Adventures in the South - Clarksdale to Vicksburg

If you haven’t read any of the ‘Adventures in the South’ series before, it’s a travelogue from a trip me and my better half took down the Mississippi Delta back in 2013.  So if you want to go back to the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

Or if you want to remind yourself where we’d got to, here’s where we left off, with Clarksdale Part 2.

Sculpture, hoodoo style

Up in the morning to head further south to Vicksburg, but first we wanted to check out the Shack Up Inn, a couple of miles outside town.  The Inn is a rather clever business venture, turning a plantation into a niche motel by offering actual shotgun shacks – somewhat modernised - as chalets for visitors to stay in.

The inn had been our original choice of accommodation for Clarksdale, but we’d given up on the idea when their website indicated that it wasn’t possible to make one night bookings at the weekends.  Too late, we were informed by local guru Roger Stolle that this was a measure designed to dissuade locals from renting shacks for parties, and that international visitors are generally welcome for one night.

But despite missing out, we decided to give it a look anyway.  On one level, it’s a bit of a dubious proposition, selling the experience of plantation life as a tourist attraction.  But it still offers some insights.

There’s a spookiness about the disused railway running past the place, once upon a time presumably a vital link for shipping supplies in and cotton out.  The shacks themselves underline the spartan nature of plantation experience for African American slaves. And then there’s the bottle tree – an interesting piece of hoodoo, voodoo, or what you will, in which coloured bottles are hung on the branches of a bush or tree in order to attract and catch evil spirits.

As we’re wandering around, a couple emerge from one of the shacks, and right away we recognise each other as fellow customers from Red’s Blues Club the night before.  It turns out they’re an Anglo-American couple on honeymoon, making their way down to New Orleans like ourselves.  But whereas we’d headed off from Red’s around midnight, they’d stuck around for Anthony “Big A” Sherrod’s next set.  According to the groom, Big A’s brother - a guy rather bigger than Big A himself - had turned up to sit in on guitar.  “And then it turned into a crunking party”, he said.  They were sitting by the door, and when Red decided to nick out and take the air for a minute he actually turned to the English lad and asked him to pick up the admission from any new arrivals.

Your modern day, all mod cons shotgun shack

Damn.  Party night in Clarksdale, and we’d only given it half measures.  Our new friends let us have a squint at their shack, which had evidently been modernised by someone with a sense of irony.  The place is what an English estate agent (a realtor, US readers) would call “compact and bijou”, with an especially snug shower cubicle resplendent with a rough concrete floor.  And while the shack has a colour TV, they tell us that it only shows a blues music channel.

And so off we go, down Highway 61.  Our next stop is a little place called Rolling Fork.  This is actually the birthplace of Muddy Waters, but to be honest I’m not one for going and looking at birthplace markers.  We do pop in to the little town museum though, a one room affair overseen by two little old lady volunteers so delighted to have visitors that we’re scared they might lock us in.

The museum celebrates Muddy, of course, but also recounts the story about President Teddy Roosevelt that gave rise to the ‘Teddy Bear’.  Back in the early years of the 20th century Roosevelt, who had cultivated a reputation for being an outdoorsman, went on a hunting trip in the vicinity of Rolling Fork.  Apparently he had a notion to shoot a bear, so his guide obliged by catching one – and how you do that is an interesting question – and tying it to a tree for Roosevelt to shoot.  Roosevelt, to his credit, found the idea of shooting a trapped bear appalling, and ordered its release.  A political cartoon drawing on the incident attracted the attention of an enterprising manufacturer of toy bears, who asked Roosevelt if he could name his bears “Teddy Bears” in recognition of the incident – thereby launching one of the most successful marketing wheezes of all time.

Tipped off by the museum biddies, we drive a few miles down the road and stop for lunch on a porch by the bayou at the Onward Store, where we get catfish and fries washed down with real lemonade.

Then it really is off down the road to Vicksburg, where our plan is to stop off at the National Military Park on the way into town, a significant memorial to the Civil War, with cemeteries for the dead of both the Union and the Confederacy.  Situated at the foot of the Mississippi Delta, with high bluffs overlooking the river, Vicksburg was a crucial area during the Civil War.  As Lincoln himself put it, “Vicksburg is the key.  The war can never be brought to a close until the key is in our pocket.”  But as we drive in on Highway 61, it appears we’re on the wrong side of the very large park to gain access.  The afternoon is wearing on, so we cruise around the pretty-looking town centre, and then head to our accommodation.

We’re staying at a B&B called Anchuca, just up the hill from the town centre.  For the benefit of British readers, for whom a Bed & Breakfast is at the lower end of the accommodation spectrum, I should explain that in the States B&B’s are more upmarket, boutique propositions.  So boutique that in this case we have a suite of rooms, the Jackson Suite, that is named after Andrew Jackson, the Confederate President who stayed in it following his release from prison after the end of the war, and gave a speech to friends from the balcony.

Heading out again on foot in the late afternoon heat, we go for a wander round town.  This must be a thoroughly alien notion to locals, as a fella walking along the other side of the street looks over at us, smiles, and calls out, “Hi folks.  Enjoying your vacation?”  Mad dogs and Scots people, it seems, go out in the midsummer sunshine.

And it has to be said they’ve got a point.  It’s not just the heat, it’s the humidity, which seems to have been ratcheted up a notch or few since we left Clarksdale.  So we potter around town picking up bits and pieces of history, and abandon plans to head back to Anchuca and freshen up before coming out again for the evening.  What would be the point when we’d be melting again within ten minutes?

Monsour's - Southern hospitality comes with the drinks

Instead we camp out in 'Monsour’s at the Biscuit Company', a bar-cum-eatery where we get ourselves well fed and watered for the remainder of the evening.  We make friends with the bar staff and the owner, and chat about the South, and I have enough to drink to get up and do a bad karaoke version of Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home To Me’.  At the end of the night the owner insists on one of the bar staff giving us a lift up the road, because apparently us Brits are being naïve to think it would be safe to walk home in the dark - but it's incredibly hospitable of them.

So we don’t encounter any live music in Vicksburg.  But since then it’s become apparent to me that the centre of town isn’t where you’ll find that action in a lot of towns like Vicksburg.  Instead the key venue for musicians like the local hero and internationally successful Mr Sipp is the Ameristar Casino a little way south of town.  That’s where the money is, but unfortunately it doesn’t really fit the romantic preconceptions of blues pilgrims from afar, does it?

Adventures in the South - Clarksdale, Part 2

After dropping off our car and bags at the Comfort Inn outside town, we got a cab back with the friendly local taxi driver.  “I had some folks from England ride with me the other day,” he said.  “They say you don’t got no churches over there!”

“Well, we do,” we replied.  “But they tend to be bigger, and there aren’t as many of them.”  This is undoubtedly true, given that in small southern towns like Clarksdale there seems to a church of some description on every other street corner, painted white and about the same size as a family house.

Once in town, we settled into the Yazoo Pass for some grub, but as they didn’t sell wine I

Al fresco cuisine in Sunflower Avenue

had to do a quick sprint round to the local off-licence for a bottle of vino.  Fed and watered, we then wandered round to Ground Zero for a drink, where a trio of old fellas were sat down on stage doing their thing, rather incongruously accompanied by a willowy young woman standing to one side, playing a small keyboard and shaking her tush.  Having given them the time of day, we decided to follow Roger Stolle’s tip, and so headed off to Red’s Blues Club.

Red’s is both literally and metaphorically “across the tracks”, in the sense that it is both the other side of the defunct railroad, and in the black part of town - not that the latter distinction meant much to us.  Strolling along Sunflower Avenue in the evening heat, initially there was no real sign of Red’s.  There was, though, a guy operating a dirty great smoking barbecue in the street, and when we asked after Red’s he jerked a thumb at a nondescript door and said “In there.”

As Steve Cheseborough notes in his guide Blues Traveling, “From the outside, Red’s looks like it has been closed for years.  But make sure to stop in on a Friday or Saturday night for excellent live blues in a super-authentic jook joint.  So authentic, in fact, that the place seems about to fall apart.  Insulation and ceiling tiles are falling from the ceiling, and it leaks when it rains.”

Well, it wasn’t raining when we were there, so no leaks were in evidence, but otherwise all

"Big A" gives it big licks in Red's Blues Club

of the above rings true.  Playing that night were Anthony “Big A” Sherrod and the Blues All-Stars, and although their set was mostly made up of blues standards from all points of the compass, rather than stuff specific to the Delta, they certainly delivered the goods.

So we were served up stuff like Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’ (admittedly the Wolf came from these parts), Jimmy Reed’s ‘Big Boss Man’, and Rosco Gordon’s ‘Just A Little Bit’ (aka ‘Teeny Weeny Bit Of Your Love’), but if the All-Stars on bass and drums were content to sit back and quietly take care of business, “Big A” was out there selling it, with a characterful voice and impressive lead guitar work.

With a long lead on his guitar, Sherrod was often out among the small audience as he played, cooking up an atmosphere and encouraging people to get up and dance, and punctuating songs with his catchphrase, “Wait a minute”.  It may not have been the most original set, but the feel of the blues ran through it like a golden thread, making it well worth paying a few bucks for one of his CDs.

When they took a break around midnight we reckoned it was time for us to make a move and get a cab back to the hotel, conscious of the longer drive we had planned for the next day.  This, it would turn out, was a mistake, as the next thrilling instalment will reveal.

If you want to read ‘Adventures in the South’ from the start, here’s the Prologue. If you want to read more about Clarksdale, here’s Part 1.

Adventures in the South - Clarksdale, Part 1

We were about ten minutes away on Highway 61 when the iPod’s American playlist coughed up the title track of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s album ‘Walking Into Clarksdale’.  The song was appropriate not just because of it’s timing, but because in a sense the song was the inspiration for being here in the first place.  When the album came out I had read a feature in which Plant (I’d guess, Page being a less likely interviewee) explained the inspiration for the song.  That article gave a name to the kind of small town in the South that had real significance in the development of the blues, and also gave me the notion for the first time of travelling down the Mississippi.

A short while later we parked up to take some pictures at one of the key reasons Clarksdale has long been a key focal point in blues folklore – ‘the Crossroads’.  Later that afternoon it was to be

The Crossroads - no devil in sight

the subject of an entertaining conversation with Roger Stolle, owner of Cat’s Head Delta Blues and Folk in the town centre.  In the course of giving us some directions, Roger referred in a withering tone to “the so-called Crossroads”.  I laughed in response, and Jill asked why.  Between us Roger and I explained that people often attributed the significance of Clarksdale’s crossroads to being the location of Robert Johnson’s legendary midnight deal with the devil, but that this was nonsense.

“So why did we bother to stop there?” asked Jill.

“Oh, you’ve still got to go and get a picture!” laughed Roger.

And you do, because the real significance of the Crossroads is that is the intersection between Highway 61 and Highway 49, two key roads that carried many a bluesman out of the Deep South towards a new life in northern cities such as Chicago, during the Great Migration.  No, there’s not much to it, and precious little sense of mystique as you dodge traffic to get a picture of yourself taken with the tell-tale signage, but it’s still an iconic spot in blues history.

Leaving the crossroads, we carried on into town to the Delta Blues Museum, a neat and worthwhile attraction.  Founded back in 1979, it moved to its current location in the old railway depot in 1999, and has an interesting collection of blues memorabilia, and one key exhibit – the house in which Muddy Waters grew up at the Stovall Farm plantation, reconstructed from the original rough and ready timbers.  I say house, but it is the definitive shotgun shack, essentially one room, and with cracks between the planks of the walls that may well have been filled and covered with nothing more than paper.

There is another exhibit that can often be seen in the museum, when it’s not touring Hard Rock Cafes around the country in order to raise money – the “Muddywood Guitar” designed by Billy Gibbons and made from a cypress timber recovered from Muddy’s cabin. It’s a relatively simple but idiosyncratic design that I’d describe as a squared-off cross between a Telecaster and a Firebird, although I imagine nobody would agree with me.  Coloured white, it features a Mississippi River graphic painted on the neck and body, because as Billy Gibbons put, painting it blue would be “too corny”.

We left as a group of day tripping Stax students were scurrying around taking the place in, and as we exited I picked up a copy of Steve Cheseborough’s excellent book Blues Travelling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues.  Have to say I’m not that interested in the gravestones of long-dead bluesmen, but the book provides a wealth of information about towns and characters instrumental in the development of the blues.

Outside Ground Zero

Strolling around the town centre, it was striking how quiet it was.  Partly this was because of the blistering midsummer heat, but it was also noticeable how many retail units lay empty.  Much of the town’s economy seems to have migrated to the strip mall outside town where our hotel was located.  But sadly the place also just seems to be up against it.

We wandered into Ground Zero, the bar and venue that gets plenty of attention because it’s co-owned by Morgan Freeman, and had a quiet drink out of the sun.  It’s a good space, with a lengthy bar down one side.  But it’s also a bit odd – a refurbished and buffed up bar that features floor to ceiling graffiti, and toilet cubicles with what seem like shower curtains for doors.  Seems to me this is taking fake authenticity a bit too far, though the place does provide another focal point for the town.

Roger Stolle’s store, meanwhile, is a treasure trove of blues and folk-art artefacts, and the man himself, a noted ambassador for the blues, is more than happy to dispense directions and advice.  When we mentioned that we were hoping to take in some music that night, he immediately produced a leaflet listing the week’s gigs, and recommended us to take in Anthony “Big A” Sherrod and the Blues All-Stars, who were playing at Red’s Blues Club.  Which, as it turned out, was a good call.

You can find Part 2 of our Clarksdale visit here.