The Delta: Rock & Roll RePast

Posted: May 28th, 2024 | Filed under: Music, Rock & Roll Rewind | 1 Comment »

I’m a rock & roll lifer. I got stories, lots of stories. Here’s another.

It is the sense of the place.

More so than the righteous music I’ve heard there on several trips down.

The Delta. Birthplace of the Blues. Which of course begat the rock & roll I love so much.

Two images from my first visit more than a quarter century gone still resonate.

A desolate crossroad of two gravel/ dirt roads with fields of scrubby early season cotton plants to the horizon in every direction. The lone highway marker, a rusted tilting pole, the sign reading Joe Noe Road.

Not far away, off Highway 61, in the middle of proverbial nowhere, a siding of 50-60 rusting rail cars, abandoned.

The Delta, ever bleak, haunts, it’s mysteries lurk. Land of cotton. Seemingly forgotten, yet daily interactions say old times there not.

The goal of that first trip with pals was a blues festival in Greenville, where BB King was to play, his first visit back to perform in a long while.

Along with way, we found Charlie Patton’s grave site, saw the cabin said to be where Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation, stood alone in the middle of road in front of the Hollywood in Robinsonville, one of the places where Robert Johnson “is from.”

On other trips, we found two of the three or so purported gravesites of Robert Johnson, believe we found Three Forks where the most revered of bluesmen was poisoned. Attended part of a Grambling/ Mississippi Valley football game in Itta Beena, experiencing the spectacle of its musical halftime, heard some blues in a juke joint and ate tamales at Abe’s BBQ at the fabled corner of 61 & 49.

Believe we stood on the porch of Clack’s Store where the Lomaxes recorded Son House. Hung out in Money, essentially an abandoned murmur of a town, where Emmett Till was slain for allegedly whistling at a grocery store clerk.

Have spent time in Clarksdale, the epicenter, which town gave us Sam Cooke, W.C. Handy. Ike Turner. Jackie Brenston. Junior Parker. Among others.

Three of the visits were to attend the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas, which is just across the bridge over the Mississippi from Tunica.

Make no mistake, that third worldly burg is all Delta. On the second visit to Helena, on the way from our parking spot to the fest, we encountered a major intersection with a massive hole in the pavement right in the middle. Sink hole? Maintenance work?

Returned to the fest several years later. That hole was still there unrepaired.

Helena is the home of the long running blues radio show “King Biscuit Time” on KFFA, airing since 1941.

The festival, known as the Biscuit to regular attendees. has several stages, the main one by the levee along the river.

As much as I cherish my experiences there, my specific memories of musical performances have slipped away over time. Solomon Burke was great. Ike Turner performed with his latest muse/ hostage, a young blonde woman whose name I’ve forgotten.

Rufus Thomas, on stage in blue spangled shorts, doing the Dog.

But the lineups are mostly folks like Bobby Rush, whom you might know.

And Beverly “Guitar” Watson whom you probably don’t.

The weirdest performance there was the return of Helena native Levon Helm, with the last post-breakup ideation of the Band. As they were setting up, the roadies adorned Helm’s drum kit with a Stars & Bars. At which point, 90% of the mostly African American audience left.

Very strange.

Yet, what always resonates for me is that the Delta is where it all began. Bo Diddley, the most primal of the Founding Fathers, is from McComb. Elvis from Memphis, the gateway. Jerry Lee from nearby Ferriday, La, but lived in Nesbit, Mississippi. Fats Domino from New Orleans, just a short steamboat chug down the mightiest of our rivers.

From this desolate environment with its checkered history was borne rock & roll.

The world changed.

— c d kaplan

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