Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues, Third Edition

Chapter 8: The Jackson Area

183 I liked Jackson better than I did either Memphis or New Orleans. Blues was more popular. Anytime you go to Jackson, they’s be telling us,“Put me down there where they chunkin’ tin cans.” They mean just play ’em as low as you can get to ’em, then. Where they going to chunk tin cans, that’s in the alley. You don’t find no tin cans in the street.“Put ’em in the alley,” that’s what they holler for. —Sam Chatmon The state capital, being outside the Delta, does not conjure up “blues” in the popular imagination the way other Mississippi locations do. Even those on the Library of Congress field-recording trips largely ignored Jackson, presuming that it was too urban to have real folk singers. But, as Sam Chatmon observed, the town actually has a strong blues tradition, one that goes back a long way and continues today. Being a big city, it has always attracted musicians. Chatmon reported seeing Memphis Minnie playing on the streets of Jackson in about 1910, when she was in her early teens and already a hot guitarist. Skip James met Lightnin’ Hopkins, a chapter 8 THE JACKSON AREA Jackson Texan whose fame would not come until after the war, in Jackson in 1930. James said Hopkins, then a teenager, spent a week in Jackson, during which time the two mainly gambled, but James also gave Hopkins a few guitar pointers. Jackson radio station WMPR, FM 90.1, plays soul-blues much of the time, with some gospel programming. The Jubilee! Jam (601-969-2008), held in mid-May on outdoor stages downtown, features various music and arts, including the blues. • Old Capitol Museum State Street at Capitol Street (601) 576-6920 The museum is open 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. Mondays through Fridays, 9:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Saturdays, and 12:30 to 4:30 P.M. Sundays. Admission is free. This three-floor museum of Mississippi history contains only a small blues exhibit, in the twentieth-century room on the first floor. Besides a resonator guitar and photographs, the exhibit includes some unique artifacts: a record cutter and label-printing block from Trumpet Records, along with a microphone of the type Trumpet used. There also are copies of some Trumpet hits: The Jackson Area 184 Blues exhibit at Old Capitol Museum, Jackson Elmore James’s 78 “Dust My Broom” and Willie Love and his Three Aces’ 45 “Nelson Street Blues.” Near the blues exhibit are other items that might be of interest to blues fans. One is a model of the first mechanical cotton picker, with a 1936 New York Times article explaining that the machine , invented by Texan brothers John and Mack Rust, would deprive nine million people of work (the brothers planned to devote the profits to the rehabilitation of those displaced workers). And a railroad exhibit has a photo of blues-yodeling country singer Jimmie Rodgers and a piece of Yazoo and Mississippi Valley (aka Yellow Dog) track. • King Edward Hotel Pearl St. and Mill St. The King Edward is long abandoned but continues to tower over downtown Jackson, its original sign still on top. Like the Peabody in Memphis and other grand downtown hotels in southern cities, the King Edward was the site of field-recording trips by northern record companies. The Okeh label set up a studio at the King Edward December 15–19, 1930, and recorded the Mississippi Sheiks, the Mississippi Mud Steppers (Walter Vincson of the Mississippi Sheiks, with Charlie McCoy—among their recordings is an instrumental “Jackson Stomp”), Bo Carter, Walter Jacobs (Vincson again, in an alias), Charlie McCoy, Slim Duckett and Pig Norwood, Elder Jackson 185 King Edward Hotel, where the Mississippi Sheiks, Bo Carter, and other "race record" artists recorded in 1930, Pearl and Mill streets, Jackson Curry, Caldwell Bracey, the Campbell College Quartet, and Elder Charlie Beck. Decades later, blind and impoverished, Bo Carter was living in a Memphis roominghouse when he recalled that session at the King Edward for British writer Paul Oliver: “Tell ya, we was the Mississippi Sheiks and when we went to make the records in Jackson , Mississippi, the feller wanted to show us how to stop and start the records. Try to tell us when we got to begin and how we got to end. And you know, I started not to make...