I was baptized in the wide and mighty River of Blues nearly 50 years ago in the basement of the Congress Hotel on Franklin Street.
It was a cold night in February 1978. There, in a dank side room of the Marble Bar, I interviewed Muddy Waters during his late career resurgence engineered by Johnny Winter, guitarist and disciple.
My most recent confirmation in the faith—on a peaceful Sunday morning in the midst of what was once “The Cotton Capital of the World”—happened last month in Greenwood, Mississippi. In the tree shaded cemetery of Little Zion Church, something serene rode the wind. It passed over the presumed grave of Robert Johnson and whispered across my shoulders, more lullaby than blues.
Over the last half-century I’ve returned many times to the Great Magnolia State to cover the tornado that ripped apart Rolling Fork, Muddy’s birthplace; to ride a tugboat during a drought that brought the Mississippi River low enough to uncover Confederate gunboats; to attend festivals celebrating hot tamales and crawfish (“Who’s your Crawdaddy?”) and, always, to absorb the bedrock of American music.
“The blues is the truth,” was the mantra of composer and bassist Willie Dixon, whom I met in 1982 after a show at the Smithsonian Institution. “The blues are the facts.”
My interview with Muddy took place just before the Marble Bar went punk. I was 20, writing for the City Paper and ignorant of the blues beyond Winter (my all-time fave), Zeppelin (da blooze), the largely forgotten Robin Trower and—Lord forgive me—Foghat. Waters, who’d seen white boys with pen-and-paper come and go since the blues rose from the boneyard in the 1960s, was kind.
“Mister Waters, where did the blues come from?”
“Well son,” he said, a glass of champagne in hand. “I guess they come from the days when you had to turn the kettle up high and sing down low.”
He played me, you might say, like a National steel guitar. The interview ended when a knucklehead guitarist friend, who begged me to take him along, pulled out a bag of reefer and asked “Mister Muddy” if he wanted to catch “the heavy-heavy buzz.” Muddy demurred and we were politely escorted out by bandmember Bob Margolin.
Over the next five years, I’d have many sit-downs (minus the knucklehead) with the likes of J.B. Hutto, James Cotton, Willie Dixon and Blind Sam Myers. In 1983 I covered Muddy’s southside Chicago funeral for The Sun. The Metropolitan Funeral Home on West 79th was packed and rumors flew that Mick and Keith were going to show. They sent flowers.
More than a distraught Johnny Winter hanging his fleecy head graveside in the back of a black limo, the most enduring image from the wake was Roebuck “Pops” Staple singing Glory, Glory on the altar behind Muddy’s open casket.
“Glory, glory, Hallelujah,” sang Pops in his gentle way, strumming a guitar. “Since I laid my burden down…”
Two years later, back when a reporter at a robust newspaper could get away with such things, I persuaded The Sun to send me to the Mississippi Delta, my first visit to the land of catfish, cotton and cruelty, a distant shore of which I’d dreamed for years.
The hook was the 8th Annual Delta Blues Festival in Greenville where I profiled 71-year-old retired field hand Cleveland “Broom Man” Jones, who “played” the broom by scraping the wooden handle across dirt spread over a plank of wood to create rhythm not unlike Willie Dixon’s upright bass. Think of that the next time you boo-hoo-hoo that you don’t have the proper equipment to make art.
It was also at the ’85 festival that harmonica great Sam Myers (1936-2006)—while trying to conscript me as his valet in exchange for his life story—started calling me “Ravioli” when Rafael didn’t come quickly to mind.
An old friend from my newspaper days accompanied me to Mississippi last month for the 48th annual Delta Blues Festival. Forty years done come and gone with its share of fortuna, joy and grief.
My friend, with whom I saw Indianola-born Albert King in New York in 1992, still calls me Ravioli and we laughed about it throughout the week-long trip, from Sun Studios in Memphis, all along Highway 61 south and, over the state line, grilled oysters at Felix’s in New Orleans.
This year’s festival was not as vibrant as those past. It has suffered because of a proliferation of similar celebrations up and down the Delta, like the upcoming October 18th Crossroads Festival in Clarksdale, home of the Delta Blues Museum. It’s a bounty that Mississippi only began to exploit in earnest a little more than 20 years ago with the creation of the Blues Trail, a series of some 200 historical markers from Memphis to Biloxi. Before then, pilgrims from Sweden and Japan and across the USA pretty much wandered about on their own.
Each year brings the passing of an old master, apprentices to the old masters and now— nearly 50 years after the first festival performers in 1978 enjoyed homemade stew between sets on a flatbed trailer—adherents to the apprentices.
Last year John Mayall, a dean of the White kids who picked up the mantle by listening to Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy records in the 1950s, passed at age 90. Guitarist Joe Louis Walker died this past April.
One of the naturals who caught my ear this year was Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, 78, whom I greeted on the porch of his Bentonia juke joint in 2023 with Heonjin Ha, a subtle yet powerful blues guitarist from Seoul. I met Heonjin in Memphis in 2022 at the International Blues Challenge and we’ve chased music together since from An Die Music to Asia.
The other treasure appearing in Greenville was 86-year-old, Louisiana-born Leon Atkins, a guitarist and harmonica player who performs under the name “Little Jimmy” Reed and has seen it all. Both of the Jimmys were wonderful and I am grateful for what is left and what may blossom in their shadow.
What caught my soul—what I have tried to hold onto—was the kinetic atmosphere at Little Zion, one of two graves said to be the final resting place of a most restless man: Robert Johnson, upon whose work was built most of what we know as the blues.
My buddy and I visited both marked graves, the other being 17 miles south on Mississippi Route 7 in Morgan City. I’m not trying to sell any devil-at-the-crossroads, come-and-buy-a-T-shirt hokum: The Greenwood grave carried the vibrations of the quick.
The other—a Baptist churchyard in Morgan City—was dry as a bone.
As E.M. Forster wrote in A Passage to India, “People are not really dead until they are felt to be dead…”
Left by fans on the handsome stone in Greenwood is the sort ephemera—much of it at odds with the deceased’s cause of death—found at the graves of the renowned around the world: empty bottles of booze and bad poetry for Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts; spliffs of reefer at Jim Morrison’s defaced sepulcher in Paris; and heads-up Lincoln pennies at the monument to the family of John Wilkes Booth in Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery.
Along with bottle caps and coins, a key ring and a miniature of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky— complete with a red Solo cup—was a green guitar pick. My friend plays the guitar casually and took the pick as a keepsake, which I encouraged him to do. Why not? It wasn’t the only one on the stone and others would surely follow.
As I waited for him in the car—Johnson singing the “Walkin’ Blues” on our playlist—he abruptly turned and put the pick back where he’d found it.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
And he said, “I didn’t want to find out what it would cost me.”
Rafael Alvarez writes from Greektown. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
