Today was a huge day. Today was a blues day - all senses. Today was probably the best day of the trip so far...
Heading out of Memphis I set off to Helena, AR with John Lee Hooker and Sam Lightnin' Hopkins accompanying me down Highway 61.
Helena was Arkansas's answer to Clarksdale and became a very important blues centre for delta blues.
It is home to WFFA Radio and the "King Biscuit Time" radio show - a blues dedicated radio show - which is broadcast still today from the Delta Cultural Centre in Helena on Cherry St.
Many blues artists in the 30s through to the 60s came in and out of Helena. Robert Johnson lived here for several years and married a local woman whose son - Robert Lockwood - became the only person who Robert Johnson taught how to play the guitar. Lockwood, on account of also being called Robert, became known as Robert Junior Lockwood. Born in 1915 he lived to be 91 and died in November 2006. Dick Waterman described him as one of the most foul mouthed people he has ever met, but a lovely man...
From Dick's book - "Between Midnight & Day":
"Let's say that everyone on earth is allocated a certain number of curse words to use in their lifetime. Now take a couple of thousand nuns and remove their curse words because they won't ever use them. Take those curse words and give them to a hot-tempered old man with bad attitude and a short fuse. Welcome to the world of Robert Lockwood.
To put it quite simply, Robert has no tact, no civility, no sense of decorum, and a total inability not to give you the blunt truth right to your face. And I love him madly."
Helena is home to the Delta Cultural Center - a museum featuring excellent exhibits on the blues and its development as well as an overview of the artists which were either native to Helena like Robert Jr Lockwood and Robert Nighthawk or adopted like Robert Johnson and Alec "Rice" Miller - who was better known as Sonny Boy Williamson II.
This is a great museum and well worth the visit as it is genuinely instructional and informative.
The town of Helena is also worth driving around. It's small but expands massively every year to host the King Biscuit Time Blues Festival. On most corners and down the streets you can find juke joints and food places selling fried catfish, chicken and bbq and many still have their original facades - now slightly faded.
I headed back to Clarksdale crossing the Mississippi once again with Alvin Youngblood Hart's "Big Mama's Door" playing sweetly in my ears. Alvin Youngblood is a contemporary bluesman who sounds like he's from the 1930s. Playing acoustic and slide he has a beautiful playing style and a powerful voice. Gary Williams of the Bluessource.com had told me that he was a very belligerent, aggressive and foul mouthed man who is forgiven all of the above because of his enormous talent. I thoroughly recommend him.
This time I was determined to visit the Delta Blues Museum. I pulled up with about 40 mins of Museum opening time left. Unlike the Delta Cultural Center in Helena which is free - here there is a 7$ entrance fee, although they discounted mine to 5$ as there wasn't much opening time left.
This museum is very different from the Delta Cultural Center. It displays wonderful collections of vintage guitars and other instruments, performance costumes, photographs and so on - as well as a whole corner devoted to Muddy Waters - but it lacks the information and instruction that its counterpart in Helena has. I would certainly recommend seeing both.
As the museum closed at 5pm I went for a cup of coffee and to find out what time the music was going to start in the evening...
With a couple of hours or so to kill before the blues started I decided to head on down to Rosedale - another place which is believed to be the location of "the Crossroads" of Robert Johnson fame. Indeed, many people believe that it was here that Johnson met the devil - where Highway 8 and Highway 1 meet...
The road to Rosedale was lovely - with the last light of the day just before it fades to dusk. Swamp and marsh either side of the road as I headed towards the Mississippi with Muddy Water's classic tracks playing a cool rhythmic accompaniment to the tires of the car clacking on the seems of the highway...
Rosedale is small and quite pretty in parts with some lovely houses and their immaculate lawns. Downtown is a little run-down like many places around these parts.
After a quick moment of reflection at the Crossroads of Highway's 8 and 1, I headed off back to Clarksdale in the direction of Abe's BBQ to go get me a fill of pork BBQ, beans and slaw...
I put on Eric for my journey back to Clarksdale - this time an album simply called "Blues". Having been a bit savage about Eric in an earlier posting on this blog, I am now going to have to take most of what I said back. He really loves the Blues and as much as a white boy from Kingston Upon Thames can have the blues, he has had the blues and it shows in his music. And he is an amazing guitarist. When he sings as Eric -rather than trying to imitate or emulate - he sounds a lot better to my mind.
So Eric delivers me at Abe's and I chow down in impressive fashion before part 2 of my day begins...
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