I Don't Like the Blues

Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life

B. Brian Foster

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469660431
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: African American Studies

How do you love and not like the same thing at the same time? This was the riddle that met Mississippi writer B. Brian Foster when he returned to his home state to learn about Black culture and found himself hearing about the blues. One moment, Black Mississippians would say they knew and appreciated the blues. The next, they would say they didn't like it. For five years, Foster listened and asked: "How?" "Why not?" "Will it ever change?" This is the story of the answers to his questions. In this illuminating work, Foster takes us where not many blues writers and scholars have gone: into the homes, memories, speculative visions, and lifeworlds of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi to hear what they have to say about the blues and all that has come about since their forebears first sang them. In so doing, Foster urges us to think differently about race, place, and community development and models a different way of hearing the sounds of Black life, a method that he calls listening for the backbeat.

1: Hard . . . Make It Easy

A woman and man stepped from the entrance of Janky’s Art Boutique in downtown Clarksdale. They talked and laughed, then stepped into a shaded area to gather themselves. She pushed a small bag into a bigger bag draped over her shoulder. He returned something to his back pocket. Hand-in-hand, they walked toward a wide blue sign jutting from the sidewalk in front of a boarded building beside Janky’s: “WROX, Clarksdale’s first radio station, went on the air on June 5, 1944, from studios at 321 Delta Avenue.”¹

The couple had come to Clarksdale for the Juke Joint Blues Festival, joining some 5,000 other out-of-town visitors (and approximately 2,000 locals) for a weekend of blues performances, southern food, and carnival fare. It was the Tuesday after, and most of the festivalgoers had gone, but the couple remained.

Across the street from them and Janky’s, local blues singer Penro “Pooh Baby” Dorsey and I sat in front of Dank’s Music Store. Pooh Baby had pulled a folding chair and his amplifier near the edge of the sidewalk, his normal busking setup. I sat up on a bench behind him.

“I been going too much lately, I feel like,” Pooh Baby told me after taking a deep pull from a cigarette, releasing the smoke and an echoing guitar riff at about the same time. At twenty-seven, he was one of the youngest musicians playing in Clarksdale, and, if his weekend schedule was any indication, he was as busy as any of them. “Played T-Bone’s Friday night,” he said. “Set up over by Mac’s [Consignment Shop] Saturday day, and I was at the Blues Spot Saturday night.” His gigs were a source of pride—and income.

“You was on the go!” I said.

“Shiiid, that’s money,” he said matter-of-factly. Then, after turning a few nobs on his amplifier and adjusting the tuning pegs on his guitar, he began playing a song in full. I watched him. Then, both he and I, almost at the same time, watched the tourist couple start watching us, first from where they stood in front of the WROX marker, then as they crossed the street in our direction.

“Sounding good!” said the man, who told us his name was Himmens [him-ins] White. As he and the woman—Shelbie—got closer, Pooh Baby played louder. “See, honey, he’s a real blues player,” Himmens told Shelbie while flashing a thumbs-up to the clouds, while Shelbie danced a two-step to a beat all her own. Then Himmens told Pooh Baby, “Man, if I could play that thing like you, I’d be all right!”

“Mane, if I could leave this motherfucka [Clarksdale] today, I would,” Pooh Baby told me, not long after Himmens and Shelbie told us they were getting ready to “hit the road back [to Georgia].” I had asked him what he “saw for himself moving forward.” His “motherfucka” was a definitive answer, each syllable like blues chords, echoing louder than the one before it, blending together in distress. “Unless, I could find just a real good-paying job, or get my own business. I want a family, I want a kid, but not here. . . . Can’t do shit for ’em here.”

I asked where he would go if he left.

“A’lanta. New York. Anywhere. You go to a place like A’lanta, you know they hiring . . . They’ll hire you to do anything. Down here, it’s not jobs like that. . . . The last, like, three years been rough for me. No funds. No crib. Working this job.” Pooh Baby had not had regular work since being laid off a year prior. At the time of our conversation, he was working when and where he could—playing an unreliable, if at times frantic, schedule of small gigs in North Mississippi; playing backup drums for a small church in the area; and, as he put it, “playing himself” by working a temporary construction job for small money in a neighboring town.

Pooh Baby told me he was tired—tired of small, tired of “real blues player,” tired from the weekend, tired of hard. He said that last one a lot. “It’s hard here. . . . Everything here hard. The school system here is bad, all the high poverty . . . and the jobs are doing more firing than hiring. It’s hard. . . . Take my momma and my dad, they worked they whole life and still struggle, you know. . . . Go ’round here [Clarksdale] one day and you go’n see what I’m tal’bout. Go around here and you go’n see just how hard it is.” Pooh Baby pulled his guitar closer to him, leaned and held his ear downward, like he was listening for something he ain’t want nobody else to hear. “Put it like this, you born here, you live here, you been through the blues for real. . . . I ain’t just gotta play the blues. I don’t have to. But, how hard it is here . . . make it easy.”

Both Pooh Baby and the tourist couple tell a blues story. The couple’s story represents what Mississippi lawmakers and stakeholders in the Delta region have promised about the blues since the 1980s: that it could be a source of positive attention and economic revitalization for a place in need of both. Pooh Baby’s story is that story’s foil. His story shows where the promise of blues tourism has fallen short, where, for Black folks, the blues has not been a solution to a development problem, but rather a sign that a problem remains. In the couple’s story, coming to Clarksdale is exciting because real blues players sound good. For Pooh Baby, a real blues player, playing the blues is easy because Clarksdale is hard. From those stories—the couple’s and Pooh Baby’s—this chapter moves to tell two more: the story of the Delta’s post-1960s development agenda, and the story of some of what Black residents of Clarksdale have faced in its wake. Long story short: both are the blues.

Blues Development in the Mississippi Delta and Clarksdale

When Haley Barbour became Mississippi’s sixty-third governor in 2003, the Delta was in its fifth decade of a development crisis that had created a matrix of problems on top of problems for the region’s residents. There was the problem of a polarized and precarious labor market; which intensified the problem of poverty, especially among the region’s Black residents;² which compounded the problem of a fragile, underfunded public infrastructure; which accelerated the problem of population loss. Barbour saw the problems and offered a solution: reimagine what “development” could look like for the region. To Barbour’s eye, the Delta had more than agriculture and manufacturing, two shrinking economic sectors.

“The Delta has the blues,” Barbour said on the day he signed legislation reconstituting the Mississippi Blues Commission in 2004. “[The blues gives us] the opportunity to take something of which we are very proud and turn it into a genuine economic development.”³ The eighteen-member commission was to “study, deliberate and report to the Governor and to the Mississippi Legislature by January 15, 2004, a plan for marketing the blues, including a tourism program, that features the historical, cultural, musical and business elements and opportunities of this ‘Bluesland.’ The marketing plan will be designed to attract tourists, conferences, music performances, filmmakers and others for the purpose of economic development of the blues, the region and the state.”⁴

The Blues Commission had been more than two decades in the making. In 1978, Mississippi Action for Community Education, a small, Delta-based grassroots organization, partnered with blues enthusiasts and musicians near Greenville, Mississippi, to organize the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival, the first modern festival in the region.⁵ Spurred in part by a national revival of commercial interest in the blues that spanned from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the Delta quickly became internationally known as ground zero for all things blues. In 1983, just five years after its establishment, the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival attracted some 30,000 attendees, making it the largest blues festival in the country. Its popularity was a sign of things to come.

By 1990, the tourist traffic generated by the Delta’s growing circuit of blues festivals and entertainment scenes started to catch the attention of elected officials and business owners in the region. “I think [the blues is] an incredible resource,” said Howard Stovall, a Memphis businessman and blues enthusiast who had grown up on his family’s plantation just west of Clarksdale. “A local festival can be the equivalent of one or two new industries in the amount of money put into the local situation.”⁶Stovall would eventually serve as director of the Blues Foundation, co-owner of Clarksdale’s Ground Zero Blues Club, and head of the Sunflower River Blues Association.

Elsewhere, Clarksdale native and Delta Blues Museum founder Sid Graves noted, “It’s exciting to see so many people from all over the world making the pilgrimage to Highway 61 and the cradle of the blues.”⁷In 1993, Clarksdale mayor Henry Espy referred to blues tourism as “a seed waiting to be germinated.”⁸ Officials put these optimistic pronouncements into action too, taking the moment to approve the formation of tourism commissions across the region. The moment culminated in 2003, when Ronnie Musgrove, Haley Barbour’s immediate predecessor as governor, announced plans for a state-sponsored Blues Commission.

In 2006, two years after endorsing the Blues Commission, Barbour visited Holly Ridge, a small Delta community in Sunflower County. The day marked the unveiling of the first Mississippi Blues Trail marker, a tribute to Delta blues legend Charlie Patton. Now comprising nearly 200 markers between Memphis, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Blues Trail was a part of the commission’s founding vision, and the inaugural interpretive marker was viewed as a sign of promise. “The blues are a powerful part of Mississippi’s heritage and America’s musical history,” Barbour said after the unveiling, his remarks echoing what he said when he formalized the commission. “The creation of the Mississippi Blues Trail is an appropriate way to capture this distinct part of our history and culture, and also will undoubtedly serve as an economic development tool.”⁹

The Blues Commission signaled a new social and economic development agenda in the Delta and spawned a wave of excitement and, perhaps more important, organizational infrastructure and resource mobilization. Over the next ten years, local tourism commissions partnered with chambers of commerce and private investors to organize and expand the already- bustling yearly schedule of blues festivals. State and local budgets earmarked money for planning, organizing, and marketing the state’s multiplying blues scenes. Billboards promoting the Delta’s blues history sprang up along highways and byways in the region. Media profiles, travelogues, and tourism brochures touted the Delta as the “Land of the Blues,” and folks flocked to and through the region by the hundreds of thousands, to see what all the fuss was about. Most of the region’s blues travelers were like Himmens and Shelbie White—white bohemians, drifters, and blues enthusiasts excited to drive the real “Blues Highway,” to hear real blues players play real blues, and especially excited to stop or stay in Clarksdale.

Almost since day one, Clarksdale has been the center of the Delta’s blues tourism system. In 1979, the year after the Greenville festival, Clarksdale native Sid Graves outfitted a small wing in Clarksdale’s Carnegie Public Library with items from his own collection of blues memorabilia.¹⁰ A year later, Jim O’Neal, who had moved to the area from Chicago, founded Rooster Blues Records, a middling record label that operated out of rented space near the downtown square. Riding this momentum, a group of local blues enthusiasts introduced the idea that Clarksdale could host its own blues festival. While some residents and local organizations, including the Downtown Merchants Association and Chamber of Commerce, supported the idea, some public officials had reservations. Was it wise to promote public alcohol consumption? What about all the tourists who would see all the “Black parts of town”?¹¹ Reservations notwithstanding, by 1988, the idea had garnered enough support that Clarksdale hosted its first blues festival, the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival.

The Sunflower River Festival was evidence enough for some local stakeholders and enthusiasts that the blues had not just staying power but economic potential. There was money in it. “When we came here and tried to tell some of the local civic leaders about some of the tourism possibilities of the blues, they thought we were crazy,” said Jim O’Neal, reflecting on the early momentum in Clarksdale around the possibilities of blues tourism. “There was a time when they just ignored the blues, but you can’t ignore it when people are coming from Belgium. . . . This is the place where devoted blues fans want to come.”¹² Sid Graves echoed O’Neal’s enthusiasm: “I think the people in this town are taking notice. They’re asking, ‘Why are all these people from Europe, Japan and elsewhere coming here?’ Recently, we’ve had the city fathers pass a resolution in honor of Muddy Waters and the blues. We’re talking to them about having musicians play on the sidewalks, and there are live blues shows already in several outdoor locations.’”¹³

The growth of blues tourism in Clarksdale in the 1980s was bookended by the news of a $100,000 gift to the Delta Blues Museum by the Hard Rock Café.¹⁴

In the early 1990s, Clarksdale began to garner more public attention for its relationship to the blues. Local establishments appeared in travel and lifestyle magazines. The town became the backdrop of film productions and the subject of documentaries and books. And more and more tourists streamed in. In 1991, the Sunflower River Festival, then in only its fifth year, attracted some 7,000 visitors, and the Delta Blues Museum expanded its memorabilia collection.¹⁵

By the end of the 1990s, the blues had not just made Clarksdale sound different. It had made it look different too. In 1998, local developers completed a renovation of Clarksdale’s Hopson Plantation, retrofitting it as a set of bed-and-breakfast-style cottages that opened as “The Shack Up Inn.”¹⁶ Hopson had been one of the largest plantations in the region in the early decades of the twentieth century and spearheaded the Delta’s move toward farm mechanization when, in 1944, it became the first plantation to produce a cotton crop without the use of manual labor. The Shack Up Inn positioned itself as a gateway to that past, offering “blues lovers making the pilgrimage to the cradle of the blues . . . the unique opportunity to experience Hopson Plantation . . . virtually unchanged from when it was a working plantation.”¹⁷

In 1999, through a combination of its own regional popularity and the conjoined efforts of public funds and private donations, Clarksdale’s Delta Blues Museum opened in its own space, moving from the local Carnegie Public Library to the newly renovated Freight Depot Station on the downtown square.¹⁸ By 2000, local officials and stakeholders in Clarksdale were essentially fine-tuning what had proved to be a well-oiled commerce machine. Seeking to further reify the town’s branding as a quintessential blues place, officials renamed several spaces on the downtown square to emphasize their connection to the blues. During this time, a five-block stretch of Delta Avenue on the downtown square became the “Blues Alley,” a side street was dedicated to local bluesman John Lee Hooker, and a spring of clubs (re)opened all around the downtown square: Club Vegas became the Delta Blues Alley Café, the Blues Station Café opened in the lobby of the old Greyhound station, and developers completed renovations to an old cotton warehouse on the downtown square, enabling the opening of the Ground Zero Blues Club.¹⁹

Indeed, what had been a remarkably successful, nearly uninterrupted, rise for Clarksdale’s blues tourism apparatus essentially since the inaugural Sunflower River Festival in 1987 became a blues boom in the early 2000s. Some officials remained skeptical, especially about how the town would manage its commercial growth and sustain its economic prospects, but the prevailing narrative was one of optimism. Nationally, the blues was as popular as ever—Congress had declared 2003 the “Year of the Blues”—and as I have noted, state legislators had given their full endorsement with the constitution of the Blu...