal nuances that transform evergreens into personal deliberations, frequently underscored with an ironic eroticism. If the BAM performance, alternately gripping and monotonous, left some in the audience bewildered, it succeeded in driving home her unconventional achievement, combining promiscuous collaboration (both engagements featured the prodigious twenty-one-year-old pianist Jonathan Batiste) and determination to rethink the jazz songbook.

Read the full article here: The New Yorker: Reluctant Diva ~ The unpredictable Cassandra Wilson.

Blues Trail: Big Walter Horton, Jimmy Reed

2008-06-13T15:49:00.004-05:00

Mark your calendars for two upcoming Mississippi Blues Trail markers.

June 19 - A marker for Jimmy Reed at Collier Road in Dunleith, Mississippi 4pm (followed by a mural unveiling at 5pm on Broad Street in Leland and a reception at the Highway 61 Blues Museum).

June 20 - A marker for Big Walter Horton on Center Street in Horn Lake, Mississippi 10:30am.

Noxubee 3 on the Blues Trail

2008-06-12T09:01:00.004-05:00

The Mississippi Blues Trail will recognize three Noxubee County natives at a marker ceremony on August 19: Carey Bell, Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater, and Willie King.

The Noxubee Alliance, along with local partners Main Street Macon and the Noxubee County Historical Society, will join with the Mississippi Blues Commission and the Mississippi Development Authority Tourism Division to host the marker unveiling and dedication ceremony at the new Macon Welcome Center on Jefferson Street in the Downtown Macon Historical District. Honorees Eddy Clearwater and Willie King are scheduled to attend and perform together. Lurrie Bell, son of deceased honoree Carey Bell, is scheduled to represent his father and also perform. Bruce Iglauer, founder and president of Alligator Records in Chicago - the largest independent Blues label in the world - is helping to coordinate the event and has been invited to speak at the ceremony.

"Cultural and heritage tourism is the fastest growing segment of the tourism economy and accounts for around 80% of domestic travelers. We lobbied hard for this recognition, and we will continue to aggressively market the existing strategic assets found right here in Noxubee County. I have already received a couple of inquiries from Blues journalists and tourists from other parts of the country who have heard the rumor that Eddy Clearwater, Willie King, and Lurrie Bell will all be together on the same stage for our event. The marker ceremony and performances by these legends will be a great day for Noxubee County and all of Mississippi," said Brian Wilson, executive director of the Noxubee Alliance.

Carey Bell, a Blues harmonica legend, was born in Macon on November 14, 1936 as Carey Bell Harrington.. His passing on May 6, 2007 was mourned by the blues world.

Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater, one of the finest Blues guitarists and songwriters, was born in Macon on January 10, 1935 as Edward Harrington. He is a cousin to the late Carey Bell. Eddy Clearwater has received numerous awards such as the W.C. Handy Award and Chicago Music Award, and he has also been nominated for a Grammy.

Willie King, an award-winning guitarist and singer/songwriter, was born in Prairie Point, Mississippi on March 8, 1943. Willie King has received several awards from Living Blues Magazine and was inducted into the Howlin' Wolf Hall of Fame. King is the subject of "Down in the Woods", a documentary by Dutch filmmakers Saskia Rietmeijer and Bart Drolenga which was nominated for the 2008 Blues Music Award.

Lurrie Bell, son of deceased honoree Carey Bell, is a critically-acclaimed Blues guitarist and singer. He was selected as Most Outstanding Guitar Player in Living Blues Magazine's 2007 Critics' Poll and nominated for several Blues Music Awards presented by the Blues Foundation of Memphis.

Bo Diddley Blues

2008-06-03T09:27:00.003-05:00

Clarion ledger Bo Diddley Photos

Billy Watkins writes about Bo Diddley today in the Clarion Ledger:

Seventeen months before he took his final breath, rock 'n' roll legend Bo Diddley was handed the Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. As far as anyone can remember, Diddley didn't let go of it until after he had arrived back home in Archery, Fla.

"Up until then, he was all about his guitar. 'Where's my guitar?' Seems like he would ask about it every five minutes," recalls Sally Killebrew of the Mississippi Arts Commission. "But after he got that award, he wouldn't turn it loose. He held it in his lap all the way to the airport. The guitar was thrown in with the rest of his luggage, and when the skycap asked about checking the award, he said, 'Uh-uh. I got this from the governor, and it's staying with me.'

"He would show it to anybody who came near him. 'I'm Bo Diddley, and I just received the Governor's Award.' It really struck me that a man who has received so many honors in his lifetime was so touched by this award."

Diddley, who was born in McComb and credited with helping blues transcend into rock 'n' roll during the 1950s, died Monday of heart failure at his Florida home. He was 79 and had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in May 2007 - three months after the governor's award ceremony.

Public and private ceremonies are scheduled for this weekend.

Diddley returned to Mississippi at least once after the Governor's Awards - last November, when he was honored with a marker in McComb as part of the Mississippi Blues Trail project.

"They told me he wouldn't be able to play, not to even ask him," says Jackson blues musician Jesse Robinson, who performed at the event. "But when I kicked off a blues song, he looked at me, and I looked at him. Musicians can feel things. Next thing I know, he is up on stage singing - and I mean singing down-home, cotton-pickin' blues. He took over."

Diddley, who moved around age 7 with his family to Chicago, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, and one of his songs, Bo Diddley, is in the Grammy Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 37 among its Top 100 Guitarists of All Time.

Born Ellas Otha Bates on Dec. 30, 1928, he changed his name to Ellas McDaniel after being adopted by his mother's cousin. Numerous stories exist about how he might have settled on his stage name.

His first instrument was the violin, which he learned when he was 5. He took up guitar at age 10 but later used his hands to form fists instead of chords. Diddley was a Golden Gloves boxer during his teens and early 20s.

But it was his guitar licks that scored the most knockouts.

"He was one of four guys - along with Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino - to take blues or R&B into a new territory with a heavy beat," says Mississippi-based blues historian Scott Barretta. "Bo Diddley's entire vision was complex. His music was all over the place. But it was his own style, his own signature."

Says Robinson: "He came up with that bomp-de-bomp-de-bomp, bomp bomp beat that made everybody want to dance. That's what Bo Diddley brought to the table."

In a 2005 interview with The Clarion-Ledger, Diddley said: "I don't call myself a guitar player. I'm more of a showman. I make a guitar do things that others can't - beatin' and bangin' on it - and people seem to enjoy it."

He was a pioneer, becoming the first black person to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. Diddley loved talking about that historic 1955 television performance.

"Sullivan had asked me to sing Sixteen Tons, the old Tennessee Ernie Ford hit," Diddley said in the interview with The Clarion-Ledger . "When I saw a list of the program, it read 'Bo Diddley. Sixteen Tons.' Well, I had a No. 1 song called Bo Diddley, so I thought he wanted me to play both. But he only wanted the one song played. The show was live, so it wasn't like we could stop.

"Afterward, he came unglued backstage. He said something to me I won't repeat, and I told him I'd punch him out. My manager was saying, 'But, Bo, this is Ed Sullivan.' I told him I didn't care who he was, that I was gonna bust (Sullivan's) lip if he said another word. That guy was a control freak."

Diddley wasn't invited back to the Sullivan stage, but it didn't hurt his popularity, especially with young British musicians such as The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Eric Burdon and The Animals.

"I was hearing all this music as a teenager coming from England ... guys like Eric Burdon singing 'Hey Bo Diddley!' - and I suddenly realized they were singing about a guy from Mississippi, this special, unique place where I was growing up. It gave me a sense of pride. It was life-changing," says Malcolm White, who helped book Diddley in Jackson on three occasions.

"Then to meet him and hang around with him was just unbelievable. Bo was a little bitter about some things ... royalties (from songs) he never received. But he was also a jokester. He had fun."

His stream of hits in the 1950s and '60s included Who Do You Love, Say Man, You Can't Judge A Book By the Cover and Pretty Thing.

In the 1980s, Nike introduced him to a new audience. Commercials featuring Diddley and professional baseball and football player Bo Jackson aired constantly. "Bo, you don't know diddley!" he would say to Jackson, who was attempting to play a guitar.

Even into his seventies, Diddley kept playing and writing music. "He never became an oldies act, and I really respect that," Barretta says. "He never became a parody of himself. He was very strong-willed and very independent."

Diddley is survived by four children, 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren.

RIP Bo Diddley

2008-06-02T13:59:00.002-05:00

Bo Diddley, a McComb Mississippi native and a founding father of rocknroll, died today.

From Modern Guitar Magazine:

On June 2, 2008, the music world lost the man behind the signature voice and choppy guitar riffs immediately identifiable as Bo Diddley. Born Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel in McComb, Mississippi, on December 30, 1928, at the age of seven his family moved to Chicago where he would be turned on to the guitar by John Lee Hooker and don the stage name Bo Diddley. The cause of death has been noted as heart failure.

During the Fifties and Sixties, Diddley was the epitomy of cool with his hip dark glasses, black hat, his homemade square guitar and rhumba-like guitar rhythms on songs like his 1955 record “Bo Diddley” with the now classic flip side, “I’m a Man." Both tracks were chordally constrained, but fueled by the deliberate and hypnotic chunka-chunka rhythms that became his signature sound and inspired countless musicians around the world, including Jimi Hendrix; Pete Townshend, Paul Butterfield, Jimmy Page, the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.

Listen to Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and the Bo Diddley-style riff drives it. All guitarists, whether they were figuring out chords in garage bands or launching their own claims to fame found his haunting guitar work gripping, so much so that Rolling Stone magazine would name him as one of the top 50 “Immortals” of rock ‘n’ roll.

As a young musician, he found himself center stage on Chess-Checkers Records with such blues masters as Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann, Elmore James and Muddy Waters.

Diddley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 with Howard Kramer, Assistant Curator, celebrating the artist’s accomplishments and influence by noting that Bo’s Chess recordings, “…stand among the best singular recordings of the 20th century.”

Governor Haley Barbour release a statement saying, "Bo Diddley was born a Mississippian and grew up in a world where natural talent earned him fame and respect. He was a rock-and-roll icon, a true pioneer whose style generated a lot of copies that were not nearly as good as the original. Marsha and I mourn his loss and extend our deepest sympathies to his family."

(Governor Haley Barbour, First Lady Marsha Barbour, and Bo Diddley)

On November 2, 2007 Bo Diddley was honored with a Mississippi Blues Trail Marker, in McComb Mississippi.

June Blues Trail Marker Events

2008-05-30T14:00:00.002-05:00

The Heritage Trails Program of the Mississippi Development Authority's Tourism Division has announced two upcoming Blues Trail Marker events in June.

Dunleith, Mississippi: Jimmy Reed Marker on June 19 at 4pm

Horn Lake, Mississippi: Big Walter Horton Marker on June 20 at 10:30am

Mississippi Grammy Celebration

2008-05-30T13:36:00.004-05:00

In an event to benefit the Mississippi Blues Trail project, Mississippi and the recording Academy came together to honor Mississippi's Grammy winners and nominees.

"Mississippi is the Birthplace of America's Music" was the theme of a special celebration of entertainers in Jackson Thursday night. The celebration of the state's Grammy legacy was hosted by Governor Haley Barbour and First Lady Marsha Barbour. The homegrown talent of Grammy winners and nominees like singer and actress Brandy, Mavis Staples of the famed Staples Singers, the Williams Brothers, Eddie Cotton, and dancer Kathy Thibodeaux were recognized.

"We're the first state that the recording academy has ever allowed to have a Grammy-sanctioned event to honor our Grammy nominees and Grammy winners," said Governor Barbour. "In Mississippi we have more Grammy nominees and winners per capita than any other state in the country."

Read the full story here: State's Grammy Legacy Celebrated at Gala

Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Ron Brown interviews Staples and Barbour and reports about the event. Listen to it here: Mississippi's Grammy Legacy

The Clarion Ledger also reports:

"The governor ... he's one cool fellow," said Staples, who resides in Chicago. "He's not stiff and stern like most governors." Barbour chuckled when told of Staples' comment. "That's about as cool as it gets, for Mavis Staples to say that about you," he said. "But being the governor of the state that has produced more Grammy winners and nominees per capita than any state in America ... that makes you cool - even if you're not."

Overstreet, a two-time Grammy Award winner for co-writing the country hits Forever and Ever Amen and Love Can Build A Bridge, said Mississippi's secret is "our culture, the way we were raised. We just got that Southern thing going."

Next year's gala, the third in what Barbour plans to become an annual event, will be held in Tunica "where we can seat 1,200 instead of 400," Barbour said. "Then, hopefully, we'll have the Convention Center done and be back in Jackson in 2010."

A trio of Swedish divas also performed. Hannah Holgersson paid tribute to Mississippi opera legend Leontyne Price, who grew up in Laurel, by singing Caro Come, which Price has performed countless times. Anorah performed Here Without You, a hit song by the Mississippi Gulf Coast rock group 3 Doors Down. And Beatrice sang What's In It For Me, honoring country superstar Faith Hill of Star.

Kathy Thibodeaux, founder and artistic director of Ballet Magnificat! in Jackson, performed a dance interpretation of Holgersson's song.

Dazed and Confused and Chasing Amy actress Joey Lauren Adams served as emcee.

Read the full story here: State's Grammy winners honored

Blues and Barbershop

2008-05-30T13:26:00.003-05:00

Scott Barretta writes about the new home o fht Highway 61 Blues Museum in the Clarion Ledger:

The Highway 61 Blues Museum in Leland celebrates its move to a new home with live performances by local musicians T-Model Ford, Eddie Cusic, Eden Brent, Duff Durrough and Pat Thomas. Artist Cristen Barnard will be on hand to sign her poster for the ninth annual Highway 61 Blues Festival, which takes place on June 7 and will feature 92-year-old Honeyboy Edwards.

The museum, founded in 2002, celebrates the blues artists native to the mid-Delta region including Little Milton, Tyrone Davis, Jimmy Reed and dozens more. Its new location is the former Montgomery Hotel building at 307 North Broad St.

The new, larger space also allows for temporary exhibitions, and the first is a series of photographs of Delta artists by Murfreesboro, Tenn.-based Bill Steber. Since 1992, when he shot a session with Leland's James "Son" Thomas, Steber has returned more than 100 times to document the places and people of Mississippi blues.

Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi hosts the Barbershop Harmony Society this weekend.

Dressed in matching red vests and bow ties, their voices carry on an American music tradition that emerged in the 19th century. The Jackson barbershop group Magnolia Chorus will perform, as well as two guest barbershop quartets - the Colorado group Redline and Tennessee's Lunch Break, whose members will compete during the Barbershop Harmony Society's International Convention in Nashville later in June.

Derrick said the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America was organized in the late 1930s, and by the 1960s, the organization claimed 48,000 Americans members. Derrick said Mississippi has chapters in Columbus and Biloxi, too. As one of the oldest American chapters, the Jackson group has around 35 members, and many will perform with the Magnolia Chorus at Belhaven.

"It's definitely a unique sound," he said. "It's traditional American music, and we'd like to get a lot of young folks involved."

Read the full story here: Barbershop group brings harmony to the stage

3 Doors Down - Another #1

2008-05-30T13:22:00.001-05:00

Entertainment Weekly shares the good news about Mississippi's Gulf Coast rockers:

If you've gone to the movies much in the last year or two, you've heard a lot of 3 Doors Down, whose song "Citizen Soldier" was the soundtrack for an unavoidable pre-show Army recruitment ad. But how is the band's own fan enlistment effort going? The good news for the Mississippi-based rockers is that their newly released, self-titled fourth album is their second effort in a row to debut atop the Billboard/Soundscan chart. But, as is the case for most veteran acts, No. 1 ain't quite what it used to be, sales-wise. The new set sold 154,000 its first week, looking not quite as battle-ready as 3 Doors Down's previous disc, Seventeen Days, did when it debuted in 2005 with 231,000 units. Still, most bands these days would take up serious arms to achieve that kind of opening.

Honey Today, Hot Tamale

2008-05-22T13:24:00.004-05:00

The Associated Press has this profile of interest: (Full story at the link) 'Honeyboy' Edwards outlasts them all

Edwards has a legacy that almost no living musician can match, and as the last Delta bluesman still standing he's found he's in demand. In the last year alone, he's released a new album, won Grammy and Handy Awards, appeared in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and done interviews for three documentaries due out in 2009 and 2010.

With all the activity, though, Edwards finds he's often tired these days. He was in Tunica on May 8 for the Blues Music Awards, in Jackson May 9 and in Crystal Springs May 10 to play a festival on a bill that included Pinetop Perkins, one of the few musicians who can claim to know Edwards when he was a young man.

Edwards, who turns 93 on June 28, was scheduled for a day of rest upon his return to Chicago, then it's off to Europe for 10 dates. He still plays about 70 gigs a year and the calls keep coming.

Edwards learned the guitar growing up in Shaw and first started playing professionally in Memphis as a teenager. By the 1950s he had played with almost every bluesman of note - Tommy Johnson, Charlie Patton, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson I, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters - across the decades.

He is believed to be among the last people to have seen Robert Johnson alive and was there the night the man legend says sold his soul to the devil died from poison. Of all the great blues musicians, Johnson's shadow has proven the longest, something Edwards admits he never would have imagined 70 years ago when his friend was killed, likely by a jealous husband who poisoned Johnson's whiskey. "Robert, he was really easy, I never heard him cussing with you," Edwards said. "He was a good musician. He liked whiskey and womens, that's all."

In news related to the Delta blues, the Chicago Reader has a piece on the history of the Delta tamale (full story at the link): On the Trail of the Delta Tamale - Southern food sleuths take on the murky origins of the mother-in-law sandwich

The SFA, which is based in Oxford, Mississippi, published its Tamale Trail documentary project (tamaletrail.com), a study of the Delta tamale that includes a map, a film, and a number of oral histories. One short segment on the “Chicago Connection” features an interview with a Mississippian who sold Delta tamales here in the 60s and 70s. He mentions a southern woman who sold mother-in-laws in the suburbs at the same time, which sparked the theory that the sandwich has southern origins.

Engler says that Mexicans, Greeks, Armenians, and Poles probably all had a role in the development of the mother-in-law. But he doesn’t discount the southern influence, pointing to a 1921 Tribune article about African-American tamaleros’ efforts to unionize. “Those probably were homemade Delta tamales,” he says.

The tamales at J’s are handmade in batches of three dozen by Yoland Cannon, a native of Leland, Mississippi, who runs a construction company and drives around town advertising them on the side of his truck. He grew up with hot tamales but only learned to make them about a year ago—from a “secret” source in the south. (Based on the way he tells the rest of the story, it sounds like that might be his mother.)

“Chicago ain’t nothing but a big old Mississippi,” says Cannon, whose intended market is southern emigres who buy tamales frozen back home and bring them up south—which is to say that, at least with respect to Delta tamales, the Great Migration continues.

According to Edge, who’ll be in town with Camp Chicago, it’s been flowing backward as well. “I’m seeing the exchange between Mississippi and Chicago working both ways,” he says. “I’m seeing ‘Windy City gyros’ and Chicago hot dogs in Mississippi. It’s people in their 20s and 30s—they’re moving back home.”

Unsung home of the blues

2008-05-22T11:10:00.004-05:00

Richard Knight, author of "The Blues Highway: New Orleans to Chicago" wrote a piece for the UK's "The Independent" which focuses largely on Jackson's role in the development of Mississippi blues.

In 1963, Medgar Evers, the Field Secretary in Mississippi for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was shot in the back as he walked from his car to his Jackson home. He died less than an hour later. It was one of the more cowardly acts of the Civil Rights struggle. But there was more shame to come: Evers's killer, the white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, was twice acquitted by all-white juries. It took a further 31 years to convict him.

Medgar Evers's elderly brother Charles still lives and works in Jackson. He's the manager at WMPR 90.1 FM, a blues and gospel radio station. When I met him in his office, a desk-fan clattering like an old Dakota on take-off, he explained how he and the great bluesman BB King, from nearby Itta Bena, have staged an annual concert to remember Medgar every year since 1963.

The fact that Charles Evers, also a prominent NAACP activist, made a career in music – and chooses to commemorate his brother through music – underlines the link between the Civil Rights movement and the blues. The two go together, not least because the blues was, for years, one of the fastest routes a black kid could take out of poverty. That period and its soundtrack is, to me, as interesting as any in history. And in Jackson, the capital of the state which gave the blues to the world, the many reminders of that extraordinary time are intoxicating. You do not need to be a blues buff to get it, either: this is the Deep South, where sluggish speech, Spanish moss and slow-cooked BBQ will seduce you.

Farish Street, north of the city, is where the blues grew up in Jackson. For years the heart of the black community, Farish Street was as important to the development of the blues as was the far more celebrated, and gentrified, Beale Street in Memphis.

Through the glare of the Southern sun one can make out the words "Ross Furniture Co" on 225 Farish Street. This was the original site of HC Speir's music shop. You probably haven't heard of HC Speir, though you're likely to have heard of Sam Phillips. Phillips discovered, among others, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.

It's time Speir was thought of in the same breath: he discovered Sam Phillips. These were the very founders of Delta blues, a genre which would underpin the subsequent development of popular music and without whom Phillips's Sun Records would have been very different. Speir, a white businessman, began selling guitars and wind-up Victrola phonographs (early record-players) on the black side of town in the 1920s. But he became what he described as a "talent broker", passing on to record companies the best of the artists he came across in and around Jackson. So-called "race labels" such as Vocalian and Gennett learnt to trust Speir's fine ear.

The blues historian Gayle Dean Wardlow befriended Speir, who died in 1972, and says the man did not understand the full significance of his work. But without Speir, Robert Johnson might not have been heard beyond the dusty Delta street corners where he played before finding his way to Jackson back in 1935.

Farish Street is in steep decline, though its heat-faded storefronts and defunct business premises, such as Ace Records and the Crystal Palace nightclub, are so redolent of another time that it's as exciting as many more organised presentations of American history. Farish Street today would be immediately recognisable to the likes of Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson II – both of whom recorded for Trumpet Records on Farish Street early in their careers.

And it's not all history: the local blues singer Dorothy Moore, famous for her world-wide hit "Misty Blue" in the Seventies, started her own label, Farish Street Records, in 2002; and Malaco Records, a much bigger concern, is still going strong after 40 years.

Another survivor is Peaches, an African-American diner located next to the Alamo theatre. The Alamo once hosted celebrated talent contests, plucking the likes of Otis Spann, who would become Muddy Waters' pianist, from obscurity.

Peaches has been a Farish Street favourite since the early Sixties and little has changed either to the decor or the menu. There's a giant jukebox stacked with blues, soul and gospel records. Photos of local heroes line the walls. The menu is pure Southern soul-food: fried beans, smothered chicken, okra and huge slices of cobbler. It's good, down-home, artery-clogging stuff and if there was a branch of Peaches in Britain I would be a fat man now. Possibly dead.

While Peaches and Malaco Records have kept the spirit of the blues alive in Jackson, the more important cradles of the music – juke joints – have not fared so well.

When I first visited Jackson in 2000, I spent a memorable night at the Subway Lounge, one of the coolest and most authentic juke joints left in Mississippi. It was a one-room basement club in a residential district which was hard to find and even harder to leave. The ceiling was decorated with fairy lights, the house band were mind-blowing and alcohol was bought from a hatch in the side of the house next door. The Subway Lounge was the real thing.

So I was sad to discover in 2004 that it had closed for good, after four decades in business. The building had become unsafe and no one could find the money to put it right. But there are other juke joints still open. The Queen of Hearts is another improvised music club, hosting live bands from time to time, and every bit as rough and raucous as the Subway had been.

There is still time to visit the cradle of that great creative outpouring and to see something of the culture which fostered it. But you don't have long. It's evaporating in the Mississippi heat.

Read the full story here: Mississippi: Unsung home of the blues

Soulja Boy on Mississippi ties

2008-05-22T11:04:00.002-05:00

17-year-old rapper Soulja Boy (real name: DeAndre Way) has been nominated for a Grammy, hit with a number 1 single, and got his start on youtube. He recently spoke to the Clarion Ledger about his Mississippi ties:

Q: I understand you went to high school in Batesville. What can you tell me about your Mississippi ties?

A: Well, man, I was in middle school in Atlanta, Ga., right? I had got in a little trouble or whatever down there, so my mama, she let me move in with my daddy in Mississippi. When I got to Mississippi, I went to Batesville, and I went to South Panola High School my ninth-grade and 10th-grade years. After my 10th-grade year that summer I had got signed to Interscope Records and started traveling the world.

Q: So are you a South Panola football fan, then?

A: I played football for South Panola when I went to school there.

Q: You did? What position did you play?

A: I played wide receiver.

Q: Did you have some wheels?

A: Well, you know, that's why I'm rapping now, man (laughs).

Q: You're coming to perform at this big concert in Jackson and you're in Tupelo now - so how does Mississippi fit into your success?

A: Basically, this is where I got picked up at. I was living in Atlanta, Ga., but I couldn't get no record deal for nothing, you feel me? Then I moved to Mississippi, and there was nothing popping, there wasn't no clubs or nothing really popping, and that's where I got my record deal at. If I hadn't ever came to Mississippi, I probably wouldn't have ever got my deal.

Q: So Mississippi will always have a little spot in your heart?

A: Exactly. It's where my family's at.

You can read the whole interview here: Soulja Boy: 'Crank Dat' just a start

Blues Trail: Alamo and Dorothy Moore

2008-05-19T15:11:00.005-05:00

The next marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail will be unveiled at 3pm on Thursday, May 22 at 333 North Farish Street in Jackson and will honor the Alamo Theater and Jackson's First Lady of Blues, Dorothy Moore.

(In related news, Dorothy Moore performed at a Habitat for Humanity benefit concert in Jackson on Friday.)

News Roundup

2008-05-16T10:23:00.005-05:00

Legendary Mississippi Sheiks to get their due

On a recent holiday, Steve Dawson—guitar maestro and founder of local label Black Hen Music—had the bright idea of putting together a tribute album to one of his favourite bands, the Mississippi Sheiks. Other than the blues classic “Sitting on Top of the World”, the Sheiks’ songs are largely unknown to today’s music fans, despite having been revered by Americana-influenced musicians since the ’30s. In those days, the trio was one of the hottest—and sauciest—acts around, and it influenced such legends as Memphis Minnie, Robert Johnson, and Big Bill Broonzy. “Much of their stuff remains obscure,” Dawson told the Straight. “They disbanded in 1935, but were one of the first bands to generate crossover interest from both black and white communities. What’s going to make this different from the regular tribute album is that, for the most part, there’s going to be a house band and the musicians are coming here to record over a three-day period.” The artists appearing on the album—which is scheduled to be out in March 2009—include Madeleine Peyroux, Bill Frisell, Bruce Cockburn, John Hammond, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bob Brozman, Kelly Joe Phelps, Geoff Muldaur, Van Dyke Parks, and Dawson’s recording buddies Jim Byrnes and the Sojourners. “Ry Cooder has also agreed to do it, much to the chagrin of his lawyer. We don’t know how it’s going to shake down, but he would be recording in L.A.,” Dawson said.

Eden Brent: The sultry voice of the Mississippi Delta Blues

With a sultry voice like thick molasses, splashed with a shot of Jack Daniels, Eden Brent approaches the piano with the eagerness of a long-lost lover, determined to make up for lost time. An engaging aptitude with the keyboard, earthy and one-of-a-kind vocals, and a palpable, gutsy energy are just a few things that have helped Brent find success in the music world. Most folks around these parts already had a head's up on Brent's talent, and now, with the release of her latest CD, “Mississippi Number One,” the rest of the world is going to be let in on the secret. A Greenville girl born and reared, Brent says she can't remember a time when she didn't want to be a singer. But it was not until her introduction to Greenville bluesman Boogaloo Ames that Brent says she began to discover who she was as an artist. When she was 19, Brent says she finally plucked up enough courage to ask Ames, who by that time was a legend in the Port City, for lessons. And it was that one request that changed the rest of her life, says Brent, who spent the next 16 years learning from and working with Ames. Since launching her solo career, she was named a 2004 inductee into the Greenville Blues Walk, the 2006 winner of the Blues Foundation's International Blues Challenge, and has headlined venues across the world, including the Kennedy Center, the British Embassy, and tours in South Africa and Norway.

Elvis tribute artiste has Delhi rocking

Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, set India's capital on fire. The hip-shaking, gyrating rock sensation of the 60s and the 70s was in full regalia - his trademark long sideburns, high-collared sequinned jacket - as he belted out favourites like 'Jailhouse Rock' and 'All Shook Up' in his deep resonant baritone. Only it was not the King in person. Award-winning Canada-based Elvis tribute artiste Stephen Kabakos took the audience back in time to the swinging 60s and the 70s in the country's first ever Elvis Presley tribute concert at the Hotel Radisson on Wednesday night. The performer, who was crowned the Grand Champion at the 2001 "Images of the King World Competition" in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of the top three Elvis tribute artistes in the world.

95 years of blues: 'Pinetop' Perkins comes to Marin

With a Nicasio show coming up and a new album, famed piano man Willie 'Pinetop' Perkins isn t letting age slow him down. I thought for sure that the last time I saw blues great Willie "Pinetop" Perkins would be the last time I'd ever see Willie "Pinetop" Perkins. Let me explain: Revered as the piano player in the legendary Muddy Waters Band, Perkins is a blues hall of famer whose barrelhouse style has influenced generations of rock and blues musicians. I had the pleasure of meeting him five years ago when he played West Marin's Rancho Nicasio with his pal Willie "Big Eyes" Smith. That night, he recorded tracks for a live album, the Grammy-nominated "Ladies Man," with Marin's Elvin Bishop and Angela Strehli sitting in. At the time, he was one of the last of the old-time Mississippi bluesmen still performing. I figured the old cat had used up his nine lives with that little confrontation with a train and, given his advancing years, thought it would be a pretty safe bet I'd never have the chance to see him play again. Which is why I don't gamble. Since then, Perkins has won two Grammys - for lifetime achievement in 2005 and another last year for traditional blues album for a concert recording with Henry James Townsend, Robert Lockwood Jr. and David "Honeyboy" Edwards called "Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas." Townsend and Lockwood died in 2006, leaving Perkins and Edwards as two of the few surviving bluesmen with a direct, first-hand connection to seminal figures like Waters and harmonica ace Sonny Boy Williamson. In his time, Perkins played with both of them. This week and last, Perkins was in his native Mississippi for ceremonies dedicating a couple of Mississippi State Blues Trail Markers in his honor. He's also up for Blues Foundation award for his DVD, "Born in the Honey - The Pinetop Perkins Story." He'll be celebrating his 95th birthday on July 7 with a new "Pinetop Perkins and Friends" CD, set to be out in June, with guests Eric Clapton, B.B. King and Jimmy Vaughan.

In related news: Blues marker honors Hopson Plantation, Pinetop Perkins

The History of BB King - The Legendary Blues Guitarist

In his youth he played on street corners for dimes and pennies! He was born on 16 September, 1925 on a plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi, near Indianola. He spent his youth playing on street corners for dimes. Today B.B. King (Riley B. King) averages 250 'packed to the rafters' concerts around the world each and every year. In 1947, he hitchhiked to Memphis, Tennessee to pursue his music career and it is first love. His first major break came in 1948 when he performed on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio broadcast. As the years well by, King has developed one of the world's most identifiable guitar styles. He borrowed from Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker and others, incorporating his distinct and complex voice-like string blends and his left-handed vibrato, both of which have become vital components of a blues guitarist's vocabulary. His economy, his every-note-counts phrasing, has been a model for thousands of players from Eric Clapton and George Harrison to Jeff Beck. In the mid-1950s, two men got into a fight during one of King's performances. The men knocked over a kerosene stove and set fire to the venue. King raced outdoors to safety and then realised he'd left his beloved acoustic guitar behind. He rushed back in to retrieve it and almost lost his life. He found out later that the fight had been over a woman. He named his guitar Lucille to remind him to never do a crazy thing like fight for a woman. Ever since, each one of King's guitars has been called Lucille.

Hubert Sumlin

2008-05-07T20:49:00.000-05:00

Hubert Sumlin will enter the Blues Hall of Fame this week and gain a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

The Greenwood Commonwealth writes (read the full story - Sumlin: Greenwood's still my town)

Hubert Sumlin’s first wife told him to shape up or be single again. “She said it was either my guitar or her,” Sumlin said of an early tiff married life tossed his way. “So I picked up my guitar and walked out the door.” That decision, in effect, will be honored Tuesday when a marker is placed on the Mississippi Blues Trail in the blues giant’s hometown of Greenwood.

Sumlin, who as a 12-year-old in the 1940s was performing with harmonica great James Cotton, got his break when Howlin’ Wolf caught wind of the duo’s sound and invited them to do a 15-minute set on West Memphis’ KWM radio station. “Wolf told us, ‘If you do it right, I might have to get you in my band,’” Sumlin recalled. Something must have been done right.
From the 1950s until Wolf’s death in 1976, Sumlin’s lead guitar playing – described as “darting, unpredictable” by American Roots Music – complemented Wolf’s performances. Then, when Rolling Stone magazine made a list in 2003 of the top 100 guitarist of all time, Sumlin ranked number 65. And a sentence guitarist Jimi Hendrix is said to have uttered has entered into music-enthusiast legend: “My favorite guitar player is Hubert Sumlin.”

At 2 p.m. Tuesday, Sumlin be honored with a marker on the Mississippi's Blues Trail. The dedication will take place on Greenwood’s River Road Extended.

Billy Watkins writes about Sumlin's connection with famed rocker Eric Clapton in the Clarion Ledger (read the full article here - Finger-lickin' good: Blues Hall of Fame welcomes Hubert Sumlin):

Hubert Sumlin had never seen so many guitars. American brands. Japanese. German. The walls were covered with them. It was near midnight in April 1970 at Clapton's home. They had just finished what would come to be known as The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions, a studio jam that included the Rolling Stones, Ringo Starr, Steve Winwood and Klaus Voorman.

"I can't take no guitar from you, Eric," Sumlin said. "I want you to," Clapton insisted.

Sumlin then spotted a guitar case on the floor and opened it. He pulled out a black mid-1950s Fender Stratocaster. He ran his fingers up and down the neck a few times, cradled it against his belly. "This one ... I'll take this one, Eric," Sumlin said.

The words made Clapton's whole body tremble. "No, Hubert, not that one. Please, man. Not that one."

Clapton had just recently purchased it in a small music store in Nashville for $100. It was the guitar of his dreams, the way it played and spoke.

"This is the one, man," Sumlin said. Several minutes passed. Sumlin kept playing. Clapton kept shaking.

"OK, Hubert," Clapton finally said. "But if I want this guitar back one day, can I buy it from you?"

Sumlin shook his head. "Naw, man, I'm gonna play it a while, and then I'll give it back to you. You ain't gotta buy it."

After he returned to the U.S., "I think everybody in Eric's family -including his butler - called me about that guitar," the 76-year-old Sumlin recalls now. "But I told them the same thing I told Eric. 'I'll give it back one day.' "

Hubert Sumlin, one of the Top 100 guitarists of all time according to Rolling Stone magazine and scheduled to be inducted Wednesday in The Blues Hall of Fame at ceremonies in Tunica, grew up on a plantation just outside Greenwood.

Just like he promised Clapton, he gave the guitar back. "I kept it a couple of weeks," Sumlin says. "I knew we were gonna be playing Montreal at the same time, so I went over to his hotel. Police led me to his room, and Eric met me at the door. He grabbed me. Hugged me. He said, 'Anything I can ever do for you, you just let me know.' "
Clapton went on to play and write most of his greatest hits on that guitar, which became affectionately known as "Blackie." It was donated by Clapton in 2004 to the Guitar Center in Corona, Calif., for auction, with proceeds going to Clapton's Crossroads drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Antigua. Winning bid: $959,000.

Hubert Sumlin -- Sittin on Top of the World

BB King International Blues Workshop

2008-05-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

Greenwood Commonwealth: King will hold blues workshop June 6

The King of the Blues will return to Mississippi Valley State University June 6 for the eighth annual B.B. King International Blues Workshop. Itta Bena native B.B. King will hold his workshop at the H.G. Carpenter Auditorium on the Itta Bena campus. Events get under way with the Musicians Workshop – Part I from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.

King, 82, will take to the stage from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. He’ll talk about his guitar style, described as “one of the world’s most identifiable guitar styles . . . integrating his precise and complex vocal-like string bends and his left hand vibrato, both of which have become indispensable components of rock guitarist’s vocabulary.”

Part II of the workshop will begin at 1 p.m. with a musical performance featuring King's daughter, Shirley. Other performers scheduled to attend are MVSU alumni Pat Brown, vocalist; Vickie Baker, vocalist; Rickey Burkhead, drum gear/performer; as well as guests Eden Brent, vocalist and pianist; Nellie McInnis, bass guitarist; Idalee Feaster, drummer; Jessie Robinson, guitar gear/performer; and MVSU student Levan Lortki-panize featured on the harmonica and guitar.

For more details on the workshop, contact the Delta Research & Cultural Institute at 662-254-3001.

Robert Johnson Blues Foundation Hall of Fame

2008-05-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

Raymond Reeves writes about the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation Hall of Fame dinner and shares the teacher behind the Robert Johnson devil myth (read the full story: Playin' the blues)

Ask a music expert about the birthplace of the blues, and the answer will be quick and simple: the Mississippi Delta. But central Mississippi can stake a claim as well, as the birthplace of one of this genre's most influential figures.

Robert Johnson [of Hazlehurst], who, legend says, sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, will be honored this weekend with the annual Blues Jam. The event, in its fourth year, is organized by the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation and features an awards banquet at Jackson's TelCom Center on Friday and a festival in Crystal Springs on Saturday.

The banquet, scheduled for downtown Jackson on Friday night, includes the induction of the latest class into the foundation's hall of fame: David "Honeyboy" Edwards, the last living blues artist known to have played with Johnson, and the late Ike Zinnerman, who will be represented by members of his family. Zinnerman apparently played such a role in Johnson's life that his influence is reflected in the famous legend regarding Johnson's talent.

"Ike Zinnerman is the great bluesman who shared his knowledge of the guitar with Robert Johnson," Clapton wrote. "The (Johnson) family says that, when Robert Johnson came down to study with Ike Zinnerman, he was not that great of a guitarist, quite frankly. When he studied with him, he worked with him so intensely that when he went back to the Delta people were saying 'Man, what happened to you? You must have sold your soul to the devil.'"

Blues Awards

2008-05-07T08:46:00.000-05:00

The Blues Music Awards are tomorrow night and as the Clarion Ledger reports, they've come home to the Delta (read the full story: The blues come home):

For the first time in its 29-year history, the Blues Music Awards will be held in the Mississippi Delta. Long known as the birthplace of the blues, the poverty-stricken Delta has taken a back seat to Memphis, headquarters of the Blues Foundation, which puts on the biggest event in the industry. But not this time. Dozens of blues acts - Jimmie Vaughan, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Omar Dykes among them - are set to attend the event, scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Grand Casino Event Center in Tunica. The festivities will kick off at 3 p.m., with Gov. Haley Barbour unveiling a Blues Trail Marker on U.S. 61 in Tunica.

Jay Sieleman, executive director of the foundation, said the group chose Tunica for a couple of reasons. First, the venue in Memphis usually used was already booked. Second, the Delta made sense. "Rather than switch dates," he said, "we thought, how can we take advantage of the situation. From our point of view, historically this is great. The Delta is the birthplace of the blues."

The Ledger has a list of the nominees but for more information visit: www.blues.org

U.S. 61 to get Blues Trail marker

2008-05-06T09:46:00.000-05:00

The Associated Press reports:

Gov. Haley Barbour on Thursday will unveil a marker designating U.S. 61 as part of the Mississippi Blues Trail. The ceremony will be held at the Tunica Visitors Center on U.S. 61 in Tunica.

"As the most famed stretch of roadway in Mississippi's storied history, it's only fitting that the highway be permanently and officially designated as the Blues Highway to honor the many talented artists whose travels made it come alive as one of most enduring cultural icons," Barbour said in a statement.

Among the dozens of blues artists who recorded songs about U.S. 61 were Mississippians Sunnyland Slim, James Son Thomas, David Honeyboy Edwards, Big Joe Williams, Joe McCoy, Charlie Musslewhite, Johnny Young, Eddie Burns, Blind Mississippi Morris, and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

The Cotton Pickin' Blues

2008-05-05T09:16:00.002-05:00

Here comes another Mississippi Blues Trail Marker Ceremony: Friday, May 9, 2008 at 1pm at the Hopson Plantation in Clarksdale to note The Cotton Pickin' Blues.

Blues Marker for Hubert Sumlin

2008-04-30T10:56:00.003-05:00

Greenwood will be the site of a new Mississippi Blues Trail marker honoring Hubert Sumlin. The marker will be unveiled Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 2pm.

Juke Joints on ABC News

2008-04-29T17:00:00.004-05:00

Ron Brown at Mississippi Public Broadcasting shared this piece from ABC News on juke joints and blues in Merigold, Mississippi. Thanks Ron!

Speaking of Ron, here are a couple of great pieces he did for MPB.

Mississippi Born Blues - Sonny Boy Williamson II is one of Mississippi's enduring blues legends. And as MPB's Ron Brown reports, more than a few people are determined to keep his legacy alive.

Natchez Bluff Blues Festival - The 13th annual Natchez Bluff Blues Festival gets underway this weekend. And has MPB’s Ron Brown reports, it begins with a nod to an historic tragedy that blues artists have been singing about for the past 68-years.

Blues Trail: Pinetop Perkins

2008-04-29T16:55:00.002-05:00

The Mississippi Blues Trail hosts its next marker ceremony at noon on Saturday, May 3, 2008 in Belzoni to honor Pinetop Perkins.

Pickering Promotes Blues in DC

2008-04-15T13:36:00.003-05:00

Roll Call reports on a project by Mississippi Congressman Chip Pickering to promote the blues in our nation's capital. Pickering has been a cosponsor of this program for the past few years.

Festival Builds Appreciation for the Blues
April 10, 2008
By Torey Van Oot,
Roll Call Staff

George Higgs has been singing about growing up in a “slow town with a fast name” since he first picked up a guitar and harmonica at age 11.

“I’m telling my life experience through the old blues — the things that I went through and I sang about them. Had some good times and had some hard times, but it’s enjoyable, and I’m telling my story through the song,” said the 78-year-old musician, who was born and raised in Speed, N.C.

But playing the blues doesn’t always pay the bills. That’s where the Music Maker Relief Foundation comes in.

The foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides grant money to traditional blues musicians in need of financial assistance, is being honored by blues legends, lawmakers and music afficionados at the Fifth Annual Congressional Blues Festival on April 23.

The festival, which features headliners Robert Cray and Elvin Bishop as well as traditional blues artists sponsored by Music Maker, is meant to “shine the light on American music’s true beginnings, blues and roots,” founder Ryan Costello said.

Costello first organized the event in 2004 after the political consulting firm he worked for became involved with the North Carolina-based foundation.

“I may be a little bit ashamed to say I’m not as much a blues connoisseur as people might think I would be,” he said. “Really I’m just a music lover and recognize [blues is] where all forms of music come from ... I wanted to honor that.”

What started out as a concert on the balcony of Costello’s Capitol Hill office building has grown to a daylong event featuring nonstop performances on three stages at the Kennedy Center.

Support for the festival has grown as well; it is now sponsored by a 66-member bipartisan Congressional Host Committee.

Host Committee Co-Chairman Chip Pickering (R), whose home state of Mississippi is considered one of the birthplaces of the blues, said he hopes the festival provides awareness of the influence the genre has had on American music.

“The blues provides a musical and lyrical testimony to enduring and overcoming struggles,” he said. “Rich or poor, Southern or Northern, regardless of race or religion, we can enjoy the blues and let it speak to our hearts and move our feet to dance.”

The festival has raised more than $600,000 since its inception to help struggling blues musicians pay for basic necessities such as food, lodging and health care. The foundation also helps artists book performances and record their music.

“When you take an artist who is playing for free on the street, and suddenly they are selling out venues in Europe and fans are buying their CDs, you have given them the chance to make their own way,” Pickering said. “This isn’t only a blessing to the artist, because the world and music consumers are also wealthier for the exposure.”

In the end, blues lovers say they hope the festival and Music Maker’s efforts help keep the tradition alive for generations to come.

“It ain’t like it used to. It’s dying slowly, but we try to keep it alive,” Higgs said. “I’ll play as long as I can — I like this old blues. I hate to see it die.”

The Fifth Annual Congressional Blues Festival will be April 23 at the Kennedy Center. For more information or to enter a lottery for free tickets to the performances, visit congressionalbluesfestival.org. The last drawing will be Monday.

Rhythm Club in Natchez

2008-04-14T16:22:00.002-05:00

On Friday, April 18, 2008 at 5:30 PM, the Mississippi Blues Commission will unveil a Mississippi Blues Trail marker in downtown Natchez in remembrance of the Rhythm Club. The ceremony will take place at the NAPAC Museum located at 301 Main Street and will kick off the 13th Annual Natchez Blues Bluff Festival.

Eddy ‘The Chief’ Clearwater

2008-04-04T14:58:00.001-05:00

Macon native Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater takes the stage in Clearwater, New Jersey on Saturday, April 12.

During the 1950s, Chicago’s West Side was a breeding ground for some of the world’s greatest bluesmen: Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Freddie King and others. With his fierce guitar playing, soulful and emotive vocals and wild stage shows, Clearwater is now part of that list.

Indeed, between his slashing left-handed guitar work, his room-filling vocals, his self-defined “rock-a-blues” style (a forceful mix of blues, rock, rockabilly, country and gospel), his boundless energy and even his signature Indian headdress, Clearwater is among the practitioners of the West Side blues working today.

The blues world recognized his talent by giving him the Blues Music Award for Contemporary Blues - Male Artist of the Year in 2001.

Born Edward Harrington in Macon, Mississippi, Clearwater and his family moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1948. With music from blues to gospel to country and western surrounding him from an early age, Clearwater taught himself to play guitar (left-handed and upside down), and began performing with various gospel groups, including the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. He moved to Chicago in 1950 and his first music jobs were with gospel groups playing in local churches. By 1953, as Guitar Eddy, he was making a strong name for himself, working the South and West Side bars regularly. He recorded his first single, “Hill Billy Blues,” in 1958.

(Read the Full Story Here)

ABC this Sunday

2008-04-04T14:53:00.001-05:00

Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Good Morning America (ABC) will highlight Mississippi Blues and Juke Joints.

Milt Hinton Legacy Performance

2008-04-04T09:14:00.003-05:00

As part of Jazz Appreciation Month, Riverwalk Jazz presents a legacy broadcastof bassist Milt Hinton in a 1991 performance with The Jim Cullum Jazz Band live on stage at The Landing. Milt was 81. Two excerpts and the full one hour show are available at this PublicBroadcasting.net page.

In addition to the music, the page tells about the life of Milt Hinton:

Jazz bass legend Milt Hinton used to say, "A person has to have lived to play great jazz...Unless you've lived, what could you say on your instrument?" Well, Milt Hinton had plenty to say in his thousands of recordings, with his lively storytelling and in some 60,000 'black and white' photographs of his fellow musicians shot behind the scenes.

Milt Hinton is widely regarded as The Dean of jazz bassists. He was the master of the "slap" bass technique that originated in New Orleans with Bill Johnson (born in 1872,) a man Milt knew during his early Chicago days. Jazz historian Richard Hadlock described Milt's slapping as "...a living link with the New Orleans bass style."

Hinton's career spanned more than 6 decades. Born in 1910 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Milt began playing in Chicago and got his first break in 1931 playing and recording for Victor with Eddie South, billed as the "dark angel of the violin." In 1936, Milt joined Cab Calloway and stayed with him until 1951. Famous as the most sought-after recording "session man" of the New York studio scene in the 1950s and '60s, Milt still holds the record as the most-recorded musician in jazz history, having logged more than 6,000 sessions. He performed with Basie, Ellington and Armstrong, and appeared on network television and radio shows, on motion picture sound-tracks, as well as recordings with Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Sam Cooke, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Quincy Jones, and many more. Milt Hinton died December 19, 2000 in New York City.

(Read the Full Story Here)

Blues Marker for Greenwood Elks Lodge

2008-03-24T14:51:00.002-05:00

The Elks Lodge in Greenwood will be recognized with a Mississippi Blues Marker on March 28: "The Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks of the World (IBPOEW) was formed in 1898 in Cincinnati by blacks who were excluded from the “white” Elks organization, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE). By 1899, 12 lodges of the IBPOEW, which became commonly known as the “black Elks,” were established in eight states, including Mississippi. In 1902, a female auxiliary group, the Daughters of the IBPOEW was founded. The chapter in Greenwood was established in 1925, and property at this location was purchased for the establishment of a lodge in 1927. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the hall in Greenwood hosted artists including BB King, T-Bone Walker, Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Percy Mayfield, “Little” Junior Parker, Roy Brown and others." (Read The Full Story Here)

BB King Buys Club Ebony

2008-03-24T14:37:00.006-05:00

B.B. King has purchased the juke joint Club Ebony in his hometown of Indianola from Mary Shepard who has owned it the past three decades. Shepard is ready to retire and her last day at the club is April 6. A Mississippi Delta Blues Trail Marker outside Club Ebony says several musical icons have played there since 1945 besides King including Count Basie, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Ike Turner.

Lula

2008-02-13T14:35:00.002-06:00

Jackson Clarion Ledger: "LULA — Blues legends like Charley Patton and Sam Carr trace their roots to the tiny town of Lula in the Mississippi Delta. Patton, who immortalized Lula in some of his lyrics, his wife Bertha Lee, and Carr are just three of the artists to be honored today when Lula gets a Mississippi Blues Trail Marker. Another marker will be unveiled in Tunica the same day in honor of another Blues giant, James Cotton. Besides Carr and Patton, the Lula area in Coahoma County claims legendary performers like Son House and Frank Frost. Singer-songwriter John Mohead is also from Lula. The marker will be located near city hall at the corner of Front and Second Street. Also today, Tunica will get a Blues Trail Marker honoring Cotton, who is scheduled to perform at the event. The marker for Cotton will be placed at the intersection of U.S. Highway 61 and Bonnie Blue Road, just west of his birthplace." (Read the Full Story Here)

RIP - David Lee Durham

2008-02-01T09:31:00.001-06:00

Delta Democrat Times: "The Delta blues community has lost another of its favorite sons. David Lee Durham, 64, will be laid to rest Saturday during a service at Gentry High School in Indianola. The self-taught guitarist died on Jan. 24 at South Sunflower County Hospital. Durham, who played a trademark white guitar with patriotic stars and stripes, was longtime leader of the Ladies Choice Band. In 2004, the group won the Delta's Regional Blues Challenge. That same year, the Mississippi Delta Blues Society of Indianola named Durham 'Blues Musician of the Year.' While we Deltans love the blues, and we love to share the history behind it, we're reminded of the harsh reality of the life of a local blues musician when someone like Durham passes - without sufficient means to cover funeral and burial costs. One postive of this is that fellow blues musicians, including Mickey Rogers of Greenville, joined forces Wednesday night for a benefit at Indianola's Club Ebony, with proceeds to cover those costs."

RIP - Jessie White

2008-02-01T09:25:00.000-06:00

Detroit Free Press: "Jessie White, a popular figure who brought his Mississippi-bred stylings to the Motor City half a century ago, died Tuesday from complications after a heart attack....He was 87. Musicians from the city's blues and rock scene were scheduled to gather at a Detroit bar Thursday night for an informal music memorial to White, and friends are hoping to have a proper tribute concert by the spring. In recent years, the pianist-vocalist known as Uncle Jessie had been a fixture at the Attic Bar in Hamtramck. There he played regular gigs with a group of younger musicians, performing sets of blues standards and his own gritty material. Born in Mississippi, White moved to Detroit in 1950, finding work in the junk business. His house on 29th Street became a popular gathering spot for hometown and touring blues musicians, home to whiskey-fueled jam sessions that became the stuff of local lore." (Read More Here)

Pinetop Perkins

2008-01-31T09:45:00.000-06:00

Pinetop Perkins: 94 years old and still pounding the piano (Citizen Times, North Carolina): "Pinetop Perkins has been playing the blues so long that when he started, radio was still a newfangled novelty. Maybe the senior star on the blues circuit, Perkins’ career dates to 1927, and yet the musician, who turns 95 in July, continues to tour....Born Joe Willie Perkins in Belzoni, Miss., Perkins started off playing both guitar and piano...Perkins told The New York Times that he played at chicken fights, where his pay was the dead chicken. His nickname came from the classic blues tune “Pinetop’s Boogie” by Pinetop Smith. He is best-known for a long hitch playing piano with the Muddy Waters Blues Band, 1969-80. Margolin also worked in that group. Perkins and others from the Waters band left to begin their own act." (Read The Full Story)

Milt Hinton

2008-01-31T09:42:00.000-06:00

Playing The Changes -- New book about Milt Hinton: "The life story of Milt Hinton is rooted in hard times, rising from segregated backwater clubs to elegant concert halls, offering a perspective on the African American experience that is unique in its mix of humor and wisdom. The publication of Playing The Changes: Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photographs (Vanderbilt University Press, January 2008) not only tells Milt's compelling story, in his own inimitable style, but also exquisitely reproduces 260 of his incredible photographs. He began taking pictures in the 1920s and continued documenting the world that he knew, in and away from the spotlight, up to his death in 2000 at age 90....Included with the book is a CD of music and interviews with Milt Hinton, along with a discography and a filmography. This remarkable book reveals as well that Hinton possessed a gift of narrative. Blessed with a storyteller's facility, he leads the reader back to his first memories as a child in Vicksburg, Mississippi....Interweaving photos and prose, the book traces Milt's path from Mississippi to Chicago, where he polished his music through the famous Wendell Phillips High School program and earned money running errands for the Al Capone organization. Committing full time to music, Hinton crossed paths with people who seem cut from a mold that was broken long ago. Many have left vivid marks on history, from the legendary boxer Jack Johnson to the incomparable Cab Calloway, with whose band Hinton traveled for many years." (Read the Full Story)

Blues Trail - Robert Johnson - Hazlehurst

2008-01-23T15:33:00.000-06:00

On Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 4:00 PM, MDA Tourism Heritage Trails Program, the Mississippi Blues Commission and the City of Hazlehurst will honor blues legend, Robert Johnson at the historic train depot located at 138 N. Ragsdale Road in downtown Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Claud Johnson (son of Robert Johnson) and his family will be present to receive this honor.

"Robert Johnson's reputation as one of the most prominent Blues pioneers is exceeded only by the myths that surround the origins of his musical career," Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said. "We don't know if he made a deal with the devil, but one thing is certain: Robert Johnson's innovative sound and soulful Blues rhythm makes him a perfect recipient for this designation of a second Blues Trail Marker in his honor."

Clarion Ledger: "Hazlehurst to unveil Robert Johnson blues trail marker"

WLBT: "Robert Johnson Honored with Blues Trail Marker"

News Update

2008-01-17T13:42:00.000-06:00

Coke Kills Ike - Rock n' roll pioneer Ike Turner's death last month at age 76 was caused by a cocaine overdose. The medical examiner's office also listed hypertensive cardiovascular disease and pulmonary emphysema as "significant and contributing factors" to the Clarksdale, Miss., native's death. (Read the Full Story Here)

Tickle Me Elmore - Elmore James, the king of the raw and loud slide guitar of '50s Chicago blues, left something down in his old stomping grounds in Mississippi before moving north -- little Earnest Johnson. In the mid '60s, Johnson took the stage name Elmore James Jr., and he hopes to show the State Theatre during his show Friday what his biological father taught him. James Jr. was born in 1939 in James' hometown of Richmond, Miss., to a woman who ran a restaurant. His mother's husband, who he thought of as his dad back then, tended to be mean, James Jr. said from his home in Chicago. (Read The Full Story Here)

Lantana in March - Caroline Herring confidently returns to the forefront of the American roots music scene with her new album Lantana, due March 4th, 2008 on Signature Sounds Records. The Mississippi-born singer/songwriter new albulm is intimate, powerful and honest, Lantana is a masterpiece of understated intensity and in many ways an artistic re-birth for Herring. After making a name for herself in Mississippi as band member and co-founder of the now renowned Thacker Mountain Radio music series, Herring moved to Austin, TX. Herring quickly took the town by storm, releasing the critically acclaimed debut album, Twilight. She won "Best New Artist" at both the 2002 SXSW Austin Music Awards and also from the Austin American Statesman. Herring soon after released an equally impressive follow-up, Wellspring. In many ways Lantana is Herring's re-imaging of the Gothic South, with a rich alto voice that soothes the listener even as she addresses difficult subjects. Herring has a journalist's eye for detail, a poet's sense of scale and language, and a life-long Southerner's understanding of the issues that shape the culture below the Mason Dixon line. Herring's commitment to uncovering the truth in her songs led fellow artist Dar Williams to call Herring 'the elusive real thing.' There is no artifice on Lantana. It's an album full of delights, lyrically and musically. And just like Caroline Herring, her new album is the real thing. (Read More Here)

North Mississippi Dulcimer Association

2008-01-09T16:49:00.000-06:00

A special program of dulcimer music will be provided by the North Mississippi Dulcimer Association (video link here) from 10:00 a.m. -1:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 26, 2008, at the Parkway visitor center located at milepost 266 near Tupelo, Mississippi. The North Mississippi Dulcimer Association strives to teach dulcimer history, tradition, craftsmanship, and music by sharing its knowledge and talents. The Appalachian mountain dulcimer is the first instrument developed in the United States. Dating back to the early 1800s, the dulcimer is an instrument whose very name means “sweet sound”. The National Park Service and the North Mississippi Dulcimer Association invite everyone to listen to the soft sweet sounds of the dulcimer and learn of its extensive history. This program is free. For additional information, call 662-680-4027 or 1-800-305-7417. (For More Details)

Blues Music Awards - Tunica: May 8

2008-01-09T10:55:00.000-06:00

For the first time in its history, the prestigious Blues Music Awards will be held in the birthplace of the blues - the Mississippi Delta. The awards ceremony will be held on May 8, 2008 at the 2,500 seat Event Center at the new Harrah's Casino Tunica and is sponsored by the Blues Foundation.

“I can think of no better location to host the Blues Music Awards than the undisputed birthplace of the Blues, right here in the Mississippi Delta,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said in this release. “One of the most significant aspects of our culture is the state’s vast music heritage, particularly in the blues genre. I’m delighted the Blues Foundation recognizes Mississippi’s important role in the history of the blues, and I welcome them, along with all lovers of the soulful, Delta blues, to our great state!”

“We know the Delta location will provide an excellent opportunity for the fans that come from around the globe to explore the birthplace of the Blues. The timing is particularly appropriate as more and more of the Mississippi Blues Trail markers are added," said Jay Sieleman, executive director of the Blues Foundation.

“Not only is Tunica the entrance to the Blues Highway 61, but it’s also the South’s Casino Capital, making it an entertaining destination for all visitors coming to this event,” said Webster Franklin, president and CEO of the Tunica Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The event brings together Blues performers, industry representatives and fans from all over the world to celebrate the best in Blues recordings and performances from the previous year. Each year, the Foundation presents The Blues Music Awards - the highest honor given to Blues artists - to recipients selected by its members.

The Blues Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony and Charter Member’s Dinner will be held the night before on Wednesday, May 7, at the Tunica Riverpark museum.

Tickets are available for purchase online where members are able to access the ballot to determine which of the nominees will be selected to receive the 25 Blues Music Awards.

The Presenting Sponsor for the Blues Awards 2008 is The GIBSON Foundation. The Blues Music Awards are also sponsored by BMI, Casey Family Programs, Eagle Rock Entertainment, FedEx, and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company.

State recognizes Elvis’ blues roots

2008-01-09T09:02:00.001-06:00

Tupelo Daily Journal: "More than 30 years after his death, Elvis Presley is still getting birthday presents. On Tuesday, what would have been Presley’s 73rd birthday, a Mississippi Blues Trail marker was unveiled at his birthplace in east Tupelo....The double-sided sign tells how Presley first heard the blues in Tupelo and then mixed the music genre with country, pop and gospel to come up with his signature sound. The marker includes pictures of Elvis with blues legends and copies of album covers....Last year, the birthplace had 70,000 paid visitors....The Mississippi Blues Trail was created by the Mississippi Blues Commission. The Elvis marker is the 28th on the trail and the one of the first in NeMiss." (Read the Full Story Here)

Happy Birthday Elvis

2008-01-08T10:43:00.000-06:00

A Mississippi Blues Trail marker will be placed Tuesday at the Tupelo birthplace of legendary musician Elvis Presley, on what would have been his 73rd birthday.

Birthplace of Elvis - Blues Trail Marker

2008-01-04T16:05:00.000-06:00

On Tuesday, January 8, 2008 at 1:00 PM, MDA Tourism Heritage Trails Program, the Mississippi Blues Commission, the Tupelo Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Elvis Presley Birthplace Museum will honor Rock & Roll legend, Elvis Presley with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail. The location is the Elvis Presley Birthplace Museum (306 Elvis Presley Drive in Tupelo).

“By all accounts, Elvis Presley was the single greatest influence on modern day rock ‘n roll in America, and much of his musical inspiration drew on the Mississippi blues,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said. “As birthplace to Elvis, Tupelo is incredibly deserving of this very special Blues Trail marker which will honor the work, memory, and music legacy of the King himself.” (More Deails Here)

Governor's Art Award: Charley Pride

2008-01-04T16:00:00.000-06:00

Clarion Ledger: "A 40-year country music career and record sales in the tens of millions earned Sledge native Charley Pride international renown. That and more have now earned him the state's top arts award, for lifetime achievement in the Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts....Pride tops a 2008 recipient class that also includes Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Gulfport native Natasha Trethewey, visual artist Lallah Miles Perry of Jackson, Meridian arts patron Emma McCain and arts leader the Mississippi Museum of Art." (Read the Full Story Here)

Miss Musicians Hall of Fame

2008-01-04T13:15:00.000-06:00

Associated Press: "Rhythm and blues legend Jimmy Reed is among the 2007 class of inductees into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. Reed grew up in Leland and died in 1976 at the age of 51. He was at his creative peak between 1955 and 1961, when he wrote hits including 'Baby, What You Want Me to Do' and 'Bright Lights, Big City.' Other inductees include, by category: Freddie Waits of Jackson, jazz; Charlie Feathers of Holly Springs, country; the Rev. Cleophus Robinson of Canton, gospel; Blind Roosevelt Graves and the Mississippi Jook Band of Hattiesburg, rock; Tommy Johnson of Terry, blues." (Read the Full Story Here)

Super Chikan

2008-01-04T13:10:00.000-06:00

Clarion Ledger: "Clarksdale bluesman James Johnson - better known as Super Chikan - has plenty to crow about. A fixture of his hometown's thriving blues scene, Johnson has toured the world, won five Living Blues Critics' Awards, was nominated for a 1998 W.C. Handy Award and was a recipient of a 2004 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. His down-home singing style, coupled with razor-sharp lyrical wit and unparalleled guitar playing (often on his own "chi-can-tars" he invented), have made him a favorite of blues fans from his backyard to France. Johnson will be the featured artist along with Jackson's Bobby Rush Revue at an after party for the Mississippi Blues Marathon at Hal & Mal's Saturday. Johnson recently spoke to the Clarion-Ledger [Read the Interview Here] while preparing for a big New Year's Eve party at Ground Zero in Clarksdale."