Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.02.2006, Blaðsíða 39

In an attempt to put our time and money where our good
intentions were, the Reykjavík Grapevine travelled to the
poorest state in the US, Mississippi, in the wake of Hurricane
Rita. Our journey to Clarkdale, Mississippi, often described as a
rough backwater where Robert Johnson sold his soul and where
John Lee Hooker and Ike Turner fled from, was nothing near
an act of compassion—it was pure pleasure.
The Search for the Easy Story
There are, essentially, two main roads in Clarksdale,
Mississippi, even now, 70 years after American myth claims
Robert Johnson walked down to the town’s crossroads,
Highway 61 and 49, to trade his soul for the ability to play
guitar. It is the one place in the South where the tradition of
turn-before-you-come-to directions works fine.
So if you get to Clarksdale, Mississippi, you can get to
the Delta Blues Museum, which is, of course, at number one
Blues Alley, just off Delta Avenue. If you’re there, you can find
anything you ever wanted to know about the blues. On our
visit, we saw footage of the great Son House playing for friends
in a tiny studio in 1967, we saw Muddy Waters’ log cabin,
reconstructed inside the museum, the telegram The Rolling
Stones sent to Muddy for his birthday, thanking him for the
musical influence. Anything we ever wanted to see of BB King
or John Lee Hooker or Pinetop Perkins we could have seen.
The Delta Blues Museum is more than a place to look at
artefacts or even screen movies—in the weeks before our trip, I
had been listening to the series the museum sponsors called The
Uncensored History of the Blues, a podcast of pre-World War
II blues without parallel. But the museum itself didn’t do much
for me.
Like many a subpar journalist, I came to Mississippi
looking for easy writing about the blues. I want the great
bluesman RL Burnside telling me “I can’t outrun em, and I
can’t beat em, so I got to shoot em” to explain why he was
deputised to carry a hand gun. I want blues great Paul “Wine”
Jones shouting at various white people “Gimme a cigarette,
chinaman.” I want T-Model Ford telling me “I ain’t have a
white women til I was sixty, but when I did I liked it.” This
is all to say I wanted the new approach to blues, following
Matthew Johnson and his Fat Possum Record Label.
Of course, part of the reason we had come to Mississippi
was because Paul Jones and RL just died. But everything going
on in the blues these days pointed to a revival of the original
raunchiness, or exposure, really, to the raunchiness that white
audiences never heard before.
Through the Delta Blues Museum website, I had heard
the legendary “accidental” recording of Lucille Bogan’s Shave
em Dry from the early 1930s. Her white audience lyrics were
coy and boring; her accidental recording included the lines:
“I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb. I
got something between my legs that would make a dead man
come.” Along with less subtle lines like “I’ve fucked all night
and all the night before baby, and I feel just like I wanna fuck
some more.” These were, essentially, the opening lines. She got
raunchier.
But the Delta Blues Museum itself takes the high road.
I ask Maie Smith, the tour manager at the museum, about
the new breed of blues recordings, among them A Ass Pocket o’
Whiskey by RL Burnside and Jon Spencer.
An easygoing person, she turns her only scowl of our
conversation.
“It’s not right what they did. I know Fat Possum is doing
other good things, but that RL record wasn’t right. Getting an
old man drunk and up in front of a band.”
Still, Fat Possum does some things right, and she hands me
a flier for the surprise concert for the T-Model Ford concert we
were planning on attending and promises to meet us there.
Keep It Clean
More compelling than the Delta Blues Museum, and almost
as crammed as artefacts, is a local blues music and folk art
emporium, Cat Head Records. It is here that we try to do
prep work for our meeting with T-Model, a man so rugged
and bluesy that he’s been written about by Jay McInerney
as the baddest of the bad in blues—true, Jay McInerney, in
Bright Lights, Big City, demonstrated knowledge of coke and
models more than music, but he’s an American great, so that
must mean something. T-Model’s been drawn by Joe Sacco,
the cartoonist who carried the mantle from Crumb. The PR
statement about T-Model by Fat Possum has been copied
in dozens of magazines and it goes like this: “T-Model’s
credentials as a bluesman are impeccable; if anything he’s
overqualified...” and goes on to explain his time on a chain gang.
Sometimes you read about him getting his first guitar at the age
of 58 from his fifth wife, just before she left him. His first wife
left him with his own father.
Roger Stolle, owner of Cat Head, is as earnest a music fan
as you can find, and his affections for T-Model are remarkable.
He tells us of T-Model’s blue Lincoln, of T-Model’s trailer, in
which Roger has dined on occasion.
The stories of T-Model, his love of loose women, and his
taste for corn liquor are great but familiar. Or they’re great
because they’re familiar. What never comes up in these stories
is a description of his music. What’s more, while I always hear
coy references to T-Model’s lyrics—Roger tells me, “I tried to
interview him and all he told me were nasty things I couldn’t
dare print”—I never get specifics. What, exactly, is so nasty
that it can’t be printed in a blues magazine? Who thinks that a
discussion of the blues has to be clean?
In the hours that I spend in the store, I form the kind
of friendship with Roger that music geeks around the world
share, and the store is a testament to the blues. But two points
leave a certain taste. While at a blues session the night before,
I had talked with locals about the difficulties of Clarksdale:
methamphetamines have slammed into the town and done a
lot of damage, the education system in Mississippi is 49th of
the 50 states, and Clarksdale is one of the poorest cities in the
poorest state in the union. Other musicians have pointed out
that racism is so pointed that even southerners might blanch.
A drummer tells me, “You’re in the third world now.” Another
tells me, “There’s a whole lot of bluesmen here because there’s a
lot of blues—you don’t sing the blues when you’ve got money.”
I ask Roger if there are cultural differences between his
native Ohio and Mississippi, and he tells me “there’s no good
bread and I have to order my beer.” I ask him what kids here
listen to, and he says just hip-hop, but he doesn’t carry it in his
store. While we’re at Cat Head, nobody under 50 enters the
store.
Bright Lights, Big Bluesman
“Hey, criminal,” T-Model shouts at me, calling me to sit
down with him. “You got a girlfriend coming out tonight?”
“No. No, girls don’t like me,” I say.
“Well, T-Model is a Ladies Man. If you come out here
dancing with your lady, dancing to my music, and she looks
good, and she starts looking at me. Put a stamp on her. Put a
stamp right here (he traces his left nipple and breast), and if she
comes back you’re good. Cause if a woman flags me down, she
can get on!”
“And that’s for god damned sure,” Red shouts from the bar.
“And that’s for god damned sure,” T-Model repeats.
Red is the owner of the juke joint and a key part of the
attraction. When we came in, he shouted “White People!”
When we aren’t talking or drinking, he tells us that he’s sure
we work for George Bush. And until he passes out, he makes
a point of shouting or echoing “That’s for god damned sure”
along with T-Model.
Our photographer laughs, catching T-Model’s attention.
He is sent out to T-Model’s baby blue Lincoln to get a small
bottle of moonshine and T-Model’s amp.
“Yeah, I can’t read and can’t write, ain’t never been to
school a day in my life. My daddy started me on a mule when I
was six years old. I worked all of my life. I had a dirty daddy. He
beat me…”
And here I attempt to interrupt. Poignant as it is, I’m
familiar with the story. It has been retold in a number of
magazines, and even Joe Sacco’s comic, The Rude Blues, word
for word.
But T-Model is here to tell his story.
“Uh huh. Yeahhhh. Dirty man to me.” He says, getting
The Mythical Bluesman
in Clarksdale, Mississippi By Bart Cameron | Photos by Gúndi
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PART 2 OF 4Touring the American Egypt