In Mississippi: Visiting Around

By Gregory Jaynes

Malcolm White, who has been known to leave a trail of hot-tamale wrappers wherever in Mississippi his notions have nudged him, set out in search of blues players the other day. White, who books acts in Jackson and has a piece of a nightclub and aspires to open a restaurant, is something of a state celebrant; indeed, so sedulous is his enthusiasm for Mississippi that one need only ride along a few short miles listening to him before the bitterweed growing wild on the shoulders of the road begins to look like daisies. "I get homesick when I have to cross a border," White says, and he means it.

The man's most recent odyssey took a week, during which he zigzagged 1,000 miles up 200 miles of the fabled Mississippi Delta. Yes, Faulkner came from here, but, more important to Malcolm White at the moment, so did B.B. King, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Son House, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and a lot of old lesser lights who still sing the blues off the front porches of tumbledown shacks. "Check this out," White said at one point. "We're going to pick up a blind man that's going to show us how to get to this other guy's house."

Bud Spires, son of Arthur ("Big Boy") Spires, was located in a project called Magnolia Heights, near a cotton hamlet named Flora. White had spoken to Spires on the telephone earlier, and Spires had agreed to ride over to Jack Owens' place and make a little music, asking only that White "bring a lift- up." To that end, bourbon had been laid in, and now as Bud Spires gets into the car, he mentions that he "wouldn't mind a little something to get my nerves on the ready." So Spires settled his nerves, and so did White, and so did a couple of out-of-staters in the car, and when the bottle was retired, White asked Spires, "Is the blues the devil's music?"

"I'd be scared to say," Spires said. "He will get into spirituals if you let him." As he talked the blind man gave directions. Going down a dirt road, after a certain time had passed, if he did not feel the car rounding a curve, a wrong turn had been made--the same for crossing a railroad track, or a bridge, or descending a hill. His navigational skills were dead on the money.

Spires said, "The thing about the devil--is it hard to get that bottle back? I like to have something in my hand when I talk about the devil." And then he told a long tale or two that lasted till the pilgrims gained Jack Owens' yard. There were some goats tied up near a patch of broom sedge, and there was a white dog, thin as clothesline, tied to a dead Chevrolet Parkwood station wagon, and out back of the little house were 40 fresh-plowed acres. A dark, blustery front was coming in from the west. On the porch sat Jack Owens, a black man with startling blue eyes, and with him was a friend, Ira Hudson, who volunteered, "I'm doing fine for a 75-year-old pap." Owens got out his twelve string Silvertone guitar from Sears, Roebuck, and you could see dust buildup on all the lower frets that a bluesman never fingers. Spires accepted an A harp from Owens, removed a wooden kitchen match from his mouth and began to blow.

They played Baby Gal, and Owens sang in a register higher than a cat can hit when you step on its tail: "Ain't got no clothes, baby gal,/ Can't go nowhere." Spires said they get together about once a month, and they never "need no training up," so accustomed are they to one another's rhythms. "Say it loud and draw a crowd!" Bud Spires hollered as Jack Owens wailed, "You're tryin' to quit me now,/ But you don't know how." It began raining, and fat drops played the roof while the two friends played on: "Give me yoh money, baby gal,/ Let me use it for myself." Whiskey pints circled round and round and round the porch. In this fashion, the afternoon slid away, as did most necessary motor skills.

Another day Malcolm White was in the town of Leland, down on Sinclair Street, where he looked in on James ("Son") Thomas, whom he occasionally books to play in Jackson. Malcolm said he just saw Jack Owens, and Son recalled that he played with Jack years ago, the first time he had ever played outside and the first time he had seen a man knifed. Son was working on a clay sculpture of a skull, in which he inserted real teeth he got from a dental college in Oxford. As he worked on his porch, he recalled his years as a gravedigger, a job he did not want to quit "until my back started giving me trouble, and I had to let it go."

"You know," Son said further, "white people's got a lot of sense. But they'll build a cemetery and put a fence around it. It's the one thing I can't understand. Nobody in there is coming out, and nobody out here wants to go in, so why the fence?"

They got to talking about the blues after a while, and Son said he figured the blues would disappear someday because kids are not much interested in it and anyway, times are not as hard as they once were. Son said his first guitar was a Gene Autry model that cost $8.50, and at the time he was being paid $1 a hundredweight to pick cotton, so he had to pick 850 lbs. of cotton to pay for it. That was hard times. And when he was digging graves, he got $15 a grave, and the worst business ever was a three week period when nobody died. "Then all of a sudden they all started dying too fast; I dug so many graves I couldn't walk."

Directly Son said he would favor his visitors with a song or two but that he had to save himself because he was due in New York City next day to play at the Washington Square Church, 135 West 4th Street. He said when he is in New York, he likes to slip out on the street and play a tune or two because you can pick up cash quickly that way. Then he got his guitar, an expensive Martin, and after making sure there were no women in earshot, he swung into Catfish Blues, a song so lowdown nasty he said "I ain't gon' give you too much." Most of the verses were difficult to understand -- there was something about "belly to belly" and "skin to skin" in the middle there -- but it did sound downright filthy nonetheless. It gave you the feeling you had been caught peeking in a girlie magazine at the local apothecary.

So went Malcolm White's week. When he was not looking for music, he was looking for food: hot tamales, crawfish, gumbo, red beans and rice, barbecue, barbecued shrimp. On a dirt road to nowhere, he stopped at a place called Booga Bottom Store and was served, by a waitress named Heardacine Kemp, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, crowder peas, sliced tomatoes, corn bread and iced tea. There was no menu; you simply sat and accepted the day's fare. "Mississippi," said White. "God love it."

In Indianola he paid his respects to the crossroads, the spot where the Southern crosses the "Dog" (the interchange of the Southern Railway and the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley, also called the Yellow Dog, and now the Illinois Central). It was here, legend has it, that W.C. Handy composed Yellow Dog Blues while waiting for a train.

In Merigold he looked in on a white blues band called the Tangents and ate catfish and hush puppies at the home of a musician called Catfish. On the radio a man was advertising a 75-ft. by 14-ft. mobile home for $1,000 down and $143 a month. "Don't worry about the wind 'cause Jesus said in the Scriptures let it be still," he said. Moreover, "I bought one. Still got one. I wouldn't have nothin' but one. When I trade this one, I'm gon' go down get another one. Praise God." In Clarksdale, White got a trim from Barber- Musician Wade Walton, who told the story of catching a fox. "They're very sly. They don't make nice pets. You can't train 'em. I had him under control, though, long as I was lookin' at him. I named him Chicken."

And that is not the half of what Malcolm White heard his week of visiting around. At times it seemed like everybody was speaking in free verse:

"She had to keep putting her mascara back on because she kept crying it off."

"There ain't but three chords in the blues."

"So what? There ain't but three chords in life."

A pity there is not world enough and time enough to go into the whole of it. Mississippi. God love it.