Finds Music Roots : Mississippi Now in Tune With Blues

When Rust College held its first blues and gospel folk festival five years ago, the gospel lovers couldn’t clear the grounds fast enough when the gospel sets were over and the blues artists took their turn on stage.

“The gospel fans thought of the blues as the ‘devil’s music,’ ” said Sylvester Oliver, acting humanities chairman at the tiny black college and the festival producer. “They considered it sinful to even listen to it.”

If they did then, they certainly don’t anymore.

At last year’s festival, the gospel lovers not only stayed through all the blues sets, they were observed laughing the loudest at the bawdy jokes of Hezekiah and the House Rockers, a Natchez blues band.

Deacon Transported

And when sultry blues songstress Lynn White emoted her way through a number called “Slow and Easy” in a slinky red dress slit to her thighs, a deacon from a local church was so transported that he repeatedly stood up, waved his arms in time to the music and then fell back into his seat.

But the gospel lovers of Holly Springs aren’t the only Mississippians who have changed their tune about the blues. All over the Magnolia State, people are discovering what the rest of the world has known for a long time: that the blues is one of the greatest forms of musical expression America has produced.

And now there are plenty of signs that Mississippians are happy to have the blues:

--Blues festivals are popping out like cotton bolls under a Delta sun.

--A Mississippi record company is emerging as the biggest blues label in the country.

--The University of Mississippi, once a bastion of segregation, now houses the largest blues archive in the world and is publisher of Living Blues magazine, the “Bible” of blues aficionados.

--The Delta city of Clarksdale boasts a one-of-a-kind blues museum.

--And one of the most popular shows on the statewide public radio station is a two-hour blues program broadcast each Saturday night.

State Has Come of Age

“Mississippi has finally come of age in recognizing the value of the blues and of the contribution of its native sons and daughters--blues giants like B. B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf--to the blues tradition,” said William Ferris, director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Veteran blues lovers elsewhere are likely to add that it’s about time.

Cities like Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles have long been havens for the blues--Memphis for so long, in fact, that it boasts of being the “Home of the Blues.” The Newport Jazz Festival featured blues performers as far back as 1960.

British and French music scholars were among the first to study the blues formally. Germany, Sweden and Holland all publish blues magazines. And Japan has such avid blues fans that they have begun re-issuing some of the classic blues recordings.

But Mississippi is, after all, the legendary birthplace of the blues. It was in the Mississippi Delta--a 200-mile-long swath of lush, table-top-flat cotton land stretching from Memphis to Vicksburg--that black sharecroppers and day laborers first fashioned the blues, before the turn of the century, out of the poverty and suffering of their everyday lives.

Disappointed love is a common theme in blues songs. One classic early blues song, for example, opens with the following stanza:

I’m sitting here alone in a one-room country shack.

I’m sitting here all alone in a one-room country shack.

My woman has left me and won’t be back.

Another early classic has these lines:

Big fat momma, meat shake on your bone.

Big fat momma, meat shake on your bone.

Every time it shake, a poor man’s dollar’s gone.

Influenced by Blues

Generations of musical artists--from W. C. Handy, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland to Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones--have been influenced by the plaintive melodies, seductive rhythms and earthy poetry of the blues as well as by the unusual bottleneck slide guitar technique of Delta blues musicians.

Handy’s 1914 “Yellow Dog Rag,” for instance, was based on a song he heard from an itinerant musician in the Delta town of Tutwiler that begins: “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.” It refers to the train station in Moorhead, just south of Tutwiler, where the Yazoo & Mississippi Railroad-known commonly as the “Yellow Dog”--crossed the tracks of the Southern Railroad.

In his 1981 musical and cultural history of the Delta, “Deep Blues,” Arkansas-born popular music critic Robert Palmer said: “The fact of the matter is, Delta blues is a refined, extremely subtle and ingeniously systematic musical language.”

Nevertheless, in Mississippi the blues remained almost without honor in its own country. Whites tended to dismiss the blues as “cotton patch music” or “ ‘Nigruh’ wailing,” while many blacks scorned the blues as the “devil’s music” or--especially after the civil rights movement of the 1960s--as “Uncle Tom music.”

New Appreciation

But over the last decade, as Mississippians have struggled to rid themselves of old taboos and prejudices, they have gained a whole new appreciation of the blues and of the seminal role this unique art form has played in American culture.

Just as native Mississippi writers like William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams are no longer regarded here simply as boozing scrawlers of dirty tales but as titans of American literature, so the blues is being viewed in a brand-new light.

Perhaps the most telling sign of Mississippi’s new-found appreciation of the blues is the growing number of blues festivals in the state, ranging from Rust College’s Northeast Mississippi Blues and Gospel Folk Festival to the B. B. King Blues Festival in the Delta town of Indianola.

‘Granddaddy’ Festival

The “granddaddy” of them all, however, is one launched only seven years ago in the middle of a 70-acre field in the tiny black Delta community of Freedom Village with an old flatbed truck for a stage and with no big-name performers: the Delta Blues Festival.

At that time, no one held out much hope for its continued success--not even its sponsors, a black rural development organization called Mississippi Action for Community Education, or MACE, based in the nearby city of Greenville.

“We really thought of it as a one-time deal just to get people together and pay tribute to the Delta blues,” said Malcolm Walls, director of MACE’s Delta Arts Project. “But to our surprise, it took off like a natural--like when you shoot dice and come up with a seven.”

About 3,700 patrons showed up--many more than festival planners had ever imagined would attend--and the show has kept on since then.

Today, the festival--traditionally held in September, with vendors selling everything from T-shirts and beer to fried catfish, barbecue ribs and Chicago Polish sausage--attracts crowds of more than 30,000 blues lovers from all over the world and is considered among the top blues festivals anywhere.

It still takes place in the same Freedom Village location where it began, although the flatbed-truck stage has been long since retired and the performers now include such well-known blues artists as John Lee Hooker, Bobby (Blue) Bland and Albert King.

Nowadays, as many whites as blacks attend the festival, and it has won support not only from several private corporations but state agencies for tourism and the arts as well as the governor’s office. Every Mississippi governor since 1979 has issued a proclamation honoring “Delta Blues Festival Day.” And in 1981 former Gov. William Winter held a reception at the antebellum governor’s mansion in Jackson for Muddy Waters, two years before the legendary blues artist’s death.

“It was Muddy’s first trip back to Mississippi since he left for Chicago almost 30 years before, and he said he couldn’t believe it was all happening,” Walls said.

David Evans, a Memphis State University music professor and author of “Big Blues Road,” says the official support for the blues as a positive aspect of the state’s culture is the most impressive feature of Mississippi’s blues awakening.

Wall of Apathy

“There are other parts of the country where individuals and groups are attempting to preserve and promote the blues,” Evans said. “But they run into a wall of apathy when they seek official support.”

Nowhere is the state’s willingess to support the blues better illustrated than at its leading institution of higher learning, the University of Mississippi.

In 1977, the university created the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and, two year later, hired William Ferris, a Vicksburg native who was then a Yale University professor and noted blues author and filmmaker, as its first director. Ferris was brought back to Mississippi with the understanding that he would make the study and preservation of the blues an integral part of the center’s activities.

“Blues was an obvious area to build a program,” Ferris said. “Country music is very well handled and archived at the Country Music Foundation in Nashville and jazz has a home at Tulane University in New Orleans. But blues had been overlooked, so we decided to create a blues archive based on a collection of recordings that was already here and collections that came in shortly after.”

One of the collections that came shortly after was that of B. B. King, who was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Itta Bena. King’s collection contained more than 10,000 records, in addition to numerous tapes, films and photographs from his career.

“B. B. was very excited about the idea of a blues archive at Ole Miss dedicated to what he has long hoped to see--serious study of the music he’s devoted his life to playing,” Ferris said.

Another collection the center obtained had been accumulated by the editors of Living Blues magazine, Jim and Amy O’Neal of Chicago. The center also took over as publisher of the magazine, although the O’Neals remain as editors.

Leading Center for Study

Today, the Ole Miss blues archive holds more than 35,000 blues recordings, 10,000 books and voluminous periodicals, photographs and other research materials. That makes the Oxford campus the leading center in the world for the study and preservation of the blues. Researchers can find everything from an original copy of Mamie Smith’s 1920 hit record “That Thing Called Love”--the first recorded blues song--to a program from the funeral of Los Angeles bluesman Percy Mayfield, who died last year from a heart attack.

“Quincy Jones, the Hollywood composer and producer, spent two days here earlier this year looking at materials as part of his research for the movie ‘The Color Purple,’ which is based on the Alice Walker book and was directed by Steven Spielberg,” said Suzanne Steel, the archive’s curator.

As part of its efforts to preserve the blues, the Southern studies center also has gone into the recording business. One of the three albums it has released so far, “Bothered All the Time,” was a 1985 Grammy Award nominee and was listed by the Library of Congress as one of the outstanding recordings of the year.

But nothing at the University of Mississippi beats the recording success of the 19-year-old company headed by two Ole Miss graduates, Tommy Couch and Wolf Stephenson, in Jackson, the state capital.

Their company, Malaco Records, produced the album “Down Home Blues” by the late Z. Z. Hill, which was released in 1980 and stayed on Billboard charts for 92 consecutive weeks, a feat unequaled since B. B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone” more than a decade earlier. In a market where an album that sells 50,000 copies is considered a raging success, “Down Home Blues” has sold close to 1 million copies.

Best Blues Label

The Malaco stable of blues artists currently includes Bobby (Blue) Bland, Denise LaSalle and Little Milton. At the annual National Blues Awards Show last month in Memphis, the company received an award--called a “Handy” in honor of W. C. Handy--as the best blues record label of the year.

“Malaco has definitely cornered the ‘soul blues’ market,” says Jim O’Neal, Living Blues’ editor. “Soul blues is modern blues that has a lot of the elements of soul music in it, unlike, say, ‘Chicago blues,’ which is just straight ahead blues without that much of a soul influence.

“Because of Malaco’s success, some blues artists who don’t even record for Malaco, like Bobby Rush, have even begun to base their activities out of Jackson.”

Ferris, of Ole Miss’ Southern studies center, added: “The Malaco sound is an exciting new step in blues history. Just as earlier recording labels such as Stax and Chess established distinctive blues sounds for performers in Memphis and Chicago, Malaco has developed a similar body of recordings in Jackson.”

Explosion of Activity

The explosion of blues activity in Mississippi in recent years has no greater admirers than the unsung bluesmen of the Magnolia State.

Sam Myers, a Jackson blues harmonica musician, had long lamented the sad state of blues appreciation in Mississippi.

“I walked through Europe like a king,” he said, recalling his tour of that continent some years ago. “And when those European boys would come to the United States, their first stop was in Mississippi to see the real blues players and to collect our records. The people here? You never got no respect from them.”

What does he think now? “It makes me feel good to know all this is finally going on. The recognition the blues and the blues performers are getting now--we’ve been needing this for a long time.”