Last week, I took a few days off and went down to Clarksdale, MS for their annual Juke Joint Festival. I flew in to Memphis on Thursday, met up with Stacy, got some BBQ, and walked around downtown. We then made our way south to Clarksdale – down highway 61, a fairly desolate stretch of road surrounded by cotton fields.
For fans of blues music, Clarksdale is a mecca of sorts. To the rest of the world… well, there isn’t much going on in Clarksdale or for 50 miles in any direction. I suspect the town has more vacant buildings than it has occupied buildings and yet it’s the type of place I wander around wondering how people make a living – partially out of curiosity and partially because it has a sense of budding potential to it. You see opportunity on every street and in every closed shop. The city hosts well over a dozen festivals (mostly blues) throughout the year and there are a local cast of characters I’ve heard described as more colorful than Sesame Street.
I’ve been down there three times now… though with it only being an hour-and-a-half from Memphis, the first two trips were easy weekend road trips. I’m friendly with the city’s director of tourism and by extension one of the shop owners. The waitress at the cafe where we’ve gone for Sunday blues brunch recognizes us and says hello when she sees us. In a weird way, the entire town is like your favorite corner bar. You see the same locals, some of the same musicians, and everything feels familiar and friendly. It’s like the entire city invites you in to it’s living room.
The festival didn’t disappoint. There was good music at a handful of outdoor venues and lots of sunshine. Saturday night we visited two iconic (for blues) clubs: Ground Zero (a club owned by Clarksdale native Morgan Freeman), and a place called Red’s – a long-standing Juke Joint where you get what you get and it is what it is. While down there, I posted a few videos to Facebook. A friend commented that he never hears that type of blues music. And short of The Black Keys or North Mississippi Allstars, you won’t come across it much. There’s a style of blues unique to north Mississippi – some call it hill country blues others call it cotton patch blues. It has a rhythmic dance and trance quality to it that sucks you in and makes you want to shake your ass, bob your head, stomp your feet. Two of the musicians who helped define the style, Junior Kimbrough and R.L Burnside, loomed large over the festival. For one, they both have children and grandchildren who have become musicians and are carrying on their legacies (Kimbrough is said to have fathered over 30 kids). Add to that there are a number of musicians that played with them who are still around and playing their songs. Nearly every band we saw covered at least one Junior Kimbrough and one R.L. Burnside song and some did nothing but hill country blues. It’s hard to imagine a more isolated musical dialect that never really escaped its geography.
Walking around Clarksdale, you can’t help but to want to see the town succeed, and you’re a little afraid it might not survive. It’s unpretentious, vibrant, and falling apart all at the same time. It’s revival is slow and to some extent you worry that if they’re too successful, they’ll lose the scrappy charm that makes it so unique. The blues world is pretty small, and probably shrinking… and to some degree, I think they’d like to keep it small. It’s a town famous for its crossroads, a part of American folklore. For the wanderers who always seem to find their way back, it’s private club of sorts – where the walls are crumbling and the roof is made of tin, where the seats out front are torn from an old Cadillac, Lincoln, or Ford. There’s rust and glass in the street and cracks in all the sidewalks – and you wouldn’t want it any other way.
As I was writing this, I stumbled across this Black Keys video posted a week ago. It’s their version of an old Delta blues song made famous by Clarksdale native John Lee Hooker and later recorded by Junior Kimbrough. It features Kenny Brown on guitar (he was Burnside’s guitarist) and a lot of the footage is from in and around Clarksdale – a place that much like the music, juke joints, dusty roads, and never ending rows of cotton has a stripped down and mesmerizing vibe that takes root your soul.