Bentonia Blues
Bentonia, MS 1993
A black cat stares out from the front porch of blues singer Jack Owen as he plays his dark and haunting blues with harmonica accompanist Bud Spires. Owens, whose canon of songs comes from the minor-keyed Bentonia tradition made famous by the delta legend Skip James, sings in his signature song, "It must have been the devil that changed that woman's mind/I'd rather be the devil than to be that woman's friend." Songs in the Bentonia tradition are suffused with brooding images of the supernatural. Robert Johnson drew from this tradition in composing his most haunting blues, "Hellhound on my Trail."
Jimmy and friend
Leland, MS 1995
While local legend Little Bill Wallace plays a slow blues in the style of his friend and contemporary B.B. King, a couple dances on a Sunday night at Boss Hall's juke joint. The small town of Leland has produced many notable blues men including Son Thomas, Jimmy Reed, Willie Foster, Eddie Cucic and Little Milton.
B.B. King at Club Ebony
Indianola, MS 1994
Not only is B.B. King the most famous living blues man, he is one of the best known music personalities in the world. King was raised in,Indianola, MS where he drove a tractor on a cotton plantation, playing gospel and blues on the street corner for tips. He left for Memphis where he became a D.J. for WDIA radio and then began his long and successful recording career. King has taken his blues all over the world and still plays over 300 concerts a year. Despite his fame and success, King still returns to his home town every June to give a free concert to the folks back home.
Jukin' at Thompson Grocery
Bobo, MS 1994
The Thompson family ran a series of general stores in the majority African-American town of Bobo for over 40 years. On nights when hometown blues man Robert Walker was visiting from California or when a group of local musicians could be rounded up, the little shotgun shack store was transformed into a rollicking juke joint in much the same way rural homes and businesses became the social centers of plantation life throughout the 19th and early 20th century.
David Johnson
Elba, AL 1996
Guitarist/harmonica player/folk artist David Johnson lived in a square cinder block building with boarded windows in Elba, Alabama, playing Delta-style slide on his small Stella guitar. Slide guitar technique is thought to have developed from a rudimentary single string African instrument played by sliding a bone or other hard object the length of the string. In this country, a similar child's toy called a "diddley bow" often served as the first musical instrument for aspiring young blues players in the Delta. The style was further popularized by the first recordings of Hawaiian guitar in the 1920's. Delta blues artists used the slider as a way to mimic the human voice on guitar in a call and response style first used in the church. It's use spread through-out the South with players using everything from broken bottle necks to knives in order to produce the distinctive, ethereal sound of genuine Delta blues. The first recorded story of slide use in the blues occurred in 1903 as bandleader W.C. Handy sat sleeping on a bench waiting for a train in Tutwiler, MS. He awoke in the middle of the night to the sounds of a ragged man sliding an open pocket knife over the strings of his guitar, producing the strangest sound Handy ever heard. Handy became fascinated by the man and his sound and soon adapted this new music into his repertoire, becoming thereafter known as the father of the blues.
Abe "Cag" Young
Drummer Abe "Cag" Young learned drumming as a child by beating on an old gas tank in his front yard. Now in his late 60's, Young is one of a handful of musicians in the Northeast Mississippi hill country that keep alive the centuries-old African fife and drum tradition. His father Lonnie and uncle Ed Young were among the first musicians of this music to be recorded in 1940 and 1957 by folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Cag Young has played for most of his musical career with fife player Otha Turner and other drummers at rural hill country picnics as well as at blues festivals in the US and Europe. Young recently retired from his job as a plantation tractor driver and is devoting more of his time to his music.
Cotton
Shaw, MS 1995
Until a few years ago James Burg still hand picked most of the cotton he and wife Elvie grew on their small farm in the central delta. With the introduction of the mechanized cotton picker at Hopson plantation in the 1940’s, the need for mass labor in the Delta dwindled sharply, leading to the greatest internal migration in our nation’s history as blacks moved North in search of economic and social opportunities. By the 1960’s, virtually every cotton farm in the South had gone mechanical, leaving only isolated individuals still farming in the ways of their slave ancestors. Today, scenes of farmers dragging the traditional 9-foot cotton sack are an anachronism as there remains only a few farmers still picking by hand. James Burg said that he and his wife hand picked because that’s the way they came up, they enjoyed working and besides, they got a higher price for “clean” cotton. A season’s cotton harvest of 1-2 500 lb. bales would often yield less than $1,000 for the Burgs, before expenses. The harsh economic realites of small-scale farming finally caught up with the Burgs and they brought in their last cotton crop in 1999.
Hellhound
Lonnie Pitchford holds a dog skull found near the porch of a juke house he used to play in as a teenager. Until his death at age 43 in November of 1998, Pitchford was the most masterful interpreter of the music of Robert Johnson. Like Johnson, Pitchford was a shy genius whose musical gifts set him apart from his contemporaries. Pitchford's approach to his music came from his immersion in and understanding of the same rural Mississippi culture that produced other great blues men of the past, a modern rarity considering that most bluesmen of his generation, both black and white, no longer come from the original culture that produced the Blues. Also like Johnson, Pitchford lived his life on a self-destructive path as if being pursued by supernatural forces. In Robert Johnson's most haunting song, "Hellhound on my Trail," he sang "Got to keep moving, got to keep moving/ Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail/ And the day keeps on 'minding me/ There's a Hellhound on my trail, Hellhound on my trail."
Sun Session Man Mose Vinson
Memphis, TN 1995
Mose Vinson was one of the last practitioners of genuine barrelhouse blues piano. Originally from Holly Springs Mississippi, Vinson moved to Memphis in 1932 and played jukes and house parties through the 1940’s. In the early 1950’s Vinson worked as a clean-up man at Sun Studios in Memphis. Between recording sessions, Mose would sit at the piano and play “44 Blues” so often he eventually convinced Sam Phillips to record him in 1954. In addition, he also appeared on records by James Cotton, Walter Horton, Joe Hill Louis and others, although his own Sun sides went unreleased for 30 years. Mose’s first full-length CD was finally released in 1997. He spent the last two decades of his life as an ambassador for Memphis Blues, primarily playing educational and cultural festivals associated with the Center for Southern Folklore. Vinson died from diabetes in Memphis in 2002.
Parchman Work Gang
Parchman penitentiary is located on 20,000 acres in the heart of the Delta and since the turn of the century it has remained one of the most feared institutions in the state. A totally self-contained working farm and miniature city, Parchman is the "county farm" referred to in dozens of blues songs written through the years. William Faulkner called Parchman "destination doom" and auther David Oshinsky described it as "the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the civil war." It was in prisons like Parchman that the work chant, a series of rhymed song couplets used to synchronize mass work, survived the longest. The work chant used the African-American musical call and response style as it's base and the song leader's use of off-color lyrics and spontaneous creativity were archetypes that found wide-spread use in the blues.
R.L. Burnside Portrait
Chulahoma, MS 2003
R.L. Burnside, known as “Rule” in the Mississippi Hill Country where he was born and raised, played a blues guitar style distinctive from his contemporaries in the Delta. Influenced by fife and drum music and the guitar style of Fred McDowell, Burnside’s music had a percussive, driving rhythm that marked the hill country guitar style. Burnside spent most of his life sharecropping and raising a large family, only playing music on the weekends for local parties. In 1967 he made his first recordings for George Mitchell, which put him on the blues festival circuit, but it wasn’t until his 1995 collaboration with noise rocker Jon Spencer, Ass Pocket of Whiskey, that Burnside reached a wide audience with his music. In the last ten years of his life, Burnside became an elder statesman for alternative rock fans as much as those in the blues community, releasing a series of experimental blues re-mix albums and appearing on-stage with the North Mississippi All-Stars at Boneroo. R.L.’s sons are keeping his music alive in true Burnside style.
Smitty's Red Top Lounge
Clarksdale, MS 1998
A woman dances to the blues while local musician John Holmes sits in with the Wesley Jefferson Band at Smitty's in Clarksdale, MS. Smitty's Red Top Lounge is one of the longest surviving juke joints in Clarksdale. Blues performers have always emphasized the sexual lure of their music in performance, often focusing on a single woman in the crowd to taunt and tease. In his book The Land Where the Blues Began, folklorist Alan Lomax describes a scene he observed there in the 1940’s: “The blowsy dancer opened her eyes, flung her arms around the singer’s neck...His fingers ran down to the bottom of the keyboard and the notes spurted up like a crystal fountain. Pressing his powerful body close to one of the young women...The girl gave a squeal of pleasure.”
Willie King at Betty’s Place
Prairie Point, MS 2000
Willie King is a rarity in the Mississippi blues tradition. Born in 1943 in Prairie Point, MS, and raised by grandparents, King struggled to survive in variety of jobs from plowing mules, working in sawmills and working as a traveling salesman. But what makes King’s story different from so many others, is that he took his experience and not only expressed it through his art, but also through social activism, forming the “Rural Members Association” to aid poor rural blacks along the Mississippi and Alabama border and making himself “a field hand turned Field Marshall” in the process. Alongside his band, “The Liberators,” King sings “struggling songs,” expressing the harsh realities of life that many blacks endure while at the same time creating exciting, groove-laced traditional blues that are neither preachy nor overly didactic. “The blues have always been part of me,” says King on his 2002 release, “Living in a New World”. “I live it every day. And it’s about love—sharing, helping each other, caring for one another, thats what the blues life is all about. I’m holding on to the blues life, because I found out that it’s a good life to live. I just want to keep passing it down.”
Baptism II
Moon Lake, MS 1997.
A group of baptism candidates make their way carefully over loose stones to the edge of Moon Lake, an oxbow of the Mississippi near Lula, MS. Small churches in the Lula/Friars Point area gather in the fall to baptize candidates in the lake just as they have for over one hundred years. The great migration of blacks from the Delta in the 1940’s and 50’s resulted in a dramatic decline in the Delta population, impacting church congregations to the point that many churches were abandoned. Today’s Delta churches now pool their resources to help keep tradition alive. Baptisms are usually attended by members of 3-6 different congregations.
Nine-foot sacks
Floyd Hollman and Leona pick cotton with traditional 9-foot sacks on Hollman's farm in Abbeville, MS. The introduction of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1940's marked the end of an era in American society. Many African-Americans, no longer needed for large-scale hand-picked cotton farming, left Mississippi in search of opportunity in the North. Today, only a handful of farmers still harvest cotton in the manner of their slave and sharecropper ancestors. Octagenarian Floyd Hollman owns his own land and still hand-picks at least part of his crop every year to keep his stamina up. "I used to be able to pick over 300 pounds of cotton a day" says Hollman, "But now I can only get about 100 pounds."
