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

Chapter 4: The Clarksdale Area

81 When the railroads supplanted the river as the area’s main artery , inland Clarksdale’s importance surpassed that of older riverside towns like Vicksburg and Natchez. Clarksdale’s location became even more strategic when the highways came in. The Illinois Central Railroad and highways 61 and 49 all intersected here, helping make it the richest town in the Delta, the cotton capital. Naturally, the music followed.“I made more money in Clarksdale than I had ever earned,” W. C. Handy boasted. “This was not strange. Everybody prospered in that Green Eden.” A cultural hot spot even in Handy’s day, Clarksdale was already an important blues town in the mid-1920s, when Son House learned to play guitar there from a man named Lemon (who had earned that nickname by mastering Blind Lemon Jefferson’s recordings). The torch would pass when Muddy Waters learned from House in a nearby plantation jook a decade later. The town’s blues heritage continued through the postwar electric period, when Clarksdalians Junior Parker and Ike chapter 4 THE CLARKSDALE AREA Clarksdale Turner, among others, would make their names. In recent years such artists as Big Jack Johnson and James “Super Chikan” Johnson have come from Clarksdale. One native Clarksdalian who left town in 1931, at age fourteen—John Lee Hooker—became a superstar in his old age. With twenty thousand residents, Clarksdale is one of the Delta’s larger cities but still a small town. (The motto that appears on signs— “Welcome to Clarksdale, Home of the Big Frog”— does not refer to a blues artist named the Big Frog. It’s an invitation to companies to move to a town where they can be big frogs in a small pond.) • The Crossroads When local residents speak of the Crossroads, they mean the intersection of the Delta’s two main highways, 49 and 61. That intersection is clearly not the place Robert Johnson sang about in his “Cross Road Blues”: I went to the cross road, fell down on my knees Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy, save poor Bob if you please.” Johnson was almost certainly referring to a lonely country crossroads, not a busy intersection next to a big town. If Johnson or any other bluesmen sold their souls to the devil at a crossroads, they would probably have picked a more remote location. And even though the devil appears in some other Johnson songs (esThe Clarksdale Area 82 Old Greyhound bus station, Third Street and Issaquena Avenue, Clarksdale (The station has since been restored and is now part of the Delta Blues Museum.) pecially “Me and the Devil Blues”), “Cross Road Blues” makes no such reference. “The Lord above” is the only supernatural being Johnson deals with in this song. Still, this Crossroads is important for what it is: the intersection of the two main blues highways, the roads on which countless blues singers and other Delta folks walked or rode as they sought work, migrated north, or just rambled. The highway alignments have changed over the years, however, so the Crossroads hasn’t always been in this spot. With the new bypass outside town, the Crossroads may be relocating again. The intersection itself isn’t so romantic to look at these days. Delta Donuts and Abe’s Bar-B-Q (“get your souvenir T-shirts here”) are somewhat more interesting than the chain gas stations and convenience stores. The highway sign itself, with both numbers on it, might be worth stopping at for a moment of silence or a photo. Just be careful if you stop—it’s a very busy intersection. A garish “crossroads” sign, twenty feet high with lights and blue guitars, also marks the spot. And before you get down on your knees, one more point: this juncture is not technically a crossroads of 49 and 61. It’s actually only a T-intersection of the highways, because what looks like the extension of 49 is Desoto Avenue west of 61. The two highways join into one as you head north from this spot. They break apart again twenty-two miles north, near Moon Lake, where 61 continues north and 49 heads west to the Helena bridge. So if a three-way intersection is enough for you, that spot is another Crossroads. The 1986 movie Crossroads, starring Karate Kid Ralph Macchio as a Juilliard student who hooks up with Willie Brown to seek a...