Blues Country
Trip Start
Sep 16, 2007
1
4
87
Trip End
Ongoing
Clarksdale,
Mississippi,
United States
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Clarksdale has a special place in Blues history. It was the hometown of many legends, including John Lee Hooker; it is also where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads at midnight in exchange for talent and fame.
The trip down in itself was great, apart from the usual Greyhound features: middle-of-the-night stopovers at McDonalds, bad-tempered bus drivers and seats designed with pygmy passengers in mind.
Actually the trip was pretty cool: we passed through Nashville and Memphis, where I saw the largest guitar shop I'd ever seen; I travelled down Highway 61 (the Blues Highway, which connects Chicago with New Orleans) and saw cotton fields and shotgun shacks and made friends with single mothers travelling with lots of small children, itinerant workers, and drifters.
Travelling Greyhound is an experience. Not a pleasant one. And apparently not even the cheapest one. But it is the best way to reach small towns and meet the side of America that you thought only existed on Jerry Springer. I enjoyed it.
So anyway, I spent a couple of days in Clarksdale. I stayed at the Riverside Hotel, run by Frank 'Rat' Ratliff. Rat's mother and now Rat have been running this place for 67 years. It is the oldest hotel in Clarksdale and during the days of segregation was a lodging house for blacks. Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, John Lee Hooker, Robert Nighthawk and others have all stayed there. Before it became a hotel it was a hospital, and was where Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, died after a car crash on Highway 61, back in 1937.
The bedrooms haven't been changed, except for the mattresses and the tellies. Rat hasn't touched the dressers, the floorboards or the bed frames. The walls are still covered with the same paint (now peeling in places) that it had in 1940. This is a rundown hotel with a genuine sense of history about it.
The town is poor. Businesses are boarded up along the main street, young fellas kick around looking bored on the corners, pavements are cracked and street signs are falling over. There is a semi-pathetic attempt to revive the town with "Blues tourism." Every second street seems to have a "Blues museum," advertised with a handwritten sign in felt-tip pen on brown cardboard.
But Clarksdale has got a sense of the Blues about it. The whole town smells of fried chicken. You'll walk past a porch at midnight and the folk will greet you with a smile and a wave and a 'how y'all doing?' People play music and sing. There are many genuine juke joints. Nothing was going on in any of these while I was there so I went to Ground Zero, a Blues Club owned by Morgan Freeman. I watched Bill 'Howl-n-Madd' Perry.
Clarksdale was an ugly rundown town that was a thousand times more friendly and loaded with character than many other places I've visited.
