Highway 61 revisited







Also in this series:
Bush against Bush (Apr 30, '04)
Kerry, the Yankee muchacho  (May 7, '04)
You have the right to be misinformed  (May 8, '04)
An American tragedy (May 11, '04)
In the heart of Bushland (May 12, '04)
The war of the snuff videos (May 13, '04)
The Iraq gold rush (May 14, '04)
The new beat generation (May 15, '04)
Taliban in Texas: Big Oil hankers for old pals (May 18, '04)
Life is a beach. Or is it?  (May 19, '04)
Cuba libre  (May 21, '04)
Miami vice and virtue (May 22, '04) 
Georgia on his mind (May 27, '04) 
Free at last? (May 28, '04)

DOWN ON HIGHWAY 61, Mississippi - Satan drank his last shot of bourbon, threw the velvet cape over his shoulders and hit the road. The moon was too scared to show up on that night in the Deep South in the 1920s, but the wind has howling like a hellhound. The meeting would be at a solitary Delta crossroads. No witnesses. Robert Johnson, a young black cat from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, grandson of slaves, a bad eye contaminated by cataracts, delicate fingers, gorgeous hands and wavy hair, pinstripe double-breasted suit and pork-pie hat, arrived on time. No words exchanged. No blood spilled. Lightning struck a Gibson Kalamazoo, and the whole Deep South heard the most satanic guitar sound ever extracted by human hands. Robert Johnson didn't even blink his bad eye, Satan excused himself with a smile, and the whole future of Afro-American popular music was set in stone.

Robert Johnson's spirit is still here - down on Highway 61, the ultimate blues trip. It's a very quiet road, especially at night, when the only sound is the car stereo playing "Crossroads". Definitely not like in the 1920s and 1930s, before the mechanization of agriculture, when it was booming with roaming crowds.

The blues springs up from hardship. It's an instrument of survival, offering release and relief. The blues commands the present moment, demanding that you forget the woes of your past and deal with the trials ahead. But even at a crucial crossroads, confronted by the shifting specter of terrorism and an unwinnable war, the United States still can't take time off to sing the blues.

Whatever the contradictions of the current exaltation of an art form born of poverty to boost the economy of the poorest state in the union, the blues cannot but help Mississippi's still depressed local economy. There's not a single town in the Delta that does not want to have and promote its own blues museum, blues festival, or mythical crossroads. Foreign visitors come to what is regarded as a sacred pilgrimage, and American visitors seem to have shaken off their fears of a Ku Klux Klan revival, an Easy Rider shooting scenario or even obese, evil, local sheriffs.

Sweaty, swaggering, gritty, fiery blues played with volcanic intensity can be heard all over the highway, for instance at the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale or the Walnut Street Blues Club in Greenville, a large river port with a levee lined by garish floating casinos. Clarksdale, Leland, Indianola and many other towns have their annual blues festivals. And the Mother of All Blues Museums is to be found in Clarksdale, in a 1918 railroad depot not far from a mythical crossroads. Most museums have very short funds. That's not a problem with the Blues and Legends Hall of Fame Museum in Robinsonville, based in one of the region's nine casinos and barely a half-hour drive from Memphis.

Too many crossroads
US Highway 61 was immortalized by everyone from Roosevelt Sykes to Bob Dylan. "Sixty-One is the longest road I know/ she run from New York city down to the Gulf of Mexico," sang Mississippi Fred McDowell. The number 61 has magical powers: it is a sign, a symbol, a direction forward, a road back home. Enameled "61" pins on lapels used to designate the members of a secret blues society. Sixty-One rips through the Delta, flat, fertile cotton lands with the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers on the curved sides and Vicksburg and Memphis at its south and north poles. Highway 51 is also a blues highway, crawling north toward Memphis. And of course Highway 49 as well, immortalized by Howlin' Wolf. Mississippi has always bred almost the majority of all blues singers, and certainly the majority of the finest blues singers - including the whole Chicago blues scene since the 1930s (Muddy Waters, Elmore James, B B King, among others).

The feeling along the road is summed up by a large, smiling black fellow talking loud about Jesus in an empty, windy street in central Clarksdale: "I got stones in my pathway and my road is dark as night."

The blues - America's original indigenous musical art form - was influenced by African rhythms and European classical music. As bluesmaster and Vicksburg native Willie Dixon put it, "blues is the roots and everything else is the fruits." The backbone of Highway 61 is the road of the 1930s Great Migration, where the blues from the Mississippi Delta - ruralized, swampy, almost the base for a voodoo ceremony - was born like a lament and traveled upriver, by boat, by train, on the back of a truck, to be finally electrified in Memphis, Kansas City and Chicago. The sound and the voices of Black America were really nurtured on the road, on the railroad tracks, in lonely churches lost in the countryside, at bar counters - and from this poetry in motion sprang up blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm 'n' blues and soul. Robert Johnson could not but be a traveling man, undiluted blues material: he lived for the road, whisky and women.

Clarksdale, Mississippi, only 20,000 people, is Ground Zero, the Mecca and Promised Land of the blues. It used to be the cotton capital, the richest city in the Delta. And there it is, at the intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49: the crossroads, celebrated by a wrought-iron guitar sculpture and unromantically surrounded by Delta Donuts and Abe's Bar-B-Q. This is not "the" crossroads sung of by Robert Johnson ("I went down to the cross road/ fell down on my knees/ asked the Lord above/ Have mercy, save poor Bob if you please"), because 61 and 49 do not really intersect in Clarksdale. Mythology reigns: locals tell us that Johnson's deal with the devil may have taken place in the Bonnie Blue Plantation near Clayton or in a graveyard in Crawford. A rambling man surely knew how to pick his own secluded crossroads.

Ike Turner and Sam Cooke were born in Clarksdale. John Lee Hooker left in 1941, when he was 14, to become a blues superstar. The Delta Blues Museum proudly displays the Three Forks sign from one or another incarnation of the store and juke joint where Robert Johnson was poisoned. The museum also treats the blues as a great, living American tradition through its Arts and Education Program , where veterans pass along the blues to teenagers and pre-teens.

Trying to define the blues, Robert Johnson reached for the impossible also in his lyrics. The blues may be "an old heart disease" slowly consuming us. Its poetry is filled with departures, lost letters, trains, cozy kitchens (against the rigors of winter), moans, groans, cars, phonographs evoking sexual appeal, pistols and of course crossroads (in which the bluesman's soul is always in danger; but he still pursues his intangible belle). The road is almost always dark as a moonless night: but the bluesman can always try to reach the mountaintop, or try to interfere on Judgment Day.

We still see the rolling man, the back-door man, the drunken-hearted man and of course the hard-working man on 21st-century Highway 61. Nineteenth-century German philosophy would have loved Robert Johnson: he regarded man as a prisoner (Arthur Schopenhauer would agree). Life remains hard in Mississippi. No fancy California or Florida conspicuous consumer trappings here. We see countless examples of a generalization of social and physical insecurity, mixed with the vertiginous growth of the inequality that nourishes segregation, criminal behavior, and the dereliction of public institutions.

The poor in Mississippi are even more striking because they live at the heart of an infinitely wealthy empire. And the US system of social insecurity comes with a sociological add-on: when you fall outside the realm of a safety net, you risk being caught in a police and penal dragnet. The percentage of people in jail in the US is six to 10 times as high as in the European Union. About 5 percent of 18-year-old-plus Americans have problems with the law, and this includes one black man in five. Almost a third of the population has a criminal record.

When we're talking to a black man in a juke joint on Highway 61, inevitably there'll be a discussion of the fact that blacks are only 12 percent of the US population, but they make up the absolute majority behind bars. As a fellow says in a Greenville bar, "A black man has one chance in three to go to prison at least for one year during his lifetime. A white man has one chance in 23." Works by Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett have demonstrated that incarceration reduces the US unemployment rate: but for the rate to be maintained at such a low level means non-stop expansion of the penal system.

First it was the ghetto; now there's also the penal system to encircle a population considered for the most part dangerous because superfluous as much economically - Latino and Asian immigrants are more docile - as politically: poor black people don't vote, and furthermore the center of electoral gravity in the US has shifted to white suburbia. Jail - as well as the ghetto - works under the same logic of exclusion.

Memphis soul
The Mississippi Delta begins in Vicksburg ("The Red Carpet City of the South") and ends probably at the lobby of the grand Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee - where, at Lanksy's, Elvis used to have his best shirts customized. The owner, Bernard Lansky, is still there, selling exclusive silk rock 'n' roll motif shirts now made in China.

The National Civil Rights Museum, at the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, passionately recaptures all the crucial developments of the civil-rights movement. Room 306 can be viewed exactly as it was on April 4, 1968, the day of a shot that changed the world. The emotional impact is still tremendous. We are reminded that only 50 years ago in Little Rock, Arkansas, and only three years after the Supreme Court ruling ending school segregation, white people were marching shouting "Race mixing is communism" and "Save our Christian America". Now, Christian America is whipped into fear at the announcement of an evil, imminent attack by al-Qaeda - the successor to communism.

Memphis gave the United States the supermarket, the drive-in restaurant, Holiday Inn and FedEx, but such mercantile entrepreneurship does not mean there's no critical thinking. Scott, a musician, thinks that "Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should be sent by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia to a 10-year duck-hunting trip in an undisclosed location, so the nation would have time to recover from the problems they created". Tim Sampson, a writer for the Memphis Flyer, thinks that maybe "next time I'll go mountain biking with Mr Bush and a bunch of married homosexual couples and see if I can really distract him from what he's doing. Anyway, it's a good thing that he has that direct link to God, who speaks to him and tells him how to run the country." For Sam Dana, President George W Bush is "raising an awful lot of money to sell damaged goods. Good use of all this money might be to supplement the skimpy [military] service life insurance collected by families of all those he sent to get killed on a fool's errand."

Commenting on Abu Ghraib, writer Ed Wethers stresses that "Americans don't read. And we love both sex and the shame it makes us feel. What else can you expect from a nation that, on the one hand, has made Internet sex sites the biggest industry on the web and, on the other, falls into a red-faced faint over Janet Jackson's Superbowl boob?" At the Stax legend Isaac Hayes' ("The Black Moses") superb restaurant and nightclub near blues-as-Disneyland, former honky-tonk Beale Street, Raymond, a writer, says that "Bush has proven he's unqualified to lead. [John] Kerry has to prove he's qualified to lead." He's very worried about the future: "We are living in moral decline. We need someone to uplift us among the greedy and the gutless."

Graceland still attracts throngs of Elvis Presley worshippers. Very few visit the legendary Sun studios (Bob Dylan kissed the floor). But Highway 61, spiritually, cannot but end at Soulsville, or the corner of College and McLemore streets, the former headquarters of the legendary Stax label and since 2003 the site of the Museum of American Soul Music.

Jim Stewart, the co-founder of Stax with his sister Estelle Axton, born in the small farming community of Middletown, Tennessee, was a pure product of the white-ruled, agrarian, working-class South. Yet he created the pure, raw Stax sound out of an interracial company on the banks of the Mississippi River. Stewart used to say that "we were sitting in the middle of a highly segregated city, a highly hypocritical city, and we were in another world when we walked into that studio".

The studio is there, miraculously rebuilt inside the museum. Stax's musical esthetic - starting with only one track recording - was pure Mies van der Rohe: less is more. But live, it was nothing but frenzied emotional catharsis. This is the sound that through Otis Redding, at Monterey Pop in '67, finally made white America embrace black music. At Stax, the lament of the blues and the joy of gospel fused into the meanest backbeat on Earth. As Howard Grimes, a drummer at Stax and Hi labels, puts it: "Backbeat means the church feel, the handclap. When they didn't have pianos in church, you heard the stomping of the feet and the clapping of the hands. The foot was on the beat, and the handclap was on the 'and'."

The black-owned Lorraine Motel, where the Stax family used to hang out, and where Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd wrote the classic "In the Midnight Hour" in Wilson Pickett's room in barely 30 minutes, was a crucial crossroads of music and politics. But within six months, in 1968, Otis Redding's plane went down, Luther King was assassinated and Stax lost its catalogue to Atlantic Records. It rebounded. The museum, today, is a tribute to true American heroes - and to interracial understanding and mutual joy.

George W Bush will almost certainly capture Tennessee's 11 electoral votes: after all, he did beat Al Gore in 2000 in his home state. A few days ago, in another music capital, New Orleans, a black R&B musician said, before sipping his hurricane: "You know the problem with this Bush cat? He can't dance! He's got no moves. That's why we're in this mess."

One might read volumes in this sort of color-coded message to the stiff Bush administration. As the Stax motto goes: "Dance. Try it." And while you're at it, add a little Otis Redding touch, and try a little tenderness as well.

But the question always remains: Can a white man sing the blues?

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