Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

Delta Blues

Delta Blues If you ever been mistreated, You got to know what I’m talking about. Worked five long years for one woman, And she had the nerve to kick me out. Muddy Waters, “Five Long Years” According to a woman I knew as Miss Emma, one of my mother’s closest friends, my uncle Obe was the meanest man she had ever seen; she asked for water but he gave her gasoline. That line, of course, comes from the Muddy Waters1 song “Meanest Woman,” which he recorded in June 1960: I asked for water she brought me gasoline, oh The meanest woman boy I most ever seen I asked her for water and she come runnin’ with gasoline. Miss Emma flipped the script to express her own feelings of hurt and pain. She, like Muddy before her, was expressing the most classic theme in the blues: a relationship gone bad between a man and his woman. Again, Muddy Waters expresses this type of rocky relationship in his song “Mean Mistreater”: Delta Blues 80 She’s a mean mistreater, And the woman she don’t mean me no good Well you know I don’t blame you baby, I’d be the same way if I could. In the following lines from “My Fault,” recorded by Waters in 1961, the singer takes full responsibility for the broken relationship: It’s my own fault, I don’t blame you For treating me the way you do When you was deep in love with me, At that time, little girl, I didn’t love you. It seems to me that the blues always deal with relationships, if not between a man and a woman, then between a man and his boss or overseer, or between himself and his own existential circumstances. Growing up during the 1950s and 1960s in the Mississippi Delta, I got to see the pain of thwarted relationships in my own family between my mother and stepfather and between my sister and her husband. There was also the pain of trying to get the plantation owner to pay a fair wage for services rendered. So, around mid-afternoon on Saturdays, my parents and sister, along with a number of others, crowded into a truck bound for Mr. Hodges’s store on Henry Street. From there, it was a fairly easy walk to Johnson Street and Carrollton Avenue, where most of the juke joints were located, or to some of the good-time houses scattered along Main and McLaurin streets. These businesses were prepared to offer, for a reasonable price, whatever sedative was necessary to soothe an aching heart, but nothing seemed to do the job as well as the blues. Too young myself to have the blues, I experienced them vicariously through others. After skipping the second movie of the double feature at the Walthall Theater, I would amble across the street to get a closer look at the frenzy. Except for the presence of liquor and profanity, you might mistake the scene for one that took place the next day at Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church as the Reverend W. H. Kingston neared the end of his sermon. It was not church, but the people seemed to be just as refreshed and revitalized and, yes, determined to get through another day. 81 Delta Blues The fried fish, the liquor, and the blues, the staple of Saturday nights in Greenwood, were repeated throughout various venues in the Delta. There must not have been much of an age restriction then, for I couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve. There was no real worry or concern as long as I was back at Mr. Hodges’s store in time to catch the truck heading back to the Whittington plantation around midnight. While liquor was off limits, I had a healthy dose of the blues and fried buffalo fish, washing them down with a Double Cola. In some joints and houses, the music went from nine o’clock Saturday night to early Sunday morning, finishing just in time for those willing to make it to Sunday school. When we moved to Greenwood, we lived right across the street from the 82 Grill. Now older, I could venture as much as I wanted into these places. Although it had a juke box and smoke and fried fish, the 82 Grill was not really a juke joint. For one...