My father came to Chicago from Puerto Rico in 1947 and went to work in a steel mill, and somewhere on the South Side in those first years he heard Muddy Waters through the door of a tavern and never got over it. I grew up with that sound coming out of the hi-fi in our front room every Saturday morning. Muddy, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, and later, when the record companies started putting the old ones back out, Robert Johnson and Charley Patton and Son House, men who had been dead or forgotten since before I was born. My mother called it "your father's church music." She wasn't entirely wrong.

Pop always said he was going to go down to Mississippi and see where it all came from. He never did. He died in 1994, and the records came to me, and I have been saying I was going to go for him ever since. I've driven a city bus in Chicago for twenty-two years. I know what it is to say you'll do a thing someday and then look up and find that someday has been and gone.

So this spring I took my vacation week early, my wife Debra said a week of catfish and cemeteries was my idea of a vacation and not hers (fair), and on Thursday, May 13, I got on a plane to Memphis with a road map, a notebook, a camera with three rolls of film, and a cassette of Pop's favorite songs that I'd made off his records.

This page is what I found. I've tried hard to keep what's known separate from what's legend, because down there they run together like two rivers, and the legends are half the fun. When I say "the story goes," I mean nobody can prove it.

U.S. Highway 61 runs straight down out of Memphis into the Delta, which is not the mouth of the river, like I thought as a kid, but a huge flat oval of farmland in northwest Mississippi between the Mississippi River and the Yazoo. It is the flattest place I've ever seen, and I'm from Chicago. You can see a water tower ten miles off.

My plan was: fly to Memphis, rent a car, take 61 south through Tunica to Clarksdale, spend a couple of days there, wander east and south to Greenwood and the graves, come back west through Indianola to Cleveland, pick up 61 again and follow it down to Vicksburg, then drive it all the way back up to Memphis in one day and fly home. Seven days. About seven hundred miles on the rental car, most of them with the air conditioner on high.

For the whole thing day by day, see my notebook.

Clarksdale and the Delta Blues Museum. If you only have one day, spend it in Clarksdale. The Delta Blues Museum is the place to start: photographs, guitars, harmonicas, posters, old records in glass cases, and people working there who will talk to you as long as you want. I stood a long time in front of a picture of a cabin, thinking about my father. Clarksdale itself has seen better days, and you can tell, but more blues people came from in and around that town than I could keep track of in my notebook. Muddy Waters lived and worked on the Stovall plantation outside town, and that is where Alan Lomax came in 1941 to record him for the Library of Congress, two years before Muddy got on the train to Chicago. I drove out Stovall Road and parked by a cotton field and played Pop's tape with the windows down. I'm not ashamed to say I had to sit a while before I could drive.

The crossroads. Here's the legend, and everyone who's ever heard a blues record knows some version: Robert Johnson, a young man who couldn't play much, went to a lonely crossroads at midnight and met the devil, who tuned his guitar and gave it back, and from then on he played like nobody ever had. What's known is less spooky. Son House, who knew him when he was starting out, told interviewers many years later that young Robert had been a nuisance with a guitar, went away for a while, and came back able to play rings around all of them. That's all anybody really knows. The same crossroads story was told about another Mississippi bluesman, Tommy Johnson, no relation. People in Clarksdale will point you to the corner where Highway 61 meets Highway 49 and tell you that's the one. People in other towns will point you to their own corners. I stood at the one in Clarksdale in the middle of a hot Saturday afternoon, with a gas station and traffic and a man selling boiled peanuts, and nothing happened to me except I bought some peanuts. I recommend them.

A juke joint on a Saturday night. I'm not going to say which one or where, because the man who runs it asked me not to put it on the computer, and I gave him my word. It was a cinderblock building on the edge of town with no sign to speak of, a string of Christmas lights over the door in May, a pool table, a cooler of beer in cans, and a jukebox full of Southern soul records I'd never heard in my life. Around eleven a guitar player and a drummer set up in the corner and played until two, loud, rough and wonderful, the real thing, and nobody was there for any reason except to have a good time on a Saturday night. I was the only bus driver from Chicago in the room and I believe the only person wearing a windbreaker. Nobody minded. I bought a round for my table, tipped the band, and danced, badly, with a grandmother who was much better at it than me.

Cotton fields, and catfish. In the middle of May the cotton is just up, little rows of green running away in every direction, straight as ruled lines, all the way to the trees. Between the cotton there's soybeans and rice and, everywhere, catfish ponds, big flat rectangles of brown water with aerators churning. I ate catfish seven times in seven days. Fried, with hushpuppies and coleslaw and a slice of white bread you don't need but eat anyway. I am a man who used to think fish came in a square. I'm a changed man. I also discovered the Delta hot tamale, which is a long story for another page, and which I've been trying to talk Debra into learning ever since.

Dockery Farms. East of Cleveland, along Highway 8, you come to what's left of Dockery, a big cotton plantation where Charley Patton lived and played in the early part of the century. Patton is about as far back as the recorded Delta blues goes; he first recorded in 1929 and died in 1934. Younger men learned from him there, and one of them was a big kid named Chester Burnett who grew up to be Howlin' Wolf. There's not much to see now: some old wooden buildings by the road, the fields, the sky. I stood there a while anyway. Somebody had to start it, and as near as anybody can tell, a lot of it started around here.

The graves. Robert Johnson died near Greenwood in August of 1938. The story goes that he was poisoned at a juke joint over a woman. Nobody knows that for sure, and nobody knows for sure where he's buried, either. There's a tall stone for him at the Mount Zion church near Morgan City, put up a few years ago. And a few miles off, at the Payne Chapel church near Quito, there's another, smaller marker for him. They can't both be his grave. Maybe neither one is. I went to both, on Sunday afternoon, in the heat, and left a guitar pick and a dollar at each one, like the people before me had. It didn't feel silly. You're not visiting a body at a place like that anyway. You're visiting a man's music, and that's everywhere.

I'm a stranger, a city man, and a Yankee, and I went poking around in people's towns and churches and cemeteries asking questions. Nobody in the Delta owed me a thing. I was treated better than I've been treated anywhere.

• Loretta Pitre, who runs a little cafe in Clarksdale where I ate catfish three times, taught me the right way to eat it (with your fingers, and the hot sauce goes on the fish, not the hushpuppies), drew me a map on a napkin to every place I asked about, and on Saturday invited me to her church the next morning. I went. They sang for two hours, and the preacher welcomed "our visitor from Chicago" from the pulpit, and I'll never forget it.
• Everett McCreery, who sat next to me at the juke joint, has been going to Saturday nights in that part of the Delta since he was a young man. He knew every record I named and a hundred more, and he told me which of the old stories he believed and which he didn't, and at two in the morning he walked me out to my rental car and stood there till I drove off.
• Florine Mena, who was weeding her family's graves in the churchyard where one of the Robert Johnson stones is, saw me red-faced and wilting in the sun and brought me a jar of ice water from her car. She said people come from all over the world to that stone, from Japan and England and everywhere, and she's always glad to see them, and she wishes they'd bring a hat.
• Anthony Schmeling, at a gas station in Rolling Fork, who heard where I'd been and where I was going, and spent half an hour telling me about the 1927 flood, which his grandmother lived through, and the levees, and how to see the river at Vicksburg from up high. He was right about the view.

1. Go in spring or fall. I went in the middle of May and it was already in the nineties and wet as a towel. I can't picture August.
2. Get a car with good air conditioning, and keep a gallon of water in it. Wear a hat. (See Florine, above.)
3. Get a real state road map. Some of the places you want are on gravel roads with no signs.
4. Remember these are people's homes, churches and graves. Ask before you take a picture of anybody. Put something in the church box. Don't take anything from a grave, not even a pebble.
5. At a juke joint, be a guest. Go with someone local if you can, buy a drink, tip the band, and don't act like you're at a museum. It's somebody's Saturday night.
6. Eat the catfish. Eat the hot tamales. Eat the boiled peanuts at the crossroads.
7. Read before you go. I read Deep Blues by Robert Palmer, Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick, and The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax, and I wished I'd read W.C. Handy's own book, Father of the Blues, before I went instead of after.
8. Listen before you go. That's what my twenty records page is for.
9. Don't wait. That one's from my father.

My pictures came back from the drugstore fine, and some of them are even in focus. My nephew says he can put a few on this page once he gets his scanner working. Until then you'll have to take my word for how flat it is.

If you're learning to play this music instead of just listening to it, go see Leon Broussard's Blues Harmonica Page, right here in the Delta neighborhood. He explains cross harp better than anybody ever explained it to me.

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since June 1999

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Last updated Sunday, August 29, 1999