Sinners and Ghosts in Mississippi
There's more to learn than blues history in The Magnolia State.
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As a music-loving St. Louisan, I’m steeped in my local music history. From W.C. Handy bringing the blues out of the country with “St. Louis Blues” to SZA filling stadiums with Kendrick Lamar this summer, I’m lucky to live in the middle of music history where we dance with the devil at the confluence.
Road-tripping the entirety of the fabled Highway 61 has always been on my travel wish list. But that’s hard to do when you live smack in the middle of it. So I’ve done it in sections: St. Louis up to the land of my beloved Bob Dylan, Replacements, and Prince, and the quick four-hour drive down to Memphis.
It’s the leg between Memphis and New Orleans that taunted me. I planned a trip that involved a Wilco concert in the Overton Shell in Memphis, then meandered down to another show in New Orleans a few days later with stops at all the blues history sites and Jackson along the way. Unfortunately, that was April 2020. I cried when I canceled my guesthouse in Jackson, down the block from Eudora Welty’s house.
Last winter Wilco announced a show in New Orleans on the first Saturday in May—during Jazzfest but not at Jazzfest, which sounded like the right time and excuse to make that Highway 61 journey.
I spent a night in Memphis, then did a quick loop to Oxford, Mississippi for an overnighter. My main goal in Oxford was to visit Rowan Oak, the home of author William Faulkner, along with hitting some local spots my friend Jonathan hipped me to. He went to law school at Ole Miss in the 1990s and lives further south in Gulfport.
My first Jonathan-suggested stop was Square Books, across from the courthouse in the Oxford town square. It took me less than 20 minutes to drop $98. Finding everything on the first table in the store doesn’t make for a leisurely hour or two of browsing, but it was satisfying nonetheless.
At the checkout, I mentioned it being my first visit to the shop and Oxford. The customer checking out beside me asked what had brought me to town since it’s not exactly a tourist stop beyond families visiting Ole Miss. I took the opportunity to tell one of my favorite stories: how I met Jonathan.
In June 2019, I pulled into the drive of a giant house in Adams, Massachusettes a couple of minutes before another car pulled up and two guys with southern accents exited. We were in town, along with the dozen other folks in the house from all over the U.S. and Canada, for Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival. We gathered on the porch where most of our housemates were sipping Negronis late into the night.
As people stumbled off to bed, I found myself sitting across from one of the cute southern boys who was wearing a t-shirt that simply read, “Yoknapatawpha.”
“I like your shirt,” I said.
He smirked and asked in a drawl that makes Midwestern girls loopy, “Do you know what it means?”
“Uh, it’s like, only the fictional Mississippi county that William Faulkner created as a setting for the bulk of his writings, duh.”
Jonathan has been one of my favorite people since. We cross paths every few years, especially since I’m in love with New Orleans and he lives an hour away. Remember his name, because he’ll be back.
My Rowan Oak plan the next day was a wash. Literally. It was raining so hard that the parking lot was wiped out.
I melt in the rain so I parked myself at Big Bad Breakfast for biscuits and gravy with a big ol fried chicken thigh thrown in the middle. Along with a giant house-steeped vanilla cold brew with the good ice, it was necessary fuel for the next leg of 61—the Blues Highway.
While I usually pride myself on my ability to travel without a plan, sometimes it would be beneficial. Thinking I could cover 360 miles of the Blues Trail from Oxford to New Orleans and over 150 years of music history without a plan was dumb.
I made it to Clarksdale, Mississippi, though, and that was plenty to digest in one afternoon.
Unbeknownst to me, the film “Sinners” had been released two weeks prior. All I knew about it was that it was a sleeper hit, and one of my musician friends had told me I had to see it. I had no idea when I was in Clarksdale that the film was set there. I’ll be watching it today since it’s now on the streaming services.
I’m a lax student of the blues, my interest peaking after a few years of living in St. Louis in the early 2000s. I thought I knew a lot, but standing in Clarksdale I realized that my blues knowledge was mostly gleaned from “The Blues Brothers,” then compilation CDs curated by Dan Akryoyd. This wasn’t a bad place to start, but that’s all it was: a start.
In addition to Clarksdale, I planned to hit the intersection of highways 61 and 49—the crossroads where blues guitarist Robert Johnson purportedly gave his mortal soul with the devil in exchange for the ability to play guitar in a way that no one had ever heard before. I didn’t make it to the intersection, because I got confused with a marker in Clarksdale at the intersection of State Street and DeSoto, across from the Church’s Fried Chicken.
I drove past this marker repeatedly without noticing it, because why in the world would the infamous crossroads be in a nicely landscaped median in the middle of town where I could sell my soul, rent a car, and get a slushy? There’s debate about which crossroads is the crossroads. Something about this one felt off to me, so I didn’t bother to park my car and dodge traffic to get close and see if I got the shimmery feeling that comes when I stand on hallowed—and sometimes sacrilegious— ground.
Afternoon isn’t the best time to visit a town known for its still-active juke joints, but the quiet gave me space to explore and think. As I crossed the tracks into downtown, I said hello to my first glimpse of Mr. Johnson on the side of a nondescript building.
Going around the block I realized that the mural was on the side of Ground Zero Blues Club, one of two modern-day juke joints opened by Morgan Freeman in 2001. Being leery of celebrity hospitality ventures (with the exception of those by my future ex-husband Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs) and places created to capture the nostalgia of a bygone time, I hadn’t researched the club and had no idea what might be going on there on a warm spring Friday afternoon. That didn’t stop me from sitting on a weather-worn leather couch on the porch and contemplating what little I know about the blues.
I know some history, like the stories of Johnson, and the children of southern sharecroppers and freed slaves who took the music birthed from field and prison work songs with them when they migrated to cities. In Chicago and St. Louis, the country blues met electricity. Kansas City and New Orleans, it morphed into jazz. Detroit gestated clean-polished soul music. And in Memphis? It collided with hillbilly music and burst into a rock ‘n roll supernova.
My friend Drew, who has two Ph.D.s in music, has tried to explain the music theory behind blues chord progressions to me. It goes over my head because my brain clamps shut at any discussion of what makes music, music. I refuse to believe that music isn’t the product of magic practiced by the most special species of fae creatures.
Although I did immediately order a copy of the LeRoi Jones (Amiri Bakara) book “Blues People” on Drew’s recommendation the day I was in Clarksdale. I would have loved to have grabbed it from a local bookstore, but Clarksdale doesn’t have one. It doesn’t even have a movie theater so its mostly-Black citizens can see the critically-acclaimed surprise blockbuster rooted in their history.
I didn’t go into Ground Zero, but it was open. I only poked my head in and saw a lot of old white people with fanny packs, so I didn’t stick around. I considered going to its neighbor, the Delta Blues Museum, but it felt deserted even though I saw occasional people coming and going. Their website, which looks like a great place to fill in the gaps in my blues knowledge, has their hours posted. Another reason to return, along with the lure of a boozy night of music at Red’s. Maybe this autumn.
What I really wish I’d done in Clarksdale: joined the elderly Black men sitting outside the tire shop on the edge of downtown, but they didn’t deserve to have their afternoon visit crashed by a white lady who needs to do some learning.
After a stop for ice and a big, cold fountain Coke at the Circle K, I lit out of Clarksdale on Highway 49. The other option was down Highway 61. By this time, thanks to the highways getting street names in most towns, I’d given up on keeping track of which highway was which. I was still around 340 miles from New Orleans and my bed for the night, and begrudgingly more concerned about getting there than exploring. The map said Highway 49 was the quickest. It would take me to Jackson, where I would hop back on I-55 and speed up to 80 mph without worrying about missing anything or getting a ticket.
During the first 30 minutes of my drive, I passed three prisons. Prisons and farmland, and tiny poverty-ravaged towns. My breath caught in my throat when a large white building rose out of the side of the two-lane highway, rows and rows of plain white cabins behind it: Mississippi State Penitentiary.
The state of Mississippi bought 18,000 acres of plantation land in 1901 and turned it into a “work farm.” Today we’d call it a for-profit prison. Most prisoners at the racially segregated Parchman Farm were poor Black men, working the same land without pay that their parents and grandparents were forced to work under slavery. Quite a few bluesmen did time at Parchman, working sunup to sundown six days a week in the Mississippi heat under the threat of beatings from a leather strap known as Black Annie. Or worse.
It’s not much better today.
My knowledge of Parchman comes from the song “Parchman Farm Blues” in its many forms, along with the absolutely gutting Jessamyn Ward novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing”.
As I drove past the expanse of the prison, I felt encapsulated in a dark cloud ready to storm. The ground, fed with centuries of Black blood, should quake open, an angry faultline set to swallow the perpetrators of tyranny that keep American prison populations predominantly Black and uneducated, held for crimes that get white people a slap and fine.
Part of me wanted to stop and rage on the side of the road for the souls of the bodies that comprise the fertile Parchman dirt. The other part wanted to get the fuck out.
Jonathan and I often rant about the politics of cruelty in our home states (Missouri for me) that leave the sick without healthcare, children without education, and far too many people without adequate food, clean drinking water, homes, safety, and protection. Still, before visiting Mississippi and seeing Parchman, I could only consider the cruelty of Mississippi in abstract terms.
But now I have felt the ghosts at Parchman. They are angry and wild, and will someday rise up. I hope it’s soon. Mississippi imprisons more of its residents than any other state. I used to think poor people committed crimes out of anger and for survival. But now I know it’s more than that. It’s white people making it criminal to be Black or Brown, punishing some people for criminal acts while looking the other way for others.
A few hours after Parchman, as I neared Jackson, traffic came to a crawl at a highway patrol checkpoint. Tired and overwhelmed from my drive and everything running through my head, it didn’t occur to me to question the young Black trooper who smiled when he asked for my I.D., complimented my tattoo sleeve, and told me I was free to go. I have no idea what the purpose of the checkpoint was, but it clearly wasn’t to question middle-aged white ladies with out-of-state plates on a RAV4 crammed full of bags and a squeaky styrofoam cooler.
Even in the shadow of Parchman, my white privilege still jumped ahead of the experience I had just lived.
On Jonathan’s recommendation, I visited Jackson’s Big Apple Inn to grab a quick dinner. Mississippi hot tamales, half-dozen for eight bucks.
He’d sent me some videos about the history of Big Apple, but I didn’t watch them until I was in bed in New Orleans hours later. Famous for pig-ear sandwiches that were a favorite of B.B. King, Big Apple Inn holds a sacred spot in Civil Rights history: Medgar Evers, the first NAACP field secretary in Mississippi who was assassinated in his Jackson driveway in 1963, had a tiny office above the Big Apple. When Freedom Riders would come to Jackson to demonstrate, he would meet with them in the restaurant’s small dining room because his office was even smaller.
Not that you’d know the historical significance of the still-operating restaurant, where the pig ears are braised in skillets and the ground local smoked sausage sizzles on the flat-top grill right by the door. It’s still a spot that functions to fill the bellies of people, no matter what’s in their wallets.
And that’s what the blues are about: the lives of the people the world was designed to omit.
An excellent Mississippi Delta blues aural tutorial.
Square Books 160 Courthouse Square, Oxford, MS Big Bad Breakfast 719 North Lamar Boulevard, Oxford, MS (with many other southern outposts) Rowan Oak 916 Old Taylor Road, Oxford, MS Ground Zero Blues Club 0 Blues Alley, Clarksdale, MS Delta Blues Museum 1 Blues Alley, Clarksdale, MS Big Apple Inn 509 North Farish Street, Jackson, MS
I went to Ground Zero a few years ago. It wasn’t terrible, but did feel like a more rustic Blueberry Hill. Plus the joint was far from jumping that Thursday night. Still glad I went, esp because Red’s was closed that night.