Believe I'm Sinkin' Down

Happy All Hallow's E'een Gentle Readers,

TWC went down to the Crossroads in Clarksdale Mississippi (pretty sure that's pronounced Misipi) with the newlyweds* a week or so ago. Highway 61 between Tunica and Clarksdale is the flattest highway in the world. Makes Kansas look like the Rockies. There isn't a hint of a curve or a rise for thirty miles.

Spent a spell at the Blues Museum in the old Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad freight depot where they had carefully reassembled Muddy Waters' sharecropper cabin. Interestingly, Chatalaina's daddy was born into a depression era sharecropper family as well. Those were hardscrabble days in the Delta no matter your skin color.

Tommy Johnson never made any bones about how he learned the blues.....

You want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way.....just a little ' fore 12 that night.....be playing a piece there by yourself.....A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want.

Legendary bluesman Robert Johnson was not as forthright as Tommy but the rumors and innuendo persist. Some of that is traced back to Son House.....

When Robert Johnson got through playing all our mouths was open. He sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that.

Henry Goodman saw the vision and said it was Rosedale, not Clarksdale, where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Man In Black, and I don't mean Johnny Cash.....

Robert Johnson thinking about Son House preaching to him, Put that guitar down, boy, you drivin’ people nuts. Robert Johnson needing as always a woman and some whiskey. Big trees all around, dark and lonesome road, a crazed, poisoned dog howling and moaning in a ditch alongside the road sending electrified chills up and down his spine, coming up on a crossroads just south of Rosedale. Robert Johnson, feeling bad and lonesome, knows people up the highway in Gunnison. Can get a drink of whiskey and more up there. Man sitting off to the side of the road on a log at the crossroads says, You’re late, Robert Johnson.

Chatalaina told us that day that any crossroads in the Delta would do so long as it was isolated and the moon was right.

Video here. 

As Ever,

The Wine Commonsewer

Photo Credit: Bill Kalles

*No Star has done made sure that Lone Chatalaine ain't lonely no more

Comments

[Col. Hogan]

Unless things have changed since I was there (1964), The roads are also the narrowest in the country. Hitchhiking in an 18-wheeler, I know that the truckers ticked the mirrors of oncoming trucks regularly.

I was there again in '96, but it was a fly-in to Jackson and a fly out a week later after attending a class in water channeling at Vicksburg.

I visited some dead Confederate soldiers (murdered by the evil A Lincoln) while I was there.

[Cap'n NoStar]

What??? No photo credit for yours truely?

[TWC]

It was there, Cappy, but a formatting glitch made it strangely invisible. I was running out the door with the kids to go Trick or Treating and didn't notice the strange glitch that pushed everything to the left and the picture to the right until this morning.

[TWC]

Col, I believe that when Robert Johnson was traveling Hwy 61 it was a dirt road. It's mostly four lane these days. I drove it (Third St) out of Memphis and across an old bridge for a few miles. Didn't think that was really a part of town where you'd want to break down.

When the happy couple and I traveled south (and back) the roads were in pretty good shape. Mostly better than modern California's roads.

[Jeff Mackenzie]

Skynyrd does that really well. More importan: I want to know if you are now a great blues guitarist?

[TWC]

Jeff, you funny guy. NoStar has a little story about TWC selling his soul for a bottle of the best wine ever, which turns out to be both white and sparkling. That Old Devil has a wry sense of humor.