A traveller once wrote, “We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey” This was our spiritual quest for the Blues and its descendants. It is a story of great humanity and the expression of human suffering and hardship.
Down in the Delta, we were often asked whether we loved the blues. It’s strange but they refer to it as a living entity. People would come up to you in Juke Joints and clubs keen to know our relationship to this strange musical genre that became one of the cornerstones for global contemporary music. The music is a relatively simple and repetitive form whilst some of these early musicians playing on poor or homemade instruments were not necessarily virtuoso performers. There is more to it than music, it does have a life of its own, born out of suffering, authenticity, experience, poverty and religion. Most of all, it was the voice of a people, torn out of their homeland and enslaved in a hostile culture and country.
I remembered my first experiences of the great Delta musicians such as Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. There was no clear melody; it was the hard moaning blues that they grew up with, learnt from generations of their forefathers who worked dawn to dusk in hot sun and harsh weather. I immediately recognised that tone when we walked into Reds on Saturday evening in Clarksdale. The 88 year old “T Model Ford” hollered out that same haunting sound while his 12 year old grandson almost drowned his guitar playing on drums. The Blues is an art form in its own right. It is a poetry and an expression of that poetry that grips and captivates us.
There is also a strange dichotomy about this music. Its about suffering and hardship yet people flock to dance to it and laugh with it. Those sitting in the Juke Joints are smiling and happy. The language and the poetry becomes a confessional to suffering and a way to absolve one of ones unhappiness. A display in the Leland Blues Museum describes how this small town (known as the Hell Hole of the Delta) would see ten thousand revellers descent on the town on a Saturday night to drink, love, dance and listen to the music.
I will take many memories with me home from the Delta and from this trip. Was it life changing?
Probably not, but a learnt a lot and I realised that there was more to life than that small circle that we live in and operate from. We saw all that was great about the USA and all that is awful. One of the most moving experiences was to visit the Human Rights Museum in Memphis. It’s so difficult to believe that the emancipation of the black people happened within my lifetime, in the very recent past. How could a nation be so proud to call itself “The Land of the Free`` and at the same time allow black people to be lynched, beaten, abused and deprived of their liberty. Like most people of my generation, I remember seeing those awful pictures of a dying Dr King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968 yet it was more of a shock to look out from the hotel room onto that very balcony at the museum in Memphis. Voyeur becomes participant. It was nothing to do with me, I was only passing by!
The economic recession has dealt a crushing blow to the poor rural communities of the south. Small towns had their heart ripped out of them with downtown main streets full of empty decaying shops. Many of the well-known blues clubs and Juke Joints published in a recent 2009 guide to the delta were boarded up and abandoned. While the green shoots of recovery were beginning to sprout in the magnificent shopping Cathedrals and Malls of the more prosperous Northern States, I hold little hope for towns such as Belzoni and Hollandale. There is nothing to keep the young men and women there. There will be no one to keep the Delta Blues alive when this generation dies out. That dark fertile soil will still be able to grow cotton (or more likely crops to produce bio fuels) and the rest will be history.
To misquote the famous Chinese quote, we have lived through interesting times. Even if Robert Zimmerman had not come along, would there have been a Bob Dylan. Its difficult to tell, but for people my age, his songs and his albums were our time line. Buddy Holly’s Death coincided with Bob’s first performances. He went to university when Kennedy was elected. His move to New York was the same year the Montgomery Race Riots. His first album came out at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and it’s the same year that I went to boarding school. Freewheeling Bob Dylan coincided with the assassination of John F Kennedy and so on……1969 saw Nashville Skyline, Bob’s return to performing live, the landing of men on the Moon and my entrance to medical school. He sang about our lives and our times and he was part of ours.
I will feel lost without my journey, my blog and my fellow travellers. We arrive home wiser, wearier and more chilled out!
As David Bowie once said “ The truth of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time”. Our journey never stops and other travellers will take our places journeying up the blues road.
