Highway 61, known to those that make the journey south in search of the blues as the ‘blues highway’, never strays far from the banks of the great Mississippi River as it passes through towns and cities that bear the scars of America’s troubled past. The current out-pouring of protest over the deaths of young African American men at the hands of the police in North St. Louis and the northern cities of New York and Baltimore suggest the presence of deeper routed injustices, which the civil rights gains of the last century failed to heal. Even when black Americans voted with their feet, leaving the ‘Jim Crow’ South in search of a better life in the industrial cities of the North and Midwest, they met new forms of discrimination in terms of where they could live and the jobs they could undertake. The shock for many blues tourists who travel across the States to the visit locations associated with the history of the blues is the revelation that the conditions that gave rise to America’s most important indigenous musical form are still to be found in sleepy rural towns and neighbourhoods hidden under the shadow of elevated Interstates.
The account of the journey I took with photographer Richard Brown takes the reader on the thousand mile trip across the United States from Chicago to New Orleans. A journey that starts from the home of Chicago blues in the city’s South and West Side. Neighbourhoods that became the final destination for thousands of African Americans from the Southern States during the Great Migration. A diaspora that brought with it forms of country blues music that would transform into a new urban sound. A sound that Langston Hughes described in a review of a Memphis Minnie gig at Chicago’s 230 Club, which held the imagery of “muddy old swamps, Mississippi dust and sun, cotton fields, lonesome roads, train whistles in the night, mosquitoes at dawn” and cried 'through the strings on Memphis Minnie’s electric guitar, amplified to machine proportions – a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.' [Chicago Defender national edition, 9 January 1943, p.14 ProQuest Historical Newspapers]
Blues travellers who take the road-trip south break their journey at the same riverside ports described by Mark Twain in Life of the Mississippi, an autobiographical account of his eight-day steamboat journey in the Gold Dust in 1882. River cities that grew up on the high limestone bluffs like St Louis, the hometown of Jonnie Johnson, Chuck Berry and Peetie Wheatstraw or Memphis, home of Sun Studios and Stax. Other cities nestle behind the protection of the great Mississippi levees, such as Helena, hometown to KFFA’s, King Biscuit Radio, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Lockwood Jnr., and base for numerous blues guitarists like Robert Johnson and Elmore James. Across the river from Helena are to be found the lazy Delta towns of Robinsonville and Lula where Son House, Charley Patton and Robert Johnson performed at local plantation parties and juke joints. Another few miles and Clarksdale is reached, for many the capital of the Delta blues, home of the Delta Blues Museum and the Stovall plantation where Muddy Waters grew up. After Clarksdale, old Highway 61 follows the Mississippi down through miles of cotton fields to Greenville and Leland, the birthplace of Jimmy Reed, then on across a flat Delta landscape of cotton fields stretched between the banks of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, where the monotony is only broken by cedar swamps and bayous and on to Natchez, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg and finally New Orleans.
Twain’s observations are pertinent because he wrote at a time when the United States could have taken a different route, as the South was starting to reassert itself after the defeat of the Civil War. He describes the brief period between African Americans’ newly won liberties prior to renewed subjugation. After passing Memphis, Twain refers to 'getting down to the migrating negro (sic) region' where 'these poor people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for their privation now. They stay on a plantation till the desire to travel seizes them; then pack up; hail a steamboat, and clear up.' [Twain, M., Life on the Mississippi, Wordsworth Editions, 2012, p.204] His observations were made just a few years after the Emancipation Act abolishing slavery and a mere five years after the collapse of the Reconstruction, which wiped out the post-civil war gains made by African Americans. A failure that ushered in decades of Jim Crow laws and through which slavery was supplanted by an economic system that has been described as one of peonage or forced labour in the South. [See Carper, N. Gordon, Slavery Revisited: Peonage in the South, Pylon, 37:1, 1976, pp.85-99.] Within eight years the South started to pass the laws that would disenfranchise African Americans from their new found civil freedoms.
In an interview, the African American writer James Baldwin said that 'the Blues and Spirituals are all about tragedy. It’s the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them – to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.' [Baldwin, James, edited by Standley, Fred L. and Pratt, Louis H., Conversations with James Baldwin, University Press of |Mississippi, 1989, p.22] Yet, today whilst blues music has found a predominantly white market beyond the communities that gave birth to it, it is the ‘tragedy’ that remains for thousands of African Americans separated from the rest of America in a post-industrial nightmare.
Areas like East St. Louis, scene of the worst race riot of the twentieth century in 1917 and hometown to blues pianist Peetie Wheatstraw until his death in 1941. Life is still tragic for the residents who have to live in a city where the homicide rate has been recorded at seventeen times the average for the United States and over half of the population lives below the poverty level. On the other side of the Mississippi River in North St Louis, nearly half the residents in neighbourhoods close to Goode Avenue, from which Chuck Berry’s song takes its name, have to survive on an income below the poverty level. According to the NAACP, African Americans are imprisoned at nearly six times the rates of whites and one in six black men have been incarcerated. [NAACP Criminal Fact Sheet, 15/05/15]. The United States Department of Labor statistics for the last twelve months until April 2015 show that on average for the whole of the United States, African American workers are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white workers.
After taking making the road-trip across the States and visiting so many towns and cities that gave birth to the blues, leaves me to consider whether recent events in Ferguson, New York and Baltimore, and the sense of injustice these have given rise to amongst African Americans, shouldn’t be seen in isolation but rather as another manifestation of a wider tragedy.
Derek Bright is the author of Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway. Highway 61 – the legendary Blues Highway and route taken by modern-day blues pilgrims on their journey south into the Mississippi Delta. Littered with iconic place names and immortalised in the songs of the Deep South, the great river road was taken by countless African Americans in search of the promise of work in the northern cities and escape from the legacy of slavery and hardship of the rural south. Highway 61 takes in the work of the early musicologists looking for an authentic delta folk music in the 1930s, the music arising from the struggles of a newly emerging black American proletariat in the 1940s, and the young white musicians who brought their awareness of blues back to the States from England in the 1960s. A heady mix of blues and civil rights unfolds as the reader accompanies the author on a southbound trail from Chicago, known as the ‘blues capital of the world’, to New Orleans, close to Chuck Berry’s fabled ‘gateway from freedom’. For anyone embarking on the journey this is essential reading that ensures the blues pilgrim will get the most from the land where blues began.