My oldest son and his girlfriend have seen the Mississippi River for the first time, from the heights of Chickasaw Bluff in Memphis. A Missouri poet wrote:
“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable…”
They started a road trip last weekend in New York City, bound for North Carolina, Nashville and Memphis. It was a music-fueled odyssey. In Nashville, Joshua and Nadia savored the splendor and vulgarity of country music’s epicenter and looked without success for the old Columbia Studios on Music Row, where Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde in 1966.
Memphis was the big city for people in southwestern Tennessee and northern Mississippi – for me, the city of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters (“the king of country music,” according to Levon Helm), Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and the great storywriter Peter Taylor (his novel A Summons to Memphis won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1987). In Memphis they drove past Graceland (too expensive), Sun Studio and the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum), and visited the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (formerly Stax Records). I’ve never visited Memphis but they traced a good portion of my youth.
In his first collection, No Continuing City (1969), the Irish poet Michael Longley devoted a quartet of poems to Fats Waller, Bud Freeman, Bessie Smith and Bix Beiderbecke, and gave it the playfully Yeatsian title “Words for Jazz Perhaps.” Here’s “To Bessie Smith,” about the blues singer who performed at the Palace Theater on Beale Street in Memphis:
“You bring from Chattanooga Tennessee
Your huge voice to the back of my mind
Where, like sea shells salvaged from the sea
As bright reminders of a few weeks’ stay,
Some random notes are all I ever find.
I couldn’t play your records every day.
“I think of Tra-na-rossan, Inisheer,
Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain –
Those landscapes I must visit year by year.
I do not live with sounds so seasonal
Nor set up house for good. Your blues contain
Each longed-for holiday, each terminal.”
Smith died Sept. 26, 1937, after an automobile accident along Highway 61 near Clarksdale, Miss. She and her boyfriend were on their way to Memphis. Here’s a video of Smith singing “St. Louis Blues” by W.C. Handy, who also wrote “Memphis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues.”
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2 comments:
Hi Patrick,
Hope everyone enjoyed the Stax Museum! I work there. Also, Bessie Smith died at a hospital in Clarksdale after that car accident and it was later turned into the Riverside Hotel and it is still in business. Some friends of mine from England just stayed there last weekend. Ike Turner also used to live there and wrote "Rocket 88" there and recorded the demo in one of the rooms. Cool place and Clarksdale is a wonderful town.....
During the late 1980's and early 1990's, my job frequently took me to the Mississippi Delta. At that time, one could hear blues legends like Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and "Booba" Barnes every Friday and Saturday night in small clubs and bars throughout the area. But, by the mid-1990's, the floating casinos in Tunica and Greenville appeared to have drawn much of the audience away from these places, and many were closing. Anonymous, what's the situation now for live blues in the Delta?
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