I arrived in Greenville at suppertime, so, as planned I ate one of the world's greatest steaks at Doe's Eat Place.
Then I drove around town a little, in a stupor, taking pictures of buildings in the evening light.
After that, I needed to keep moving, either that or curl up somewhere and fall into a deep, dark food coma. I took a walk along the Mississippi River levees at Greenville. (The Mississippi River levees are the largest, longest engineering project in history.)
The next day, Wednesday, I took my time driving around on my way to Clarksdale. I went to Leland. (Which I had also driven around the night before.)
I met Pat Thomas there. He's the son of James "Son" Thomas, a blues player as well. He was playing in the Highway 61 Blues Museum, but I think he was just warming up, or maybe it was all the bandages on his fingers.
I lunched at the Crystal Grill in Greenwood and I highly recommend it. The $7.95 lunch special I had was fried catfish, turnip greens, mac & cheese, hush puppies, corn muffins and a piece of pie, oh yeah, and a drink. And it was just about perfect, even if my arteries weren't happy about it. It was fish, wasn't it? That's good for you. And there were greens, so what if they were loaded up with ham hocks.
After lunch I turned north up old Highway 49. I passed Parchman Farm, famous in dozens of blues songs. It's the Mississippi State Penitentiary and was famous as a truly hellish labor camp. These days there don't seem to be long rows of stripe-clad prisoners with hoes or bent over chopping cotton. There were a bunch of road signs telling you what sort of trouble you'd get into if you stopped along that stretch of road for anything other than an emergency, but it didn't look much different than most of the other stretches of road I'd been passing along.
Then I got to Tutwiler, the town where W.C. Handy supposedly first heard the blues on the train platform.
There was an oddly decorated house there. Driving around the Delta you see a lot of art in people's yards and decorating their houses. I couldn't find out any details about this place.
There was a nice swampy area right in the middle of town.
Finally I got to Clarksdale, the town that makes the loudest and most persuasive argument for being the home of the blues. I checked into the truly fantastic Big Pink Guest House, and had it to myself for the night. (This is the interior courtyard.)
Then I wandered around town for a little while.
There are a number of intersections that claim to be the actual "crossroads" where Robert Johnson, and others, sold their souls to the devil to play the blues. In Clarksdale, the intersection of Highways 49 and 61, the two main highways that run up and down the Delta, would seem to have the greatest claim on it. Sadly, here it is.
I'd never been to Helena, Arkansas, and it is just across the Mississippi from the north Delta. It seemed like as good a place to cruise to as any. It has a beautiful park built along the levees.
Which is good, because downtown has fallen on some hard times.
I went back to spend the night in Clarksdale, where at the Ground Zero Blues Club I saw, among other things, a 14 year old white boy (he looked like a little surfer kid) named Jake, shred the hell out of blues guitar licks. That brought to mind the age old question of whether or not white people can play the blues. Far greater minds than mine have mulled this over and come to a wide variety of conclusions. I spent some time mulling it over, too, and I came to some of my own conclusions. I will blog about them, possibly tomorrow. But for the moment, this blog is plenty long enough.
I leave you with a picture of the northern part of the Natchez Trace highway. Just about 200 miles of my drive today, from Clarksdale to Nashville, looked just like this.
6 comments:
I want to know what camera you're using. The colors are vivid and the shots in low light---without flash---are excellent.
Thanks. I'm using a Nikon D300. I set the saturation to +1 rather than neutral. I find neutral is too bland. I like shooting in low light and shoot a lot that way, generally what I do is put the camera on the digital equivalent of fast motor drive, hold it steady as I can and if I fire off a burst of five or six frames, at least one of them is going to be sharp, even at very slow shutter speeds. I do a bit of monkeying around with the images in Photoshop, but generally try not to do very much, getting it as close to the original scene as possible.
Thanks. The low-light saturation is incredible. I'm salivating. But damn, that camera costs $1400. Please forgive a naive question: do I really have to shell out that much to get pictures that good?
I don't think so. There are some pretty remarkable cameras out there for a lot less money. They might require a little more fiddling with the in camera settings and maybe some more playing with Photoshop after the fact, but in terms of the lenses and color reproduction, etc. I, for one, have been incredibly happy with some of the higher end Panasonic Lumix point and shoots. I think they do a remarkable job for the money and the lenses, which are made my Leica, are tack sharp, contrasty and the other stuff you want from a lens. I think the top of the line ones are somewhere around $500 or so, and they go down from there.
I ended up with the Nikon after trading every last bit of non-digital camera equipment I'd accumulated over the years for it, and enough extra for a slew of lenses. But I've been incredibly impressed with some of the lower priced cameras. Actually, some of the lower priced Nikons, like the D90 are pretty great too, they use pretty much the same chip as the D300.
Tremendous pictures! As someone who lives in Asia I have to ask . . . where are all of the people? So many of the great buildings look boarded up and empty. I hope that this is just the result of artistic license and not because times are so tough in America?!?
What a delight to wake up to your beautiful blog this morning. Your photos of the Delta are wonderful. I'm forwarding your blog on to my friend, Tommy Polk, who owns the Big Pink Guesthouse, and hope you'll come back to visit sometime at his newest place in Southwest Mississippi -- Shantybellum Guesthouse -- on the southerly end of the Blues Highway 61 in Natchez.
www.shantybellum.com
www.shantybellum.blogspot.com
e pritchartt
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