Mississippi, the Blues, and the great Sonny Boy Williamson.

I can confidently assert that the Mississippi Delta does indeed shine like a National guitar, at least it did the first time I saw it about a month ago. We were travelling down through Virginia to Nashville, Memphis, and Clarksdale to New Orleans.

I was about twelve years old when I first became aware of the blues.  I heard the Stones, the Beatles, the Manfreds, the Nashville Teens playing RnB.  I remember the excitement in my best friend's voice when he told me on our way to school how he's heard someone called Wilson Pickett singing In the Midnight Hour when he was listening to Radio Luxembourg in bed the previous evening.  This music was new.  We'd never heard anything  like it. We sought it out. We ate it up.
In Croydon there was a two storey shop, downstairs it sold Singer sewing machines and upstairs, I don't know why or how, was rack after rack of Chess records. We'd spend hours after school looking at them.  Reading the labels.  Wondering at the names we'd never heard of. Memorising the sleeve notes on the LPs.  Hardly ever having the money to actually buy anything.  And then I did have the money, enough for one single.  I don't know why I picked it, I hadn't heard it before, didn't know the name on the  yellow, red and black Chess label.  I asked them to play it.  Help Me by Sonny Boy Williamson, B side Bye Bye Bird. I still think it is one of the most exciting pieces of music I've ever heard.  I saw Sonny Boy at the Fairfield Halls and last month I visited his birthplace in Glendora, Mississippi.  On the way we stopped for petrol in Tuttwiller, where he's buried, and the girl behind the desk asked me why I'd come to Mississippi and I said  I grew up with the music, but it was more than that.  I am in debt to the music and the musicians. 
The first time I heard Bessie Smith sing 'I'm sitting in the house with everything on my mind' her voice went right to the centre of my fears.  The blues is fun, sexy, raucous, prophetic, poetic and profound.  And all within an art form of deceptive simplicity. 
John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Wille Dixon, Chuck Berry and Howlin Wolf were the voices I listened to as I grew up. They talked to me about a world that frightened and attracted me.  I had nothing in common with their life experience but that didn't matter because even if I didn't know anything about Parchman Farm and wondered if a jelly roll was some kind of cake, when they sung about the loneliness and the joy of being alive they were showing me something far more important than my common or garden teenage angst.  And their work and their music has been a constant throughout my life.  I reach for it in moments of celebration and despair.  I'm still following their signposts. Hanging on to their hope.  Revelling in the nights when the only thing that'll touch it is one bourbon, one scotch and one beer.

We went to Mississippi to see where it came from and I have no conclusions.  Glendora seems to have hardly changed from the day Sonny Boy Williamson came home and told everyone he'd been playing the concert halls of Europe and nobody there believed him. 

                                                                               
                                                                    
There's a museum there now commemorating the terrible murder of Emmett Till and a Blues Trail marker for Sonny Boy Williamson. I have no idea how such a place with such suffering and hardship produced a music that lights up the world. I suppose I went there to say thank you.