A plaintive note—keening and high—floating up into the sonic atmosphere and slamming heavily back down to earth, joyously expressing the deepest sorrow and inciting dance; foot-tapping rhythms. Backwoods sonatas of heartbreak and sadness—‘High Water Everywhere’. Highway 61 in a sweltering Mississippi summer walked tirelessly by vagabond music men with dime store guitars on their backs and visions of Memphis and Chicago in their world-tired eyes.
‘Hey, baby don’t you wanna go? To that land of milk and honey—sweet home, Chicago.’
Tales of crossroads at midnight and souls sold to ‘Legbah’, the Devil’s right hand man. Hwy. 61 drips of the legends, the men, the blues that made it famous. It is the ‘Blues Highway’; the road to salvation for many a blues man. Clarksdale, Friars’ Point, Stovall; the towns along the highway are like relics, the remnants of a blues historian’s dream as he counts down the miles from Greenville to Memphis, following the same path that B.B did back in '47. The tall, straight utility poles go clicking passed, providing the only break in a long, long procession of open fields ready for planting. And over there, just beyond your sight but always present, that big river flows on down to the sea. Muddy and wide, its presence is always felt in the Delta. This is the heart of it, where it all began; and the blues drips off the trees and swells up from the fertile ground.
This is the place where Eddie James ‘Son’ House decided to get religion and join the Baptist church. It’s where Charlie Patton rode his Stone Pony and Robert Johnson found his Little Queen of Spades. It’s the place where America started breathing after a long, hard, dark night. Where the sons and grandsons of slaves found release for their souls and the plantation men stood powerless against songs. It was the first thump of a back-beat being pounded out by feet on porch boards in a Cypress grove at night. The sweat, the booze, the pain and elation of a voice finding its song and a song finding its music.
Some people say that Rock and Roll was born in Memphis, but I don’t think so. It was born in the Mississippi Delta on a sweat drenched Saturday night, on the front steps of a drugstore in Clarksdale, and on the banks of that big river—so muddy, wide, and forbidding. It was born in the sound of back-beat foot stomps and syncopating guitars keeping time with the freight trains as they passed by in the dead of night.
‘The blues is a low-down aching chill. If you never had ‘em, well, I hope you never will.’
But if you haven’t had them, can you really understand them?
If you haven’t walked a mile in the shoes of those men who sang them so real, can you know what they’re saying?
You can.
You hear it in the notes, a sort of defiant sadness that is inexpressible in words. The music is thick with it. It flows under the words and notes—it gets under your skin until it itches and burns. It makes you want to dance joyously under the Delta moon and cry in your beer at the same time. It makes you drunk and angry. It hurts—but it feels good. It’s a cold steel blade that cuts the thick night with a keening, ringing cry. It’s the voice of a certain kind of suffering—the kind that says ‘You can beat me, rob me, do what you want, but you will not silence me’—that comes floating down through time and out of the speakers of your stereo; strangely timeless and arcane, archaic and new. It is the perfect expression of humanity concentrated into two minute sound bites played on beat-up guitars in time to back-beat feet stomping broken porch boards emanating from the ominous Delta of that big river.
‘I’m a stranger here, just got into town...’
But, there really are no strangers in the blues. It’s every man, woman, and child. It’s laughing in the face of sadness and kicking them when you’re down before they get a chance to kick you. I heard someone say: ‘The blues ain’t nothing but a good man feeling bad.’ I don’t know. I think maybe the blues ain’t nothing but good people just feeling.
Whatever it is; it’s real.
peace, wayf
peace, wayf 
