As part of our driving holiday up the Mississippi, we stopped for a couple of nights in Clarksdale, one of the more well-known crossroads and an excellent base to explore the delta blues region.
The Delta Blues Museum sits in the nightclub area near the centre of town and is an excellent introduction to the blues.
(No connection with the museum, but interesting nonetheless)
The displays range from the days of slavery to the current music scene, with plenty to listen to and instruments to fetish. There’s old cars, and bits of Muddy Waters’ shack from when he was a share cropper, along with gold discs and photos of those who became stars and others who didn’t. It was at once sobering and inspiring and I left with a couple of books and bunch of music to chase up when I came home.
While in the area we also managed to find three graves of Robert Johnson, and as many crossroads where he sold his soul to the devil.
What we observed was that probably none of the graves were authentic, despite the protestations of the old guy at one graveyard who obviously made a meagre living by showing folks to the ‘actual grave of Robert Johnson’ in the hope of a tip. Looking at the other graves from the early 20th century the commonality was their simplicity. Many were just rocks or slabs with names and dates misspelled and inexpertly carved. The working poor of the 1930s had little formal education and no money to waste on the ostentation demanded of local councils to mark important sites. What was especially depressing was that we found graves from the recent past that were no more sophisticated than those of 100 years before in the same graveyards. I gave the guy $10 and retreated to the car, to drive back to a highway and on to Memphis.
