It is about 17 miles from the room where Bessie Smith died to the grave of Sonny Boy Williamson, father of the blues harmonica. It would be hard to imagine a more obscure stretch of anonymous back roads. Yet to devotees of America’s musical heritage, this region, the cradle of the blues, is the equivalent of the great medieval pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostella in northern Spain, where St. James the Apostle, one of the first Christian martyrs, is reputedly buried.
Fans of an art form that preserves the history of what it was like to be black in America find their way here from halfway around the world. They navigate with mental maps inspired by long-ago guitar licks and lyrics heard on scratchy old records and lodged in memory ever since.
Looking for the abandoned country church yard where Sonny Boy rests, they might hum his minor-key warning to a straying lover:
“You gotta treat me better or it gotta be your funeral and my trial.”
At the site of Bessie Smith’s final hours, they may recall the Queen of the Blues’ lament:
“I’ve lived a life but nothing I’ve gained/ Each day I’m full of sorrow and pain.”
Though Americans come too, particularly in August when nearby Clarksdale hosts a blues-and-gospel weekend, the area is a year-round destination for Europeans, Australians and the Japanese. Foreigners are reverent toward the blues, along with its musical kissing cousin, jazz – the only two art forms created in America. They are mesmerized by the fact that the birthing place of the blues was one small section of the Mississippi River Delta.
Indeed, so many pilgrims from abroad turn up at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale that proprietor Frank Ratliff has had to set some limits. “I tell them, if they rent a room they can write their names in my guest book,” says Ratliff, who likes to be known as “Rat.” “Otherwise, I’ll tell them all the stories, but if I let everybody sign [the book], whether they stayed with me or not, I’d have to be buying a new book every week.”
Handing over the latest volume of the hotel’s register, he excuses himself to tend to the most recent arrivals, two young men from Ukraine. They have selected Rat’s second option: a tour of the premises, accompanied by a brief lecture on the birth of the blues, but no room and no sign-in.
The book reveals that he has recently hosted overnight guests from Italy, France, England, the Netherlands and Japan. They certainly weren’t attracted by the sumptuousness of the facilities. The Riverside Hotel, a rabbit warren of dimly lit rooms, rambles along the banks of the Sunflower River, which flows through a black neighborhood of Clarksdale. Every few feet, the corridors bump up or down a couple of stairs, a reflection of the structure having been added onto repeatedly. Once it housed the G.T. Thomas Hospital, which was the local infirmary for blacks in an era when white institutions were off-limits.
On Sept. 26, 1937, Bessie Smith was riding along nearby Mississippi Highway 61. The Depression and changing musical styles had sent her career into a tailspin, and she was on the first leg of what she hoped would be a comeback tour when the car plowed into a parked truck.
What happened next is a matter of dispute, one of the most notable in American musical history.
Some say the blues vocalist was turned away by a white hospital, even though she was in critical condition from loss of blood — a version of the story followed by playwright Edward Albee in “The Death of Bessie Smith.” Others counter that she briefly was treated by a white doctor, then transferred to the black infirmary that became the Riverside Hotel. In either case, Smith, once the highest-paid black performer in America, died in one of the infirmary’s shabby rooms, not much different from those now occupied by Rat’s permanent guests, who are older bachelors and widows.
“It’s kind of holy,” Rat said, pointing to a portrait of Smith propped up against the pillows on a double bed in the room where she died. “I don’t rent it out, unless I’m all filled up.”
Born in an infirmary
Just after World War II, Rat’s late mother, Z.L. Hill, converted the infirmary into a boarding house, which became a hangout for local musicians. If you were to believe his version of the story, rather than the musicologists’, the blues as a musical form was largely worked out on the premises.
“You want to see Robert Nighthawk’s suitcase?” Rat said, speaking of the late bluesman who pioneered the slide-guitar style of playing. “He asked my mother to hold it for him.”
Rat’s conception of the compass of blues history isn’t too far from reality. That Highway 61, where Bessie Smith’s car crashed, intersects Mississippi Highway 49, no more than a mile from the Riverside Hotel. The 1930s blues great Robert Johnson liked to tell audiences that, at that very crossroads, he sold his soul to Satan in return for being able to play the guitar faster than anyone before him.
“The devil came there and gave Robert his talent and told him he had eight more years on Earth,” one of his relatives told a musicologist researching the career of Johnson, who died at the age of 27.
In nearby Tutwiler, W.C. Handy, who wrote the blues anthem “St. Louis Blues,” first encountered the music that was to make him famous. In 1903, he saw at the train station there “a lean, loose jointed Negro” playing what Handy, in his autobiography, recalled as “the weirdest music I ever heard” but a sound nonetheless “haunting.”
Muddy Waters, who helped transplant the blues from rural Mississippi to Chicago, grew up on the Stovall Plantation, near Rolling Fork, at the southern end of the Delta. Howling Wolf was born in eastern Mississippi. But before migrating with his music to Chicago’s Maxwell Street, he too served a blues apprenticeship, playing towns along the Delta, the great series of switch-back turns the Mississippi makes as it forms the western border of its namesake state.
To properly appreciate the fact that so many bluesmen came from one section of one state, consider the following analogy: It would be as if Domenico Scarlatti, J.S. Bach, and Claude Debussy had been raised just up the road from each other.
Little has changed
Riding through the Delta, the very landscape seems to answer the question of why it would be home to the blues. When cotton was king, this was its realm — a place of great wealth, blinding poverty and not much in between. Even if the streets are empty, you immediately can tell if you are passing through a white or black settlement. The white towns are often picturesque, in a travel-magazine kind of way. The black towns are collections of shacks right out of a Walker Evans photograph of Depression-era America.
The land between the towns is so featureless, you might think a giant flat iron had been run across it. It is absolutely treeless, as if whatever human or geological hand shaped the topography didn’t want to waste a square inch on non-marketable vegetation. Even in late autumn with the crop mostly harvested, myriad stray balls of cotton parallel the highways, marking their edges with a continuous white line, like the chalk lines of an athletic field.
Today, cotton is harvested and baled by enormous mechanized devices that stand parked in the fields. But years ago, those operations had to be done by hand — which meant, in effect, thousands upon thousands of black hands. In pre-Civil War days, this was the homeland of the plantation system, a form of land ownership that hasn’t changed much since, notes Terry Freeze, who runs a bar and grill in Yazoo City.
“In this county, six families own 80 percent of the land,” he said. “It’s always been that way.”
A product of that hard-scrabble experience, blues lyrics spoke to men and women desperate to find a little love, a bit of consolation, in a hostile world. Alternately, they carried the dream of escape, as when Muddy Waters sang:
If I feel tomorrow, the way I feel today/I’m gonna pack my bags and make my getaway.
By the 1940s, more and more blacks were acting out that dream, riding the railroads that connect the Delta with Chicago. During World War II, northern industries were starved for workers, even as a wave of lynchings and the introduction of mechanized cotton cultivation made it clear there was no future for blacks in the South. With them on what came to be known as the Great Migration came the music born of that experience.
Discovered by young whites
Simply to be heard over the din of outdoor venues like Maxwell Street, those transplanted Delta musicians amplified the blues, hooking microphones and speakers to their guitars and harmonicas. Eventually, the innovation drew the attention of white musicians and gave birth to rock — a kind of mixed media based upon the experience of Southern blacks modified for suburban-bred adolescents. The more generous of those rock musicians acknowledge their indebtedness.
“If it had not been for you, we would not be where we are today,” the Rolling Stones telegraphed Muddy Waters on his birthday in 1975.
In fact, the relationship of bluesmen and their white disciples ironically mimicked the share-cropping system Waters and others had known in the Delta: Rock groups got the lion’s share of the musical harvest.
A lasting memory
Still, the pioneers of blues did get a kind of non-monetary compensation. The death of a few white musicians, like a George Harrison, is headline news. But rock groups come and go so fast it is hard to imagine many will be remembered decades after their passing — let alone that their resting places will be a shrine attracting the faithful to an obscure farm field in the rural South.
“Sure, I ought to be able to find his grave for you,” said Britt Brown, police chief in the tiny black hamlet of Tutwiler, Miss. “I used to belong to that church.”
He drove down one back lane, then another, until finally he caught a glimpse of the half dozen or so gravestones he was seeking. One of the markers had been erected by a company for which Sonny Boy Williamson had recorded. On Sonny Boy’s stone it is recorded that he died in 1965. The monument’s base displayed evidence he hasn’t been forgotten: half-a-dozen harmonicas other musicians had brought there. Someone had left a quarter-full bottle of a Canadian whiskey labeled “Rich and Rare.” Fans had written him notes. When the spring rains come, their ink no doubt will run. Yet those that get blown away are inevitably replaced by newer ones — like one recently left there by Garris and Mossel Strelt.
It said: “We came all the way from Belgium to honor you.”
