‘The Blues Came Walkin’
Two friends on an adventure through the relentlessly deep history & juke joint culture of the Mississippi Delta
Chills. Absolute chills, as we step into the dim red glow. The same feeling that ran through me five years earlier, watching bluesman Leo “Bud” Welch enter this hallowed space. But that was as part of a short documentary — and this was the real thing. I’d told myself right then and there, I was going to Clarksdale, Mississippi. To that place — Red’s juke joint.
A small, dim room, lit only by neon music notes, hung haphazardly over the four walls, silhouetting a stack of random boxes, discarded stools and who knows what else beside the performance space. There’s no stage. Just an old area rug spread across the concrete floor, covered with a collection of amplifiers, microphones and an endless spaghetti junction of cords running every which way. A simple drum kit and four old wooden chairs, seemingly borrowed from the tables that filled the rest of the room.
Another assortment of chairs lined the wall nearest the entrance, against a backdrop of old, faded photographs— snapshots of bluesmen, guests and other moments captured here over the past several decades. The remaining three walls, covered with layers of photos, banners and promo posters from shows gone by — Big Jack Johnson, Robert “Wolfman” Belfour, Wesley Junebug Jefferson, Terry Harmonica Bean, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, Big George Brock, James “Super Chikan” Johnson. Even a 90th birthday banner from 10 years earlier, celebrating the now-deceased T-Model Ford.
Overhead, a collection of exposed, old wooden ceiling slats are flanked by patches of stained, sagging ceiling tiles. A few large tarps are stretched above the stage area, holding back loose ceiling insulation — and, likely, the occasional raindrop. The sound of creaking floor boards at the back of the venue, drowned out by the chatter of the growing audience. Only to be replaced by a good old-fashioned Delta blues soaking, compliments of the Lucious Spiller Band.
My buddy Doug flew from his home in Arizona to my place in Northwest Arkansas, and we made the five-hour trek from there to the heart of the Mississippi Delta to absorb as much of the blues experience and history as we possibly could. And, here we are, kicking it off with a four-plus-hour, out-of-body experience in the most authentic, imperfectly perfect environment we could ever have imagined.
Red’s is one of the last authentic juke joints remaining in Mississippi — or anywhere. A lifeline to when sharecroppers stepped out of the cotton fields and into the hundreds of tiny juke joints that informally sprung up across the state and the south during prohibition and through the middle part of the 1900s. On Friday and Saturday nights, this is where they gathered, to listen to live music, dance, gamble and breathe.
The fact is, the Delta blues is the foundation of American music. It’s a connection to slavery. To sharecroppers. To segregation. Songs born of brutal heat and oppressive working conditions in the cotton fields — lifted into juke joints and onto front porches across the south. It’s the voice of a culture. A soundtrack of a people, so deep and inspiring that it drew me and one of my best friends to Red’s juke joint more than a century after the genre was conceived.
That’s the pulse that lives on at Red’s. Each week, people from across the country and around the world are drawn to this place. Over the years, blues legends like Pinetop Perkins have been spotted in the audience. According to Roger Stolle, owner of Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art in Clarksdale, Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant has popped into Red’s on several occasions to experience one of the last authentic jukes left on the planet. It’s a window into the very communities and region where it all began.
Clarksdale
Just a few short blocks beyond the weathered door of Red’s juke joint sits the heart of downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi. This town of just 14,000 is best known for the legendary crossroads of U.S. Highways 61 and 49, where many believe a 19-year-old Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in 1930 for the ability to play the blues like no other. While I don’t subscribe to that belief, there’s no denying this community — and the Delta region — is ground zero for the roots of American music.
Sam Cooke was born in Clarksdale. Notable bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Willie Brown, Pinetop Perkins, Big Jack Johnson and others walked these streets. And the earliest Delta blues pioneers— like Charley Patton and Son House — were just a handful of miles away.
Long gone are the days when thousands of sharecroppers worked the endless sea of cotton fields that cover the Delta landscape. The invention of the Cotton Gin, the promise of work and better lives drew a significant percentage of the population north to cities like St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit, forever changing the Delta.
But it’s clear Clarksdale has fully embraced its deep history, which remains on display around literally every corner.
Riverside Hotel: For example, from the 1940s into the 1960s, the Riverside Hotel served as a lodging hot spot for traveling musicians like Duke Ellington and Howlin’ Wolf, while also serving as a short-term home for bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson II and Robert Nighthawk. In fact, the building originally opened as GT Thomas Hospital, where Ike Turner was born in 1931 and where singer Bessie Smith died following an auto accident in 1937.
WROX: There are several Mississippi Blues Trail markers sprinkled throughout downtown Clarksdale, including one outside 257 Delta Ave., which housed WROX Radio, a prominent blues radio station in the region. WROX went on the air in 1944 and broadcast from this downtown building from 1945 to 1955. According to the trail marker, disc jockey Early “Soul Man” Wright became the top on-air personality in the Delta and one of the first black deejays in the country. Among the notable musicians who performed or hosted programs on-air were Ike Turner, Robert Nighthawk, Dr. Isaiah Ross, Jackie Brenston, Sonny Boy Williamson II and others.
Ground Zero: Just a few blocks away, a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks at one end of downtown, stands Ground Zero Blues Club. While not a juke joint, this repurposed building now serves as Clarksdale’s largest music venue and features live blues and food several nights each week. Co-owned by actor and Mississippi resident Morgan Freeman, it has attracted quite a bit of attention from blues fans visiting from across the country and around the world.
Deak’s: Deak Harp, a blues harmonica player and multi-instrumentalist who toured the world, has settled in Clarksdale, where he operates one of the only brick-and-mortar custom harmonica repair shops in the country. Five seconds into the video below and you can feel the blues oozing out of Deak and his shop. It’s not uncommon to see musicians like Deak and even the great Charlie Musselwhite walking the downtown streets or popping up in local blues clubs or juke joints — often times sitting in with the featured bands.
Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art: Cat Head has become an absolute Delta fixture, stocked floor to ceiling with blues recordings, folk art, souvenirs, photographs, books, magazines and more. More often than not, there’s a musician performing on the patio outside the front door — and it’s THE place to find out who’s playing where any week, any day, any time. Owner Roger Stolle is a transplant from Ohio who walked away from a career in big-agency marketing to dedicate his life to promoting Clarksdale, while carrying forward the history of the Delta blues.
The railroad: At one end of downtown Clarksdale, across from Ground Zero Blues Club, is the very railroad and train depot that took Muddy Waters north to Chicago in 1943, where he would go on to electrify the blues and become one of the most recognizable names the genre has ever known. This same railroad passed through the small downtowns of so many communities across the Delta, taking musicians, sharecroppers and their families from town to town. The tracks eventually spurred the mass migration of residents to the northern states, spreading the blues to the rest of the country.
Delta Blues Museum: One of those former railroad depot buildings now serves as the Delta Blues Museum, providing an amazing walk through the history of the Delta blues and its many musicians — from household names like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Mississippi Fred McDowell, to some of the more obscure artists responsible for developing America’s music. Artifacts, instruments, rare photos — even the core structure of what once served as Muddy Waters’ modest sharecropper cabin, where he grew up and lived the majority of his life prior to moving to Chicago, is on display at the museum.
Stovall Plantation
As cool as the preserved structure of Muddy Waters’ sharecropper cabin is to see on display inside the Delta Blues Museum, the very piece of land upon which it stood is fewer than 10 miles north of Clarksdale. Pulling up to the homesite is like a holy experience — the Mississippi Blues Trail marker in the foreground, and a view into the very fields Muddy Waters worked on the Stovall Plantation. The fields that inspired his earliest songs, just a handful of miles away from the juke joint where he first heard Son House play, which prompted him to switch from harmonica to guitar.
It’s the same homesite where Alan Lomax, a gentleman traveling the south looking for musicians to record for the Library of Congress, found Muddy Waters. Another local bluesman, David Honeyboy Edwards, told Lomax he had to hear Muddy play. Upon his arrival, Lomax set up his equipment and recorded Muddy doing a series of interviews and songs, which were shared widely beyond the Delta, landing him on a train to Chicago where he was signed by Chess Records and became a legend.
Dockery Farms
No matter what direction you go from there, blues history hangs thick over the Delta landscape. In fact, just 50 miles south of Stovall sits Dockery Farms, an enormous plantation that many, including the great BB King, have dubbed “the birthplace of the blues.”
Along Highway 8 just outside the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, Dockery was home to 3,000–4,000 sharecroppers and their families at its height in the early-to-mid 1900s. According to William Ferris’ book, Blues From The Delta, “During the post-Civil War period, thousands of black freed-men migrated to the Delta to clear and farm its fields. They were recruited by labor agents who promised higher wages and civil rights which had been lost in other parts of the state. The Delta economy was founded upon the labor of blacks who cleared fields, built levees to protect them from floods, and cultivated their crops.”
The piece of Dockery that has been preserved to this day — which includes a commissary storage building, cotton gin, cotton shed, hay barn, seed house, a mule trough station, and a storage shed — served as the central gathering spot for the community of workers on weekends. Saturdays were for gathering around live music — and Charley Patton, known as the father of the Delta blues, was among the regular performers here. Patton developed a slide guitar style, fretting it with a pocketknife or a brass tube or bottleneck. He stomped his feet while playing and his vocals often mimicked the back-and-forth exchanges that were common between groups of sharecroppers in the cotton fields.
Aspiring bluesmen who went on to become household names, like Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Bukka White, came here to learn directly from Patton. Other blues pioneers like Robert Johnson and Son House performed at Dockery, and Pops Staples, patriarch of the Staple Singers, grew up on the plantation. Walking the property today is essentially like wandering the ghost town of the Delta blues.
Holly Ridge/Charley Patton’s grave
About 35 miles away, Patton’s final resting place is in an unassuming cemetery in the tiny community of Holly Ridge. Flanked by an odd collection of farm equipment storage buildings and a quiet road with a few small homes, the very first Mississippi Blues Trail marker ever placed advertises that his headstone can be found in this rural cemetery. Finding the headstone, however, was anything but easy.
Doug and I walked the entire cemetery a few times before we finally found what we’d come to see. The soggy plot of uneven ground includes a couple hundred headstones, arranged in a fairly unorganized manner. We noticed several other headstones belonging to lesser known, local bluesmen, dating back as far as the early 1900s. But then we found it — Patton’s grave, featuring a reproduction of one of the only known photos of the legend, and the inscription “The voice of the Delta: The foremost performer of early Mississippi blues, whose songs became the cornerstones of American music.”
That line, “… whose songs became the cornerstones of American music.” Let the significance of those words sink in.
That kept repeating in my head, along with the lyrics to “A Spoonful Blues,” a Patton favorite that Doug and I had been listening to as we rolled into Holly Ridge. Yet, other than the trail marker at the opposite end of the cemetery, there was no special treatment. Just a simple headstone, not much larger than the others, a short distance from the lone tree on the property.
Greenwood/Robert Johnson’s grave
Just as significant was the opportunity to visit the grave of the legendary Robert Johnson — a man forever surrounded by mystery. The man whose legend has become larger than life with the continued retelling of the crossroads story. The man who is considered to be one of — if not THE — biggest influence in the history of the blues.
The mystery around Robert Johnson is so huge that he has three headstones, in three different cemeteries, spread across the Delta, from Quito, to Morgan City, to this location just outside Greenwood. Within the past couple of decades, though, historians tracked down and interviewed the husband and wife who were hired to dig Johnson’s grave in 1938. So, this headstone, at the back of the Little Zion Church cemetery, surrounded by nothing but open fields in every direction, is the accepted final resting place. Which makes a great deal of sense, as the Three Forks Store juke joint where Johnson was poisoned following his final performance is only a short distance away.
Po Monkey’s
While I was overjoyed to see with my own eyes how the Dockery Farms site is being cared for and preserved, I struggled mightily with the condition I found Po Monkey’s in. A former sharecropper’s cabin turned juke joint, Po Monkey’s was one of the few jukes to continue operating into the 2000s. But its doors were locked for good shortly after the passing of its owner, Willie “Po Monkey” Seaberry on July 14, 2016.
Located in the tiny rural community of Merigold, Po Monkey’s feels powerful and significant. Tucked alongside a dirt road, literally in the middle of a cotton field, with nothing but rows of dirt stretching as far as the eye can see, you can’t help but wonder how anyone ever found the place. But they did. For decades, this venue served as a hugely popular gathering spot for folks across the Delta. Most nights that it was open, a DJ spun soul blues music, but live blues was featured on Thursday nights. People drank, played pool, danced and absorbed the music. And Po Monkey himself was always there to greet guests, often dressed head to toe in one of his wild suits and hats.
As the years passed, the old juke joint began attracting the attention of blues fans around the world. It was not uncommon to have visitors from multiples states and countries on any given night during its last few decades of operation. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Po Monkey’s is quickly being reclaimed by the Earth. The storage structures behind the venue have already toppled over. A large chunk of the tin roof was resting in the weeds about 30 yards away. And the wooden exterior walls were beyond weathered and falling apart. The signs and posters that covered the front exterior wall are long gone. Everything … is slowly crumbling.
Doug and I explored the site, walked around back and even snapped a few Polaroids — because Po Monkey’s is a reason to snap a Polaroid if there ever was one. But after about an hour of that, we stood in silence for 15 or so minutes, staring through the emotions of the moment. I’m not sure what was going on in Doug’s head, but a single line from the bible was replaying in mine:
“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
Over. And over. And over again.
Greenville & Leland
Doug and I rolled on, south on U.S. Highway 61, known internationally as The Blues Highway, to Greenville. Nestled near the banks of the muddy Mississippi River, this town — and a long stretch of Nelson Street, in particular — was home to an incredible number of small clubs and juke joints. While most of those venues and buildings no longer exist today, there was a time decades ago when top-notch bluesmen like Little Milton, Charley Booker, Willie Love, Little Bill Wallace, T-Model Ford, and a number of top touring acts, would carry the beat on Nelson Street when the sun went down.
A short distance east, where the railroad passes through downtown Leland, sits the intersection of highways 10 and 61, one of the most storied — and profitable — busking corners for Delta bluesmen during the first half of the 20th century. On the weekends, families from across the Delta would ride the rail into downtown Leland to shop, and that flood of foot traffic drew bluesmen to set up on and around that intersection. According to the Leland Chamber of Commerce, at its peak, more than 150 bluesmen lived within 100 miles of Leland. A few of the closest ones included Sonny Boy Nelson, Charlie Booker, Lil’ Dave Thompson, Eddie Cusic, Johnny Horton, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Jimmie Reed, Boogaloo Ames, Little Milton and James “Son” Thomas.
But it wasn’t all about busking in Leland during the early days of the blues. Several clubs regularly featured live blues, including Ruby’s Night Spot, for which a Mississippi Blues Trail marker has been erected to celebrate the site. But, in his book, Blues From The Delta, William Ferris explains that one of the most popular blues venues for locals was a back room within the home of a gentleman known as Poppa Jazz, located on Kent’s Alley, between Fifth and Sixth streets:
“During the day, visitors moved in and out of the home, buying corn whiskey. When night came, activity shifted to the back of the home as singers and dancers gathered in his blues room. The room was dimly lit and joined to an unlit room where the corn whiskey was kept in a refrigerator. Poppa Jazz stood between the two rooms and would get a drink for whomever needed one as the musicians performed.”
James “Son” Thomas was a regular performer at these back-room gatherings, and the room served as a centerpiece of the Leland blues community until Poppa’s passing in 1974.
Indianola
Just 16 miles east on Highway 82 is Indianola, home of the late, great B.B. King. By the time Doug and I rolled into town, the B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center, which occupies the restored railroad depot and beautiful surrounding campus, had closed for the day. But it was obvious this is still B.B.’s community, eight years after his passing. Several accounts talk about how B.B. busked at the corner of Second and Church streets in his younger days, and how after rising to international stardom, he still returned each year to perform for his hometown.
Just a few blocks away, in an otherwise residential neighborhood, stands the historic Club Ebony. A night club established in 1947 and later owned by B.B. King himself, Ebony was a regular stop on the Chitlin Circuit, a loose network of performance stages, juke joints and clubs that showcased African American performers during the 1930s through 1960s.
According to the Mississippi Blues Trail archives, “Club Ebony is one of the South’s most important African American nightclubs, built just after the end of World War II by Indianola entrepreneur Johnny Jones. Under Jones and successive owners, the club showcased Ray Charles, Count Basie, B. B. King, Bobby Bland, Little Milton, Albert King, Willie Clayton, and many other legendary acts.” It closed shortly after B.B.’s death in 2015, but the building continues to be well maintained and cared for.
Tutweiler
A short drive north on U.S. Highway 49 from Robert Johnson’s gravesite— and just a handful of miles south of Clarksdale — sits the tiny town of Tutweiler. It may appear to be a blip on the map, possibly even missed altogether if you turn your head at the wrong moment. But the town named after Tom Tutweiler, a civil engineer for a local railroad company, in the late 1800s, is hardly small when it comes to blues history.
John Lee Hooker was born here in 1917. And, the fact he walked these very same streets as a kid ran through my head as I stepped foot out of the car in the tiny downtown. This place was undoubtedly still in his blood when he migrated north to Detroit and built a name for himself with his electric boogie blues. Just as it was in Sonny Boy Williamson II, the famed blues songwriter and harmonica player who’s buried here.
But you have to roll the calendar back to 1903 to zero in on Tutweiler’s most historic tie to the Delta blues. It was then that WC Handy, who went on to become Memphis’ first great songwriter and international star, recalled hearing a man playing “the weirdest music I ever heard” at the train station. The “lean, loose-jointed Negro,” as Handy described him in his 1941 autobiography, “used a knife as a slide for his guitar while repeating the phrase ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’” This is a reference to the town of Moorhead, where the Southern and Yazoo and the Mississippi Valley lines intersected.
Handy based his Yellow Dog Blues and other compositions on the music he heard in the area, and their popularity would earn him the title of Father of the Blues. He penned Memphis Blues, the first commercially successful blues song, in 1912, and made his fortune in 1914 by writing and publishing St. Louis Blues.
Seriously, Doug and I spent an entire weekend visiting communities, cotton fields and old haunts across the Delta, and stories like these were literally surfacing everywhere. This region, held down and dealt every restriction and injustice imaginable — and then some — managed to exhale all of that into the roots that have fed every generation of American music since. Its place in history and enduring influence are almost overwhelming.
Saturday night at Red’s
With a flood of emotions stewing around inside our souls, Doug and I decided to chase two full days of Delta exploration with a second-consecutive night at Red’s juke joint. Tonight, Anthony “Big A” Sherrod and the All Stars were playing — and our fascination with this special place went through the roof.
I’m told “Big A” literally grew up at Red’s, having seen his first show there at age 5. All I know is that man and his band made it perfectly clear the blues are NOT dead. The way the notes danced out of his guitar — how he belted out lyrics — how he established himself as the ultimate showman … all of it brought a life, soul and depth that had Doug and I shouting “HELL YEAH” back at the band with regularity. The energy and freedom the band exhaled felt like the first time I heard Jimi Hendrix. The way they played off each other — we couldn’t afford to take our eyes off of them the entire night. Before long, “Big A” was off his seat and moving through the audience. Sparking conversations between songs. Teasing guests. Getting people up and dancing. Taking flight into improv jams. Dropping back into soulful grooves.
The great Charlie Musselwhite, who was in the audience on this night, was wearing a smile drenched in satisfaction. There’s a reason he came out tonight. There’s a reason the entire audience was shouting back and forth with Big A and the All Stars. Even Red Paden, the owner and namesake of Red’s juke joint, was grooving along.
All of us, no matter our differences, our ages, our backgrounds, our anything … were riding the same wave of Delta blues authenticity. And nobody wanted it to end.
But when it did, I walked out into the Mississippi Delta air with a renewed confidence. A matter of hours earlier, I’d been wrestling with what happens to the blues — to this huge piece of American history — when a place like Red’s vanishes? Or when Po Monkey’s returns to dust? Or if a developer decides to plow part of the historic Stovall Plantation under? “Big A’s” performance reminded me that the blues is a feeling, not a building. It was born before juke joints. It has endured the most unimaginable hardships. It’s more than music. It’s our history. It’s part of the human experience.
Return to Stovall
Before rolling out of the Delta the following day, Doug and I returned to the Stovall Plantation one more time. We queued up the recordings Alan Lomax made while visiting with Muddy Waters on the legendary day in 1942. Those songs and interviews were pumping through our hand-held Bluetooth speaker. Our feet on the very slice of Earth where Muddy’s cabin once stood. Our eyes looking out at the very fields that inspired the songs we were listening to.
Ghosts of Mississippi
Being here — in Clarksdale and the Mississippi Delta — makes it perfectly clear it would have been impossible for the blues to originate anywhere else. In a region some have dubbed “the most southern place on Earth.” It feels like a different world — a world with a history and tortured authenticity that carries a significance, a weight, and a reverence so deep it pulls at all your emotions. As I write these words, these opening lyrics from the SteelDrivers’ song, “Ghosts of Mississippi,” run through my mind:
Late one night behind corn whiskey
I fell asleep with a guitar in my hand
I dreamed about the ghosts of Mississippi
And the blues came walkin’ like a man
It’s equal parts magical and powerful that more than a century after the roots of American music were planted in these cotton fields, the Delta blues continue to stoke the souls of musicians — and common folks like Doug and I — the world over.
