Justice, the Blues, and Several Journeys Through the Mississippi Delta
On a July afternoon in 1964, a gaunt man wearing a suit jacket and the wide-brimmed hat of a preacher stepped onto the low pallet stage of the Newport Folk Festival. He was unknown to most of the audience, who sat cross-legged in the grass, waiting curiously. They were mostly young, mostly Caucasian. The men wore polo shirts and close-cropped haircuts. The women wore modest summer dresses. This was not yet a counterculture, though among them, a sentiment was starting to coalesce, one that questioned the orthodoxies of American social and political life.
This man who sat before them with an acoustic guitar across his knee was plainly of a different world. The deep lines in his face spoke not only to more years, but harder ones. In a high, haunting voice, he began to sing:
A few months earlier, Nehemiah Curtis James, better known as Skip James, had been lying in a hospital bed in Tunica, MS, suffering from cancer and forgotten by culture at large, his heyday as a pre-war blues player preserved only on a handful of obscure 78 rpm records. He’d been discovered there by a group of blues-obsessed young men led by John Fahey (soon to be a guitar legend in his own right), who’d been making yearly pilgrimages from Berkeley to the Mississippi Delta to search for country blues legends who’d faded into obscurity.
Unbeknownst to Fahey, his group was not unique in their mission. Only a few miles north, a different carload of young, white blues enthusiasts from north of the Mason-Dixon was combing Mississippi in search of another lost voice. This group was bent on finding Son House, another legend who sang with almost demonic intensity and seemed to beat the notes out of his guitar. This mission, too, turned out to be successful; indeed, Son House also appeared at the 1964 Newport Festival.
The rediscoveries of Skip James and Son House were crucial moments in the blues revival of the 1960s. But this is only half of the story told in the documentary Two Trains Runnin’ (2016). The other story, which also concerns an expedition of sorts, is somewhat graver. For Mississippi in the 1960s was not simply a mythic land of lost blues singers, Spanish moss, and the devil at the crossroads. It was a fierce civil rights battleground, in which segregation and white supremacy was still very much the law of the land, and activists were met with intimidation, assaults, bombings, and murders, undertaken by members of law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan.
During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, a coalition of civil rights organizations initiated a campaign to register black voters in Mississippi, enlisting help from hundreds of Northern college students. As the two groups of blues fans went looking for their musical idols, a group of three activists en route to the site of a torched church in Meridian, MS were intercepted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in an incident known as the Mississippi Burning murders.
What did it mean that these events all took place in the same period of time, within the same swath of land? How did they presage the cultural upheavals of the late ‘60s? Today, at a moment where pop culture draws heavily from African American musical and cultural idioms while racism remains alive and well, how do entertainment and politics entwine?
We’ll consider these questions at our screening of Two Trains Runnin’ on Thursday, May 31. The evening will be opened by a live performance by Philadelphia bluesman Georgie “The Blacksmith” Bonds. Stay with us after the film for a discussion featuring Georgie Bonds; Jonny Meister, host of WXPN’s The Blues Show; and Dr. Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the poetry book Obsidian Blues.
We’ll also take a closer look at the Newport Folk Festival on Wednesday, July 25, with our screening of Festival!(1967), playing as part of our Best. Show. Ever. concert film series, Murray Lerner’s seminal documentary captures the festival between 1963 and 1965, featuring performances by Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Judy Collins, Howlin’ Wolf, and many more. And at its center is Bob Dylan, whom we watch transform from the golden child of the folk movement into a snarling rock ‘n’ roll rebel with his blistering 1965 electric debut.
See you at the movies!
