On this episode of Unpacked, Afar contributor and fiddle player, Emma John takes you on a musical odyssey to the soul of blues. As she follows the Mississippi Blues trail she meets local musicians and legacy keepers who were connected with legends like B.B. King and Muddy Waters—discovers how tourism is keeping the soul of blues alive.
Transcript
Big A: And the blues is anything, you know what I’m saying? You wake up and you’re late for work and you go out and you got a flat tire—that’s the blues. As you know, like, your baby done caught the train and she ain’t coming back no more—that’s the blues. Like, you know, a lot of things. The blues.
Aislyn: I’m Aislyn Greene, and this week on Unpacked, we are traveling to Mississippi to meet the musicians and music lovers who are using tourism to preserve the legacy of the blues. Our guide is Afar contributing writer Emma John. Emma is a British author, a podcaster, and she is a musician herself.
In fact, one of her first stories for Afar was about her attempts to learn the bluegrass fiddle. Since then, she has learned how to sing opera in Vienna and more recently followed the Mississippi Blues Trail for Afar’s print magazine.
The link is in the show And in this companion story, Emma takes us on a musical odyssey to the heart of the blues.
Emma John: As a musician, I love the American South. I’ve explored the worlds of bluegrass, old-time, and country from Virginia to North Carolina, Kentucky to Tennessee. But until recently, I’d never ventured to the Deep South and I didn’t know much about the blues music that originated there. Then I discovered that Mississippi had an official Blues Trail. It’s a series of big blue plaques that commemorate important places in the history of the music and tell the stories of its origins and its evolution. There are now 220 of them spread across the state and even beyond. The trail has been a big boost to Mississippi tourism since it was established in 2006, and the large majority of markers are clustered around the Delta.
[Big A plays music]
Emma: You’re listening to Big A and the All Stars, performing live at the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. If you’ve heard of Ground Zero, it’s probably because one of its owners is Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman. It’s less likely you’ve heard of Clarksdale, a tiny town of just 14,000 souls in the Mississippi Delta. That’s the land that lies between the Mississippi and the Yazoo rivers. I’ve traveled to the Delta because I wanted to visit the home of the blues, and I’ve come to Clarksdale because this town was once as vital to the music’s development as Chicago, Memphis, or St Louis. Then it faded into history.
Roger Stolle: When I started visiting in the mid-to-late ’90s, it was like a ghost town, really.
Emma: That’s Roger Stolle. We’re chatting at the Cathead Delta Blues and Folk Art record store he owns. It’s this funky treasure trove of vinyl and poster prints right in the middle of downtown Clarksdale. On one side of it is a little boutique, and on the other is a workshop where a guy makes sculptures out of wood. And there’s a cool vibe in all of them, but honestly, the surrounding streets have this dilapidated, half-abandoned air. It feels a bit like walking through an unused movie lot.
Roger: I mean, there were lots of empty buildings. The ones that weren’t empty, you couldn’t even tell if they were really in business or not. And, um, except for maybe a Saturday night, and even then, not a guarantee of it, but there was no guarantee of any live music. Um, it really just had fallen, you know.
Emma: It wasn’t always this way. A hundred years ago, Clarksdale was a boomtown. Its elegant art deco facades were products of the Delta’s cotton wealth. Across the train tracks from downtown was the so-called New World district, where African American sharecroppers and immigrant workers spent their money and their free time. It was a lively place, full of juke joints where local musicians played the blues, in surroundings that weren’t so much a bar or a club, as a house party.
And that musical history is what brought Roger to Clarksdale in the first place. A passionate blues fan, he knew all about the great blues players who emerged from here. John Lee Hooker was born in this city. Muddy Waters grew up in a cabin on its outskirts. And the intersection of highways 61 and 49 are legendary as the crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil, in return for his musical genius.
Over time, Clarksdale’s prospects declined, and so did its population. The combined forces of segregation, and the Great Migration, has left a huge toll on the Mississippi Delta,
and it remains one of the most impoverished and depopulated regions in the South. So 20 years ago, when Roger decided to leave a well-paid job in advertising to open a record store in Clarksdale, it was a weird enough choice that his mother was distraught.
Roger: You know, moving here was kind of crazy because there was so little happening. It was so quiet. I could step out of here a little after 5 p.m., if I didn’t leave right at 5, and the few people that were downtown were gone. I could look for at least three blocks down Delta Avenue. There’d be no parked cars.
Emma: Since then, Roger has been at the heart of the movement to revive this blues town. The former ad man saw the potential for local entrepreneurs to grow a music economy that would draw folk from all over. Now, by championing the blues in its historic heartland, Clarksdale is attracting musicians and music lovers alike, and those deserted downtown buildings are filling up with businesses and venues.
Roger: We have so many people now who stay downtown, live downtown, be eating downtown, there’ll be music every night. Um, to be a little town of 14,000 people that has live blues 365 nights a year over a dozen annual festivals is really crazy.
Sean Apple: Hi, my name’s Sean Apple and I’m the owner of a place called Bad Apple Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. What I consider to be the home of the blues.
Emma: The Bad Apple Club is near the old train tracks on one of Clarksdale’s quietest streets. There’s an empty lot opposite and some boarded-up buildings and I’m not gonna lie, as I’m pulling up, it all looks a bit sketchy. There’s a rusted grill and a generator and three beat-up loungers on the pavement and you can’t see into the club past the corrugated shutters. Still, there is a sign hanging by the door that says “Happy Faces Only.”
Sean: Some people are afraid to come into my club, on a daily basis. I have a gap under my door and if I’m not playing, if I’m in the middle of a story, I listen and I can hear people say, “Oh my goodness, is it OK to go in here? John, I don’t know if we should go in here. This looks dangerous.” You know, and, and then I have to put my guitar down. I have to walk up to the door, open it and say, no, no, no, you’re welcome. It’s OK. You come on in. We’re all a family in here and it’s all about music and togetherness and everyone is welcome.
Emma: Sean’s originally from Pennsylvania but as soon as he finished high school he came to Mississippi to walk in the footsteps of his Delta blues heroes, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker.
Sean: And when I got down here, much to my surprise, I found men and women that were still carrying on the old-style traditions of the blues, out in rural areas, sitting on the porch of their shotgun shacks and playing music in their yard, playing in these rural juke joints out in the middle of nowhere, where I was the only person who looked like me.
Emma: Today, Sean shares everything he’s learned through the sessions he hosts at his club. His one-man show is a perfect introduction to blues history. He talks and sings us through its evolution, from the down and dirty acoustic sound of the Delta to the funky beats of the electric blues. And he does it all wearing a pink trilby and a cheeky smile.
I should say: Sean’s club is also his home. He’s performing in his front room, where there’s an eclectic collection of secondhand furniture, and a cooler he sells beers out of in between songs. His bedroom and kitchen are out the back, and if you need the bathroom during his set, he helpfully directs you to it himself. And that’s kind of the point. Sean is so in love with the blues and so keen to preserve its culture that he has created the kind of juke joint he encountered on his musical travels. This isn’t supposed to be a luxury tourism experience; it’s meant to present the music in its authentic environment.
Sean: You’re not going to find marble countertops and, you know, some places are so clean you could eat off the floor. You don’t want to eat off the floor here. I’m the first to tell you. Something’s wrong with you if you do.
[Deak Harp playing harmonica]
Emma: Today there are more than a dozen venues hosting live blues every week in Clarksdale. And there are a whole host of businesses supporting and complementing them, like the workshop where Deak Harp restores harmonicas. That was Deak you just heard, by the way. There’s also an art gallery, a hotel that doubles as a coworking collective, and a coffee roastery that trains local youth for employment.
But it’s the tourism that’s really restoring this town’s economy. Travelers from all over the world are showing up to hear the blues. And many of these travelers are on musical road trips between Nashville or Memphis and New Orleans.
Clarksdale isn’t the only place in the Delta that’s harnessing its blues legacy. In 2008, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center opened in Indianola, about 60 miles to the south. And since it opened, Indianola has been welcoming over 40,000 visitors a year. That’s more than four times as many people as live in the town.
I’ve driven south to see it for myself and to meet Robert Terrell, the museum’s director of operations. He first encountered the man who would become one of the world’s most famous blues players back in the 1960s, when Robert himself was just a boy.
Robert Terrell: Well, you know, it’s been so long, it’s kind of, you know, I would have to go back into the mid-60s. And at that point, you know, I knew him as just being, you know, B.B. King. He wasn’t as big as he eventually became and when he started to move, my daddy actually operated a place over in Hollandale, which was a little juke joint.
Emma: During segregation, Black artists like B.B. were legally barred from playing white establishments. Black promoters set up gigs on the so-called Chitlin Circuit, which included the famous Club Ebony in Indianola, B.B.’s hometown.
Robert: And so, um, you know, you just get a chance to see him moving around, him and Howlin’ Wolf and all of the guys just, just moving around in these small places playing. And they were always just really honorable guys. So my first memory of him is just to look at him, like, Wow, he’s a nice man. You know, and not even the fact that he was a guitar player, he was a blue singer. He was just a nice man. And I knew a lot of guys, who during that era, who were great musicians. And they didn’t have quite the type of personality that B.B. had. So, that’s the thing that always touched me about him. He was a common person. He was just a nice man.
Emma: This rural backwater is where B.B. had grown up, one of many African American children who worked the cotton fields around here. As Robert leads me through the museum, we hear one of B.B.’s friends, now a pastor, talking about how he honed his musical gifts singing gospel in church. There’s memorabilia from the days when he hustled for gigs on Beale Street. We sit in a replica of his Big Red tour bus and watch a video of his bandmates, describing how gas station attendants used to refuse to serve them, even after segregation ended. The museum was B.B.’s idea, a way to give back to his local community, even when he was a global superstar.
Robert: He would come home every year and do a homecoming festival for free because he felt like: I need to give back to my community. And these are people who now that I’ve arrived to be B.B. King, they can’t really afford to come to see me in all these big places. So he would still come back home and did it for free. He would pay his band and he would just come back home and do it for free. So he, he maintained his connection to, to, to the town.
Emma: B.B. was so committed to the place that he insisted on being buried here at the museum, and when he died in 2015 that’s exactly what happened.
Robert: Yes. And that gin, the brick part there, he actually laid in state there for an entire day, just one day. We brought him in at, uh, nine o’clock, I believe at nine o’clock that morning, set him there and, uh, we probably had at least six, 7,000 people come through just that one day. We had just a constant flow of lines.
Emma: At the end of the exhibits, I walk through the exit and follow the path to B.B.’s resting place. The circular monument that surrounds his grave is inscribed with the lyrics to some of his most famous songs. His actual gravestone bears the words “Someday I’ll go home again and I know they’ll take me in.” It’s a moving place, and everyone here seems to feel it. I watch visitors around me stand quietly for some time before they take their first selfie.
Robert: I’m glad he’s here. I think one of the things that, uh, that we always said was that he didn’t want his grave to be just somewhere where it was just grown up and it’d be all dirty, you know, and he’d just say, “See that my grave is kept clean.” And I think that’s one of the things that we try to make sure we do.
Emma: Robert pulls out his phone and tells me there’s something he wants me to see. It’s a video that B.B. recorded not long before his death, when he was thinking about his legacy. The blues man looks directly into the camera, wearing his trademark smile and looking as cool as any musician with 15 Grammys to his name.
B.B. King: Please see that my grave be kept clean. And I believe if you hear this, and you enjoy it, like I hope you will, you’ll see that my grave be kept clean. With all the love I have to give, I hope you got it.
[Music from Pat Thomas]
Emma John: My next stop is a place even smaller than Indianola. Just 15 miles west is Leland, population 500. I park halfway up its main street, opposite the building that was once the Montgomery Hotel. These days the light-filled entrance hall and adjoining rooms are home to the eclectic collection of stage costumes and memorabilia that make up the Highway 61 Blues museum, where I’m about to spend a few hours.
Pat Thomas: OK. That’s my father there. That’s me there. But we was playing in the Greenville Festival. And the band hadn’t quite got tied up. And they said, Son, go ahead on and give them something. He said, Come on, Pat. That’s me there. I was the bass man at the end for my father. And I started playing.
Emma: How old were you then?
Pat: Huh?
Emma: How old were you then?
Pat: I, I was in, I was in my 30s. I was a young guy then. I’d say about 30s. This was back in the 1980s. So I was, I was young then. I don’t grow much older now. I’ll be 64 this year in August.
Emma: The man showing me round is Pat Thomas, and he’s wearing a T-shirt with a picture of his father on it. His dad was the celebrated blues man James Thomas, nicknamed “Son,” who wrote songs like “Rock Me Mama” and “Dust My Broom.”
Pat: He moved to this area in the 1960s and become a gravedigger. He said he dug graves for 25 years. He said that Dr. Tolan said, Son, you dig another grave, your back gonna bust, and you gonna be in a wheelchair. And Daddy said, after the doctor told him that he said he had to stop digging graves. He said he couldn’t do nothing but sit and sing the blues.
Emma: Gravedigging and singing weren’t Son Thomas’s only occupations. He was also a folk artist. The cabinets in this museum are full of his sculptures. They’re mostly macabre skulls shaped out of clay and found materials, from tin foil to human dentures. Some of the artworks are Pat’s, too—he learned the process from his father, just like he learned the guitar.
When Pat isn’t showing me around, he sits on a folding chair in the hallway under his floppy camo-print hat and plays to whoever comes through the door. Listening to him sing and play his father’s songs is like being transported back to another era. But he’s not alone. Alongside him is Oliver, a young guy who’s traveled all the way from Philadelphia to learn the Delta blues straight from the source. Every now and then Oliver will lean over and ask him what chord he’s playing, or how he’s getting a particular sound out of his instrument. And Pat patiently shows him, keen to keep the secrets alive.
[Pat and Oliver playing music]
Emma: Mississippi’s influence over American music has been immense. The state has more Grammy winners per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. That’s why it’s the only place beside Los Angeles to have its own Grammy Museum, which opened in 2016.
After leaving Pat and Oliver, it takes me half an hour to reach it. The museum is located on the campus of the Delta State University campus in the town of Cleveland, and I’m instantly impressed by its hands-on exhibits. In one room, I get to try out a whole host of instruments. In another, I learn to mix my own tracks. I even get an interactive songwriting tutorial from the famous blues musician Keb’ Mo’.
But if there’s one thing the Grammy Museum Mississippi wants to teach me, it’s how country, rock’n’roll, and every other iteration of American music grew out of the blues. Apparently Cleveland was chosen as the site of this museum for a couple of reasons. One was the educational opportunities offered by the surrounding university. The other was Dockery Farms, just four miles east of town.
The next day, I drive out to the farm, where a cluster of barns still loom by the edge of the highway. The big timber buildings have been preserved as a sort of open-air museum you can wander around for free. Beyond the empty cotton and seed stores, the farm’s original cotton gin lies inactive. I’m alone as I walk past the hulking great machine, but I do have a soundtrack. Piped through hidden speakers are recordings of the earliest blues musicians—men like Charlie Patton, who used to play for the laborers here.
Barry Bays: Dockery was a place to be, you know?
Emma: That’s Barry Bays, a professor at the Delta Music Institute, part of Delta State University. We’re talking in the Cotton House hotel in downtown Cleveland, and Barry is explaining how the Black sharecroppers who worked on Dockery’s 25,000 acres used to blow off steam with music and dancing at the end of their working week. The farm became a hothouse for the pioneers of the Delta blues.
Barry: And at the time when, uh, Charlie Patton did all his records, you know, he was living there and then Robert Johnson lived there for a bit, played there. Muddy Waters, he pretty much lived in Clarksdale on Stovall Plantation. But he played there because that was the place to play. There were so many, uh, house parties and, uh, things like that going on there. Like, that was the place to be. You know, it was happening. And, uh, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, everybody at some point over a period of 20 or 30, 40 years played at Dockery.
Emma: As a bass player, Barry has performed with big-name blues musicians from Willie Foster to Charlie Musselwhite. And he’s passionate about Mississippi’s musical heritage. He starts telling me all about W.C. Handy, the bandleader who first introduced the blues to a mainstream audience.
Barry: He’s considered the father of modern blues because he published the first sheet music. He didn’t invent it, but he put it out there for the world to see. And so, he put it in published sheet music form into the 12-bar blues. Anybody that knows music, knows what that means. Three chords. And so he put it out there so that anybody could play it by looking at the music.
Emma: Barry says there’s this famous story that Handy first heard the blues when he was waiting for a train in Tutwiler, just south of Clarksdale. There’s even a Blues Trail plaque there, right where the railway station used to be, commemorating the moment.
Anyway, Barry says, Handy’s Tutwiler encounter is this foundational legend in blues history.
Barry: “But my moment of enlightenment happened at the Bolivar County courthouse in Cleveland, Mississippi.” Which is like right there about 50 yards from here.
Emma: In other words—Handy might have first heard a blues song in Tutwiler, but it was here in Cleveland that he realized what the music meant to people. Barry tells me Handy was playing a gig at the courthouse, and while he and his band were taking a break outside, a couple of the local musicians got up to entertain the crowd.
Barry: These people were hooping and hollering and they went inside to see what’s going on. There were people dancing, throwing down. He said there was more money thrown down there at them guys’ feet than he was getting paid for both nights.
Emma: And sure enough, when I head down to the County Courthouse the next day, I find another of those Blues Trail markers, memorializing what it calls the “Enlightenment of W.C. Handy.”
But it’s important to note that not all the Mississippi Delta’s music-making is in the past. Barry’s own work is proof of that. His entire academic career has been in the service of developing the next generation of musicians.
Barry: So, our program here is the Delta Music Institute. And we have a degree in Entertainment Industry Studies with a concentration in entrepreneurship or audio engineering.
Emma: The DMI was set up in 2003 with the help of Elvis Presley’s bass player, Norbert Putnam. They started out by turning the university’s gym into a music facility.
Barry: And the way it got started is many years ago, maybe now it’s decades, I guess, uh, a friend of mine, he came over to Cleveland to help us. We were just going to have a small studio, like, this big, very small, just so the students could record their cute little rock’n’roll songs. And once he saw the campus and the building and all that, he said, Well, why don’t you do this?
Emma: And now…
Barry: . . . we got Abbey Road of the South here. I don’t know what you’d call it, but it’s huge. You saw it, so. It’s crazy. You can’t make this up. You tell people that haven’t seen it, and they go, Oh, Mississippi, I bet it’s cute. Bet it’s awesome. Bless your little soul. That’s great. And then they see it and they go, Holy moly.
Emma: Barry takes me to see the studio and I can tell you, he’s not exaggerating. The mixing desk looks like the captain’s console on an intergalactic starship. For young musicians starting out, recording here is an experience that money can’t buy. Which is great, because Mississippi is not a wealthy state. Its historical and political legacies cast a long shadow and economic and racial inequality are still keenly felt here in the Delta.
A new generation of musicians are wrestling with those issues and expressing them in the music of their forefathers. Meet 31-year-old Keith Johnson, a graduate of —you guessed it—Delta State University. He grew up by the shores of the Mississippi River and he learned his music by singing gospel. But his latest project is a blues album called Nephew Muddy.
Keith Johnson: Muddy Waters is my grandfather’s uncle. He’s the brother of my great grandfather, Fred Morganfield.
Emma: Keith and I are chatting in a fast-food joint in Greenville, just a short drive from where the Mississippi forms the state line with Arkansas. Keith is on his lunch break—when he’s not gigging, he works in human resources. His degree from Delta State was an MBA. That’s a pretty different life experience from his great uncle Muddy, who grew in a tiny timber cabin on a cotton plantation. But Keith says that in the Delta, the blues is always with you.
Keith: It’s just here in the dirt and the soil in Mississippi, man. Something is here. It’s definitely here, and it’s birthed legends.
[Keith Johnson track]
Emma: I ask Keith how he writes blues songs for a modern age.
Keith: I mean, in my music, at first I wanted to talk a lot about heartbreak and dance and struggle, but now I have to talk about something more meaningful like family or, or even by working in HR, you know workplace harassment, retaliation, racism. Yeah, that’s big. Talk about racism, man. It’s, um, talk about gender. It’s a lot that we can talk about. Black lives matter. It’s so much you can talk about. Inflation, I mean political.
Emma: I love that. I love the idea of a song about inflation. And how do you do that?
Keith: Hey, I can do it. I can do it. You can’t get bread for 50 cent, but you still expect to pay the rent. That’s a song right there. Talking about inflation. It’s a different sensation. It’s taken over the entire nation. But is it God’s creation? I’m talking about inflation. And I just wrote that you can take that back home and do what you want to do with it. But that’s how you write a song about that.
Emma: I have to say, I’m impressed. I think one of the things I’ve realized from my time in Mississippi is that this is an art form that really meets people where they’re at. And yes, that makes it an authentic voice in a region that’s still wrestling with poverty and inequity. But I’ve also been surprised by how celebratory and even funny the lyrics can be. Listening to it with new ears, I find its notes of humor and resilience in tough times a true balm right now.
I’m especially thankful for my time with Pat Thomas in Leland. Back home in the U.K., I get a WhatsApp message from Oliver telling me that Pat has passed away. “He was a wonderful, kind man,” says Oliver. “I’m so glad you got to meet him.”
I take a moment to remember our encounter. It had felt, when I was listening to him play, that I was as close to the soul of this music as I’d ever get. There’s a real sadness in his passing. One more link to the music’s heyday has been lost.
But the Delta’s musical legacy lives on in a new generation of artists. Musicians like Keith Johnson in Greenville or Big A and Sean Apple in Clarksdale. And they’re not just ensuring the continuation of an enduring and beloved genre. They’re inviting others—people like you and me—to experience the soul of the land itself.
I think back to my time with Sean, to the words that have stuck with me all these months later.
Sean: They come here to Clarksdale looking for the beginning of music as they know it, because the music that most people like when they come here, they got influenced, uh, and, and introduced to blues by rock’n’roll. They got introduced to this by Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and, and so when they come to Clarksdale, they’re looking at, you know, the grandfather of, of all that music, you know, and they want to come and see what influenced that.
Aislyn: Thanks for joining us in this exploration of the Mississippi blues. If you, like me, want even more of the music you heard in this episode, there is a Spotify playlist in the show notes, as well as links to all the musicians’ work.
We featured all of the clips you heard here with permission of the artists. But, of course, the best way to support them is to purchase their music and maybe even travel to see them. You’ll find travel resources for that in the show notes as well.
And of course, links to Emma’s website, her stories for Afar and her many excellent books. Next week, we’ll be back with tips on the best outdoor off-season adventures to book this year.
Cindy: It’s a good time to visit Central America in the spring.
I’ve been to both Costa Rica and Nicaragua in April, May, and it’s just the tail end of their dry season there. The rainy season usually starts sometime in May. So it’s a time when, you know, you can still be outdoors without getting sopping wet, but it’s not their, it’s not their high season—so, you know, a few less crowds, not quite as expensive.
Aislyn: Ready for more Unpacking? Visit afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Tiktok. We’re @afarmedia. If you enjoy today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great stories. Subscribing always makes that easy, and be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platforms. It helps other travelers find it.
And if you want to ask a question or suggest a topic for coverage, you can leave us a voicemail at the link in the show notes, or email us at unpacked@afar.com
This has been Unpacked, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland. Music composition by Chris Colin.
And remember, the travel world is complicated. We’re here to help you unpack it.
