Mississippi River Blues: Clarksdale Mississippi

The Heart of Rock and Roll is in Clarksdale Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.  We are headed to Louisiana and the Atchafalaya Historical District, but first, we stopped in Clarksdale for the day.  We are taking Highway 61 south thru the heart of the Delta.  The Delta is the western area of Mississippi that was once a swamp that was drained and cleared to grow cotton.   Flat like Kansas; King Cotton for a time made this area from Natchez to Memphis one of the wealthiest places in the world.   You can see this wealth in the many plantation estates open to the public. Cheap slave labor fueled this wealth, then after the civil war a sharecropping system that was maintained through terror and violence.  It would make today’s current unbalance of wealth seem mild by comparison.    

 In this suffering and toil came this marvels music called the blues.  Although plantation owners would not let slaves read or write they were given musical instruments.  They develop a form of music that is uniquely American and is the root of all the current popular western music Genres.   Clarksdale is in the center of the American Music Triangle; Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans.    It is Ground Zero as stated by Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero Blues Club.  This club across the street from the Blues Museum, in the downtown, where there were several authentic Juke Joints or blues clubs.

Driving west on Highway 278 out of the hill country of Tennessee and Mississippi the landscape flattens out with cotton fields in every direction.  All of the roads become elevated above the farmland; you can tell that overabundance of water is a big part of life here.   Many parts of the Delta are prone to flooding.  Arriving in Clarksdale without knowing the history would leave one to believe that this was just another sleepy farm town.   

You arrive at the crossroads of Highway 49 and 61, this was the place that Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil for the gift of playing the guitar.   I guess it didn't work out too well for him since he died at 27.   He was a pioneer in the music, Eric Clapton has called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived".  Downtown is the fabulous Mississippi Delta Blues Museum, you must see the log cabin where Muddy Waters grew up.   What impressed me the most were the plaques by rock and roll bands presented to the museum.  They were thanking the blues for their music.   The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Roger Stewart paying their homage to the music that they took and made their own.

 

We had lunch at  Abe’s Barbeque at the crossroads on Highway 61.  We talked about returning to this holy land of American Music.  There is so much to hear that we were only teased for the day. Clarksdale is an undiscovered American music mecca yet to be spoiled by blatant commercialism.  It is the real deal in American Music History.