Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey through the Soul of the South

4. Como: Hill Town with a Delta Rhythm

101 6 4 Como Hill Town with a Delta Rhythm Como’s depot disappeared with the cotton commerce after the Great Depression. Gone are the days when this hill town on the edge of the Delta could claim more millionaires per capita than any other Mississippi town. Yet a lively social scene prevails on Main Street. Several restaurants occupy the short row of storefronts facing lovely Victorian mansions across the tracks. They’re the kind of casually sophisticated dining spots you might expect to find in a college town rather than an economically bereft farm burg of two square miles and thirteen hundred souls. About thirty miles south of Memphis along i-55 and within an hour’s drive of destination towns like Tunica, Clarksdale, and Oxford, Como invites more traffic than you might think. It has its old-money residents, but Como has lately attracted transplanted Memphians and commuters drawn to the small-town charm. It boasts an opera guild, and some of the old plantations are gathering places for fox hunts. Nor does it hurt that it’s in a wet county, bordered by several dry ones. Como has another distinction: It is the epicenter of Mississippi Hill Country blues, a vanishing style of American music born in its outlying rural areas. Heavy on primitive African rhythms, with hints of hillbilly, 102 Como it has captivated such music icons as Bonnie Raitt, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and the Rolling Stones. Unlike the blues musicians from deep in the Delta who migrated north, these country blues musicians earned a cult following and continued to live on their farms, where they fashioned their instruments with found materials. Othar (“Otha”) Turner led a band of drummers with a fife he carved from river cane and christened with a beer before playing. Napoleon Strickland plucked a diddley bow, a single wire stretched between two screws on a wooden board. The blind musician Sid Hemphill played the quills (cane pipes) and a jaw harp, in addition to the banjo and fiddle. His granddaughter , Jessie Mae Hemphill, banged the snare and bass drums in his fife-anddrum band before mastering the electric guitar, which would send her on gigs all over the world. Bonnie Raitt traveled to Como when she was eighteen to study with Mississippi Fred McDowell, a farmer whose mastery of the bottleneck slide guitar was such that folk music archivist Alan Lomax brought him into the Atlantic Records studio. The Rolling Stones later invited him to tour in Como 103 Europe and bought him a silver lamé suit, which he wore home to Como. He was buried in the suit after he died of cancer at age sixty-eight. Carved on the back of his small tombstone in a local cemetery is a verse of McDowell’s song “You Got to Move,” which was covered by the Stones. In downtown Como, there are two Mississippi Blues Trail markers—one commemorating McDowell, the other Othar Turner, leader of the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band. Turner was recognized not only for preserving music traditions unique to the region but also for inaugurating a quirky food custom as well. For decades at his farm in Gravel Springs he hosted a Labor Day dance and picnic whose centerpiece was a goat he field-dressed and barbecued himself . That event, carried on in his name each year by relatives and friends, inspired the title of Turner’s first album, Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, which he cut in his nineties. Turner played his music until his death in 2002 at age ninety-four. His daughter, Bernice Turner Pratcher, who had been battling breast cancer, died the same day. In a funeral procession through the streets of Como, Turner’s then thirteen-year-old granddaughter Sharday Thomas led a fife-and-drum ensemble, playing one of her mentor’s signature handmade bamboo instruments the way he’d taught her. She continues to perform at festivals and concerts around the area. A good time to visit Como is the first weekend in December, when the town hosts its annual Christmas in Como celebration, showcasing its rich music heritage in a series of performances inside and outside the buildings along Main Street. Y Como Steakhouse. 203 Main Street. 662-526-9529. thecomosteakhouse.com In the late 1980s Paul Beavers, who’d designed the open charcoal pits at the Butcher Shop restaurants in Memphis, wanted to open another steak...