Day 43: MEMPHIS TO GREENWOOD

Down in the Delta – the Mississippi Delta that is

Leaving Memphis, we travelled through the Mississippi delta. Not a hill – not even a mound- in sight, it was all rich farmland.  They grow mainly corn, soy beans, cotton and rice and it’s a big area for raising and processing catfish.  It used to be a huge area for cotton but farmers have now turned to less labour-intensive crops.

It was a day full of surprises:

We pulled into a little town named Clarksdale for an included sit-down lunch.  As we drove in, we all wondered how a sleepy little town such as this would have a place big enough to host a coach tour.  Houses were falling down, shops boarded up; clearly the town has seen better days.

However Clarksdale is in the heart of Blues country.  It’s on the junction between two major highways, Route 61 and Route 49. Train lines also intersect here and so it was a major stopping point for many. Being too poor to be able to afford a ticket on a passenger train, blues singers of the 20s and 30s used to ride the freight trains. Most of them would stop off here, trying to make a few dollars.

We find that wherever we go, that area claims to be the ‘birthplace of…’ or where a particular musician got his start.  Clarksdale is no exception.  We learned that most of the big names in blues came out of Clarksdale.  These names are now becoming quite familiar to us as we progress on our musical tour:  BB King, WC Handy, Ike Turner, Sam Cook, Muddy Waters and an interesting character named Robert Johnson. 

Both Clarksdale and our final destination for the day, Greenwood, claim Robert Johnson.  He was an African American of considerable talent and no doubt would have risen to even greater fame if he had not met with an untimely death at 29.  Musicians such as the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Led Zepplin have dubbed him the ‘grandfather of Rock and Roll’.

The story goes that in 1938, at the highway 61/49 junction, he ‘sold his soul to the devil’. He claimed that the devil had tuned his guitar, giving him ‘unearthly ability on the instrument’.  

Johnson went on to be a bad boy and he especially liked the ladies.  He was carrying on with the wife of a particular saloon owner.  One night, the saloon owner sent to Robert a ‘complimentary’ whiskey laced with poison.  Johnson survived for a week or so.  He managed to get the poison out of his system, but infection set in and eventually killed him. 

As the years went on and he became larger in death than perhaps he had been in life, people started to wonder where he had been buried.  So far, no fewer than three different gravesites have been found for him! The first was found in 1973 by a group who did some research, found a Robert Johnson listed in cemetery records for 1938 and this became the recognised gravesite.  Then in 1990, an Atlanta rock band made further investigations and came up with another Robert Johnson, who apparently also died in 1938, buried in a Baptist church graveyard in a town named Quito.  The band put a substantial, engraved granite stone over the grave. 

Columbia Records clearly didn’t believe that the Quito site was genuine because the following year, 1991, they erected a more substantial granite obelisk on the original grave, found in 1973.

Some people not satisfied, more detailed research was done, including an interview with the wife of the man who dug Johnson’s grave.  This interview led to what is now believed to be the definitive grave site of Robert Johnson, beside a tiny Baptist church in Greenwood, some miles away from Clarksdale.  Yet a third substantial granite tablet was then erected there! We visited Greenwood later in the day and went to this third gravesite.

Now back to our lunch at Clarksdale:

This forgotten town is now the home of the Delta Blues Museum.  Housed in a disused freight train station, the museum has a great collection of memorabilia and information about blues music.  One of the things I remember most is a collection  of ‘Negro songs of protest’. Unusually, the museum allows no photography at all, so I have no records from it.

Right across the road from the museum is where we were taken for lunch. It was a place called ‘Ground Zero Blues’ and as we approached it, we were all in disbelief. Outside were several tawdry lounge chairs like you would expect to see on the roadside for collection. Then inside it was even worse!  Every single surface was smothered with graffiti and signatures!  It was pure grunge, grunge, grunge.

The surprises didn’t stop there.  Visiting Ground Zero Blues Club that day was the part-owner and town mayor and he told us how it had come about.  Apparently, he is a personal friend of fellow Mississippian, Morgan Freeman, and the two of them have gone into partnership with another person to bring Ground Zero Blues Club into existence.  He said that people would come to the Delta Blues Museum, which is apparently a ‘mecca’ for blues fans.  But there was nowhere local that played blues music.  This café was set up to meet that need and it is now a major venue for live blues music to be played.

Our lunch, by the way, was not as grungy as we might have anticipated.  Although nothing flash, it was quite tasty.

Before leaving Clarksdale, we visited yet another museum, this one privately owned by a Dutch man.  It was tiny in size, just a house taken over to make a museum, but what that museum contained was staggering.  The presentation was far from professional but the content absolutely made up for that. 

The Dutch man is a private collector and I think if there has been anything published, played or sung since 1900 he has it there!  He has it arranged chronologically so that as you wander through a section, all the memorabilia from a particular era is right there before you.  Roger’s time was mostly spent looking at the stuff from the 50s & 60s – Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, Chubby Checker, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry etc.

The section I spent most time in was the 60s and early 70s – early Beatles, Jerry and the Pacemakers, Hermans Hermits etc.  There was also Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan etc, but because I wasn’t into their music, I didn’t stand infront of their stuff for long.  But standing infront of the records and memorabilia of my teen idols, I had a brief but wonderful trip down memory lane.  I was right back there with Sandy Vincent, sitting in her bedroom with her portable record player!

Back on the coach, we travelled on to the small city of Greenwood.  Here we had more surprises in store. 

Greenwood is a bigger version of Clarksdale – a semi-deserted town with boarded up shops and tumble down houses. 

   Love the sign in the corner!!  (If you can't see what it says, click on the photo to enlarge it.)

However the area of Greenwood over the Tallahatchie Bridge (the same one that Billy Joe jumped from in the song ‘Ode to Billy Joe’ by Bobbie Gentry ) is quite lovely and many of the houses were used in the filming of the movie ‘The Help’.

         ‘Billy Joe jumped into the muddy waters of the river off Tallahatchie bridge’

We were taken on a tour by a local specialist.  I am not sure what he would do without ‘The Help’ because practically the entire city tour featured the various buildings and houses that featured in the movie.  However we did also go to the bridge over the Tallahatchie River and to the (third) gravesite of Robert Johnson.

So, driving to our hotel, in this town where you could shoot a rifle down the main street, we wondered what sort of a hotel we would be staying at.  To our huge surprise, it was a very small boutique hotel, just beautifully decorated, clean and very comfortable.

Having settled in, Roger and I walked to one of the several eating places we had been recommended.  The walk took us past a large Episcopal church (interesting in this clearly southern Baptist town) through the deserted streets and past a couple of pathetic looking shops. 

Surprise number three for the day was when we walked into the restaurant. The front section was quite ordinary – laminex tables and nothing fancy.  But as we went further back into other sections of the premises, a whole different world opened up.  There was a beautiful restaurant with an equally beautiful meal. Roger, of course, chose a dessert, pecan icecream pie.  There was surprise number four for the day.  It was on a crumb base, with all of eight centimetres of gorgeous creamy pecan icecream.  As if that wasn’t enough, on top of the icecream was a thick layer of meringue and it was all drizzled with caramel topping!  My only regret is that we didn’t have a camera to take a photo if it.

Upon walking back to our hotel, we came to the conclusion that Greenwood mustn’t exactly be a crime capital. We came across a police car parked in the middle of the road, engine and lights turned off. The policeman in it was just chatting with a guy who was standing on the road.  We found out the next day that it was our bus driver (out of uniform so we didn’t recognise him) that he was talking to. While chatting, a call came over the car radio for the policeman to go and investigate that someone had borrowed a mobile phone and wouldn’t give it back.   Such is the sleepy little hollow called Greenwood.