Traveling the Blues Highway（转载）

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  Byrin 楼主 2020-02-08 10:36:52

  The phrase “having the blues” goes back to 18th-century England, where the “blue devils” was slang for melancholia. But it was sorrows like Sam Kendrick’s, common among blacks after the Civil War, that led to a raw new music—the blues—depicting work, love, poverty, and the hardships freedmen faced in a world barely removed from slavery.

  If he had lived, my great-grandfather would have been part of one of the largest peacetime internal movements of people in history. Between 1915 and 1970 more than five million African Americans left from every field and corner of the South, most going to the nation’s booming cities. Sam Kendrick’s eldest child, Swan, my grandfather, settled in Washington, D.C., where both my mother and I were born. Others in the family followed the heavily traveled path out of Mississippi to Memphis, where the blues spurred the rise of rock-and-roll. This “blues highway” led on to Chicago—the mecca for bluesmen and other migrants.

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  Byrin 楼主 2020-02-08 10:37:12

  One who landed in Chicago in 1936, Willie Dixon, called the blues “the facts of life.” Dixon was a blues songwriter, poet, and philosopher who campaigned for more than 50 years for recognition of the blues as the root of all American music. “Everything that’s under the sun, that crawls, flies, or swims likes music. But blues is the greatest, because blues is the only one that, along with the rhythm and the music, brings wisdom.”

  All routes from the South were paved with a people’s blues, but no place is more closely associated with the music than the Mississippi Delta. This broad, rich floodplain—anchored by the Mississippi and washed over by the Yazoo, Tallahatchie, and Big Sunflower Rivers—spreads 200 miles [322 kilometers] from Memphis, Tennessee, to Vicksburg, Mississippi. The black Delta soil steams in the broiling summer heat as I turn off Highway 61 onto a narrow paved road that was a wagon track in my great-grandfather’s time. Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues” is playing loud on my tape, his brooding voice and intense guitar seeming to conjure up Delta spirits. I stand on a steel bridge—successor to the one Sam Kendrick had worked on—and stare into the murky water. Here in the place where his life ended, I’m beginning a journey through memory and into the blues.

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  Byrin 楼主 2020-02-08 10:37:22

  Around midnight on a sweltering Saturday in August, Mama Rene slides onto the barstool next to me at the Do Drop Inn, just off Highway 61 in Shelby, Mississippi. “No, honey, blues aren’t just about us being sad. That’s why I opened this place. It’s a way to remember. The blues talk about black folk, how we lived, the way we were treated. And we’re still going on.”

  Irene Walker—Mama Rene—is a handsome woman of 63 who grew up a sharecropper’s daughter. For 33 years she’s been a nursing assistant with the Delta Community Home Health Agency, based in Clarksdale. Lately, she’s been trying to attend to the blues with the same care she shows for her patients. “Blues is fading away with young black folks,” she says, shaking her head. “They think it’s for old folks. They’ve let the rap take their culture away from them, and young whites are moving into our culture.”

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  Byrin 楼主 2020-02-08 10:37:37

  Next to the bar is a brightly lit area with a pool table and electronic game machines. Beyond is a small stage and dance floor, dark but for the glow of blue and green Christmas lights strung along the ceiling.

  On stage a hard-driving blues band with two guitars, drum, and electric piano is connecting with the sparse crowd. The lead singer, sweating heavily, eyes shut, moans, “Have you ever seen a one-eyed woman cry?” His mournful words elicit emphatic shouts of release from the dancers. “Yess, Lawd!” “Talk to me now!” With waving arms and swaying bodies they seem to be pushing through a doorway, if not to a better life, to a better moment.

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  Byrin 楼主 2020-02-08 10:37:50

  The scene is a reminder of what Worth Long, a historian of the blues, told me. “No matter where they’re playing, jukes or in a yard, blues is music to move to.” Before the blues, songs were sung to pace work—pounding railroad ties or chopping cotton with hoes. Then, said Long, “the work song moves to the dance, which was once held in front and back yards. Then dancing moves from the yard to the juke—commercial places.”

  A year passes before I return to Mama Rene’s to find a radio DJ playing CDs. He’s telling everyone tuned in that he’s broadcasting live from the Do Drop Inn in Shelby. The crowd is younger, larger. “I’ve got to make money,” Mama Rene sighs. “I’m trying to think how to bring my blues night back the way it was. I’ll find a way.”

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  Byrin 楼主 2020-02-08 13:48:48

  Young black people still go to places like the Do Drop to dance, but the blues doesn’t mean much to them anymore, although it animates rap and other music they listen to. Blues music sprang from poverty and restriction, and for many black Americans it has been something to disavow. The often earthy lyrics didn’t help either. Indeed lines like Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Every time she starts to loving, she brings eyesight to the blind” had some calling the blues “devil music.” A straitlaced, nonsmoking, nondrinking, hymn-singing churchman like my great-grandfather Samuel Kendrick would even have been offended by words like James Cotton’s “raising a good cotton crop’s just like a lucky man shooting dice.”

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