Road Trip/Side Trip -with musical accompaniment
I made a big ol’ solo road trip this week, left 6 AM Tuesday, back 10 PM Thursday, 1545 miles, 2 meaningful business stops, one semi-meaningful, and a little messin’ around. Since it was just me, decided to listen to some stuff, so I left with the early Monroe Brothers box set, 13 individual CD’s including Clark Kessenger, 10 assorted early country blues classics, one Ruby’s Begonia, and one other which I can’t remember.
Tuesday was devoted to getting to Greenville, Mississippi. Stopped in St. Louis to have lunch with my brother Dean, he bought since I was traveling, we had a decent talk, and as usual parted with both of us feeling slightly glad that we are not the other one. (He more than me.) I didn’t get into my CD’s until south of St. Louis and I started off with Kokomo Arnold. It was fun, but didn’t listen to all 30 tracks on the double CD. Country blues is of course a tightly defined genre and you don’t expect a lot of variation, but I am probably safe in saying that old Kokomo only actually had one song. It is a tribute to his ingenuity that he managed to get it recorded 30 times. I finished out the drive to Memphis with Ruby’s Begonia, jazz-grass and swing, a still active band. Again, didn’t finish the CD, good but not spell-binding. Memphis to Greenville is about 2 hours, so tried some Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie for that leg. Most of the Rainey recordings had some very hot horn players on them which was worthwhile, but the vocals were buried in the mix to the point of being meaningless, so not much there. Ma’s real name was Gertrude for those who care, she took the "Ma" moniker when she married a performer who called himself "Pa" Rainey. I didn’t know that. Minnie was better, but frankly none of those old female blues singers keep my attention for very long.
Got a skanky motel in Greenville and finished Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I sort of like the opening paragraph of this book,although some will find it cliché ridden. A strong cliché always beats a weak originality. I will reproduce it for those of you who slept through your college literature classes.
" Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing."
Wednesday morning took care of the primary reason for the trip, which was to deliver a rebuilt medical air compressor to Greenwood Leflore Hospital, help install it, and haul the old one away for rebuild or salvage. This task, which could have been done in 4 hours by a reasonably active and agile person, was accomplished in that length of time by seven maintenance guys with suggestions from me. They wanted to help, so I assumed my aged and infirm persona, acted is if I could barely walk and could lift nothing and let them have at it. I drove away at 11:15 with everyone’s good wishes.
Greenwood Mississippi is at the eastern side of the Mississippi delta and is significant in music history as the location of the juke joint where Robert Johnson was poisoned. With a little time on my hands, I decided to stop at the country history museum about a block from the hospital. Pretty interesting plus I saw a flyer for the Greenwood Blues Museum, devoted primarily to the aforementioned Mr. Johnson. I sought out this edifice, and found it on the third floor of a downtown building at the top of a long metal outside stair, formerly a fire escape.
It was a well done small museum, maybe 20 x 100 feet in size, with a lot of interesting stuff if you are interested in that sort of stuff. There was a picture of the RJ’s gravestone, a nice new one erected a couple of decades ago. It’s not actually on his grave, as nobody can figure out where they buried him, but they are pretty sure it’s in the right cemetery. I found it mildly ironic that the town where the man was killed and buried in an unmarked grave now finds that he is their primary claim to any sort of fame. I bought a double CD set of all his recordings plus 12 alternate takes and headed back down the stairs.
For reasons which escape me now, I did not visit Robert Johnson’s grave, maybe because he may not be buried there.
Now properly fortified with the correct music, I determined to spend the rest of the afternoon driving up Highway 49, across the delta, through Tutwiler, up to Clarksdale at the intersection of 49 and 61, which is where everybody that played any delta blues was from at one time or another or claimed to be. And that is just what I did, another white boy wannbe’ musician driving past the cotton fields and farm shacks, marveling at Johnson’s virtuosity, at one with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and 10,000 others who in truth can’t come much closer to doing what he could do than I can.
At Clarksdale, I spent an hour at the official Delta Blues Museum, another very cool place with much to gawk at. Didn’t buy anything there, although I was tempted by a Charlie Patton t-shirt. Finally decided against it because it had his picture on it plus his name under it. If you have to have the name written under a picture of Charlie Patton, I don’t want you to start a conversation with me and thus the shirt would draw the wrong crowd. Thus, I passed. Drove across the Mississippi River and into Arkansas, through Helena, home of the radio station that carried the original King Biscuit blues hour and home of the current King Biscuit blues festival which I am going to go to someday.
By the time I got to Hot Springs I had listened to all 41 Johnson tracks twice. Everybody needs to do that at 2 to 3 year intervals.
Thursday morning I did a bit of work at the Hot Springs hospital, then headed north. Went through a Big Joe Turner CD which didn’t do much for me, then a Jimmy Yancey one that did. Yancey was a wonderful blues/boogie woogie pianist and I liked it a bunch. Then I put in a Big Boy Crudup and it was so much fun that I stayed with that all the way to Kansas City. Double CD, 40 cuts, just fun music. About half of them sound a lot like "That’s All Right Mama", but again, I have the greatest respect for a man who can sell the same song 20 times.
My last stop was in Springdale Arkansas to see a man about a vacuum pump, and damned if he didn’t have a King Biscuit Blues Festival poster on his wall. Thus, we had something to talk about besides pumps.
Tuesday was devoted to getting to Greenville, Mississippi. Stopped in St. Louis to have lunch with my brother Dean, he bought since I was traveling, we had a decent talk, and as usual parted with both of us feeling slightly glad that we are not the other one. (He more than me.) I didn’t get into my CD’s until south of St. Louis and I started off with Kokomo Arnold. It was fun, but didn’t listen to all 30 tracks on the double CD. Country blues is of course a tightly defined genre and you don’t expect a lot of variation, but I am probably safe in saying that old Kokomo only actually had one song. It is a tribute to his ingenuity that he managed to get it recorded 30 times. I finished out the drive to Memphis with Ruby’s Begonia, jazz-grass and swing, a still active band. Again, didn’t finish the CD, good but not spell-binding. Memphis to Greenville is about 2 hours, so tried some Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie for that leg. Most of the Rainey recordings had some very hot horn players on them which was worthwhile, but the vocals were buried in the mix to the point of being meaningless, so not much there. Ma’s real name was Gertrude for those who care, she took the "Ma" moniker when she married a performer who called himself "Pa" Rainey. I didn’t know that. Minnie was better, but frankly none of those old female blues singers keep my attention for very long.
Got a skanky motel in Greenville and finished Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I sort of like the opening paragraph of this book,although some will find it cliché ridden. A strong cliché always beats a weak originality. I will reproduce it for those of you who slept through your college literature classes.
" Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing."
Wednesday morning took care of the primary reason for the trip, which was to deliver a rebuilt medical air compressor to Greenwood Leflore Hospital, help install it, and haul the old one away for rebuild or salvage. This task, which could have been done in 4 hours by a reasonably active and agile person, was accomplished in that length of time by seven maintenance guys with suggestions from me. They wanted to help, so I assumed my aged and infirm persona, acted is if I could barely walk and could lift nothing and let them have at it. I drove away at 11:15 with everyone’s good wishes.
Greenwood Mississippi is at the eastern side of the Mississippi delta and is significant in music history as the location of the juke joint where Robert Johnson was poisoned. With a little time on my hands, I decided to stop at the country history museum about a block from the hospital. Pretty interesting plus I saw a flyer for the Greenwood Blues Museum, devoted primarily to the aforementioned Mr. Johnson. I sought out this edifice, and found it on the third floor of a downtown building at the top of a long metal outside stair, formerly a fire escape.
It was a well done small museum, maybe 20 x 100 feet in size, with a lot of interesting stuff if you are interested in that sort of stuff. There was a picture of the RJ’s gravestone, a nice new one erected a couple of decades ago. It’s not actually on his grave, as nobody can figure out where they buried him, but they are pretty sure it’s in the right cemetery. I found it mildly ironic that the town where the man was killed and buried in an unmarked grave now finds that he is their primary claim to any sort of fame. I bought a double CD set of all his recordings plus 12 alternate takes and headed back down the stairs.
For reasons which escape me now, I did not visit Robert Johnson’s grave, maybe because he may not be buried there.
Now properly fortified with the correct music, I determined to spend the rest of the afternoon driving up Highway 49, across the delta, through Tutwiler, up to Clarksdale at the intersection of 49 and 61, which is where everybody that played any delta blues was from at one time or another or claimed to be. And that is just what I did, another white boy wannbe’ musician driving past the cotton fields and farm shacks, marveling at Johnson’s virtuosity, at one with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and 10,000 others who in truth can’t come much closer to doing what he could do than I can.
At Clarksdale, I spent an hour at the official Delta Blues Museum, another very cool place with much to gawk at. Didn’t buy anything there, although I was tempted by a Charlie Patton t-shirt. Finally decided against it because it had his picture on it plus his name under it. If you have to have the name written under a picture of Charlie Patton, I don’t want you to start a conversation with me and thus the shirt would draw the wrong crowd. Thus, I passed. Drove across the Mississippi River and into Arkansas, through Helena, home of the radio station that carried the original King Biscuit blues hour and home of the current King Biscuit blues festival which I am going to go to someday.
By the time I got to Hot Springs I had listened to all 41 Johnson tracks twice. Everybody needs to do that at 2 to 3 year intervals.
Thursday morning I did a bit of work at the Hot Springs hospital, then headed north. Went through a Big Joe Turner CD which didn’t do much for me, then a Jimmy Yancey one that did. Yancey was a wonderful blues/boogie woogie pianist and I liked it a bunch. Then I put in a Big Boy Crudup and it was so much fun that I stayed with that all the way to Kansas City. Double CD, 40 cuts, just fun music. About half of them sound a lot like "That’s All Right Mama", but again, I have the greatest respect for a man who can sell the same song 20 times.
My last stop was in Springdale Arkansas to see a man about a vacuum pump, and damned if he didn’t have a King Biscuit Blues Festival poster on his wall. Thus, we had something to talk about besides pumps.
posted by tickmeister at 5:36 PM
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