Mighty Mississippi: River of songs and stories

By Mike Dean
CNHI News Service

April 15, 2007 01:08 am

— L. A. Suess leans back on the riverboat Mark Twain, crosses his right leg over his left, and takes his audience quickly back in time with the sweet, synchronized sounds of banjo and harmonica.
It has the feel of a scene from Show Boat, the long-running Broadway hit, but it is another entertaining day of music and tall tales on the chocolate waters of the Mississippi River.
“Music reflects the history and the culture of the river,” said Suess, who has plied the Mississippi for years. “People still have an appreciation for old country stuff, for folk music.”
Especially in Hannibal, Mo., where the Twain is docked and where author Samuel Clemens got his inspiration for characters like Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Becky Thatcher.
Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, spent his early years in Hannibal, the son of a justice of the peace. His boyhood home is now a National Historic Landmark, and a museum charts his storybook background, much of which is tied to the Mississippi.
It was the lure of the river that drew a young Clemens away from his familial surroundings, including a stint as a printer, and into the adventuresome career of a riverboat pilot. Eventually, of course, he became one of the 19th century’s best-known novelists and humorists.
“When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him,” wrote Clemens in Life on the Mississippi. “For the reason that I have known him before – met him on the river.”
If Mark Twain’s tales and satire defined the rascals and river rats of the steamboat era, music described the hardscrabble reality of toting barges and lifting bales of cotton.
Folk, blues, soul, gospel, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll connect the dots between cultures and people along the lower Mississippi in places like St. Louis, Memphis, Clarksdale and New Orleans.
Memphis stands out. It is known as the birthplace of rock and roll as well as the home of the blues. It also helped plant soul and gospel music in the American conscience.
Elvis Presley is the best known local icon, but there were many others who made it big through the recorded sounds of Sun Records, the Memphis-based music studio known for discovering American idols long before the popular television show.
Johnny Cash, Ike Turner, Carl Perkins, B. B. King and Rufus Thomas, to name a few, trace their success to Memphis and the blending of blues, gospel and country.
Chuck Porter, an official at the Rock ‘N’ Soul Museum in Memphis, called it the “Memphis thang,” a unique backbeat sound often heard in songs of the river.
“It’s a sound that can be hard to learn to play,” said Porter. “It’s not something that somebody teaches you overnight. You need to get down and play.”
The acoustics at the Sun studio help. It features the original hard tiles installed personally by founder Sam Phillips in 1950. No recording facility has been able to duplicate the distinctive background noise.
Where Beale Street meets the Mississippi is also the Memphis sound. That’s where W. C. Handy wrote the first blues song in 1901. Today, blues bars and eateries populate the streetscape, officially declared the “Home of the Blues” by an act of Congress in 1977.
Once a seedy hangout for drug addicts and prostitutes, Beale Street emerged as a tourist attraction in the 1960s, about the time Elvis Presley, Van Morrison and other white rock ‘n’ roll stars began showing up to jam with blues musician B. B. King.
“Beale Street was the black man’s haven,” said Porter. “They could come down here and they could play and enjoy themselves. But it was not a pretty place.”
Beale Street underwent revitalization in the 1980s, and now plays host to one of the nation’s premier music festivals for three days in the spring. Music lovers crowd Tom Lee Park to hear their favorite artists, and to drink to the beat of the night in Silky O’Sullivan’s, Rum Boogie Café and The Black Diamond.
“There’s not a lot of real, old-time blues musicians left,” said Porter. “I mean the older guys who were there when a lot of the recording started.”
What you experience now, he added, is “musicians that have been influenced by a lot of the old-timers. They’re just trying to carry on a tradition.”
Blues musician Johnny Cool, who peddles compact discs to tourists on Beale Street, said the tone and style of the music form is dying in the very city that gave it birth.
“It has been totally devastating to the people who come to Memphis to hear the blues, and find out that they don’t hear the blues,” said Cool. “They hear country and western or watered-down rock ‘n’ roll because the blues players who used to live here have moved on.”
Some of them can be found down river in Clarksdale, Miss., where Cool said he grew up working on a plantation and learning about the hard side of life, an experience he called essential to emoting the blues.
“It has to do with adverse conditions, facing intense racism,” said Cool. “I had to face all that when I was coming up as a kid. You see yourself (in the music) as being able to do whatever it takes to relieve … such a very unpleasant environment.”
If true blues needs hardship, it has found it at Red’s Lounge, Clarksdale’s oldest juke joint. Plastic tacked to the ceiling protects the musicians from a leaky roof. Big Red, the owner, sells T-shirts to raise money for repairs in a place with barely enough room to accommodate two-dozen patrons and a pool table.
But the people are friendly, the barbecue out front sizzles all night and the sound of the blues has a reputation of being consistently good and local.
This night, Robert “Wolfman” Belfour, 66, holds court. He plays solo for the most part, and the sound from his guitar is so full that if you closed your eyes, you’d think he had a brass accompaniment.
“Don’t nothin’ but players play here,” said Big Red. “You’ve been getting all that watered-down (blues) in Memphis. We got the real deal here.” And it plays on and on - until there’s nobody left to listen.
“There’s not even a clock,” he said. “We don’t give a damn about the time. We’re like the casinos. We party until we’re tired, then we go home.”
Joe “Ice Man” Williams, who jams at Big Red’s, said the crowd is small but loyal. He said the same people come back night after night.
“It’s a part of our heritage,” he said. “We were raised with the music. Our parents loved it, we love it, it goes from generation to generation.”


(Optional end. Pickup credit line at bottom.)


Moving down the Mississippi to New Orleans, the blues morph into jazz, personified by the lifesize statue of trumpeter Al Hirt in the French Quarter. Hirt, who died eight years ago, was known as “Sugar Lips” for his ability to improvise melodic variations on his horn. The highlight of his career, he often said, was playing a solo rendition of Ave Maria for Pope John Paul II’s visit to New Orleans.
But the sounds of Pete Fountain, Wynton Marsalis, Irma Thomas and other local jazz artists were hard hit by Hurricane Katrina. Many of New Orleans’ musicians scattered to different parts of the country.
Henry Swanson, a jazz singer, said he lost everything, including his home, in the flood waters from the breach in the major levees protecting the city during those fateful days in August of 2005.
“The water hit the door and broke the deadbolt lock and broke the door frame,” said Swanson. “I had to run upstairs and get in the attic. Stayed up there all night. The next day I looked out, and all I saw was water, just water.
“I lost all my sheet music, my PA system, five acoustic guitars, my music collection from 1955, furniture, clothes. It was all out there on the street.”
Now, 19 months after Katrina, the city’s musicians are coming back. Fats Domino, perhaps the best known, announced he’s returning, and the music community expects many more to follow.
Preservation Hall, the French Quarter sanctuary to honor New Orleans jazz, has been scheduling regular concerts with the New Birth Brass Band, Glen David Andrews & The Lazy 6, Fred Lonzo, Lucien Barbarian, Less Muscott and Ben Jaffee to help get the city back on its feet.
Habitat for Humanity is building a “Musicians Village” in the devastated Upper Ninth Ward, across the street from Swanson’s home. Eventually, Habitat plans to build 300 homes there.
“It’s so important that we don’t lose our soul,” said Bob Marye, a Habitat official involved in the rebuilding effort. “There’s already an Atlanta and a Houston and a Dallas. There’s only ever going to be one New Orleans and it is so important that we retain its music. It is a great gift to the world.”
Henri Smith is one musician who is watching and waiting for the city to rebound. He ended up in Gloucester, Mass., the seaside setting for Sebastian Junger’s best-selling novel, “The Perfect Storm.”
"Hopefully, I'll be able to get back," said Smith. "I'm trying to use the music as therapy" - music like this Louis Armstrong classic:

Do you know what it means
to miss New Orleans
and miss it each night and day?
I know it’s not wrong
the feeling’s getting stronger
the longer I stay away.

Mike Dean is a CNHI News Service Elite Reporter fellow. He is a photographer for The Gloucester, Mass., Daily Times.

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