Escaping the Delta Read Free

but I’m gonna keep the boy I got. A few years back, that guy didn’t want nothin’ to do with me. He put himself above me. He was playing that disco and stuff, but I stuck with what I know, and now I ain’t making nothin’ but money.”
    As we sat there, chatting and sipping our Cokes, a man walked past the door, and Barnes jumped up and ran after him, yelling, “Get your goddamn ass inside here!” He returned alone, shaking his head, and explained, “Yeah, that guy drink in here for nothing and then when he’s got some money he go drink somewhere else.” The next time the guy went by, Barnes ran out and yelled after him again, then reached inside the back band of his pants and pulled out a pistol, held it up to his cheek, and sighted along it, shouting, “You give me my damn money!” He was laughing, and the customers were laughing, so I laughed along with them, guessing that this was a show put on for my benefit. Still, the gun was real.
    From the Playboy, I headed across town to visit Eugene Powell. Then eighty-three years old, Powell was the only prewar blues recording artist who still made his home in Mississippi. He was sitting on his front porch with a lady friend, and invited me to join them. With little prompting, he began talking about the old days when he used to perform with the Mississippi Sheiks, the state’s most popular band. After a while, we got out our guitars, and I played backup as he ran through what I gathered had become his standard set, a mix of blues, pop and country hits. The blues were mostly standards like Little Brother Montgomery’s “Vicksburg Blues,” Roosevelt Sykes’s “44 Blues,” and Tommy Johnson’s “Big Road Blues,” which he introduced as his own compositions, meaning that he had rearranged them and added some new verses.
    When the mosquitoes started biting, we moved inside. Powell’s front room was both bedroom and parlor, with a big double bed and several chairs. The walls were decorated with framed photographs of his children and of “old friends that’s dead.” In the center of one wall was a hand-tinted portrait of Martin Luther King, with a yellow plastic flower attached to the frame. On the wall facing the bed was a largeclock, a present from his daughter in Chicago. Its second hand carried a butterfly, revolving through a field of artificial flowers, and its case was surmounted by a golden bust of a unicorn.
    I had brought a cassette that included Powell’s 1936 recording of “Street Walkin’” (made under the pseudonym Sonny Boy Nelson), along with other Mississippi songs of the period, and he asked me to put it on and leave it playing. He talked through all the guitar-and-vocal selections, including his own, but stopped to listen to the Sheiks playing their biggest hit, “Sitting On Top of the World.” When it was over, he laughed and said, “Now, anybody don’t like that don’t like ham and cheese.”
    After a while, Powell got off the subject of music and started talking about ghosts, or “haints.” He said he had never seen any himself, but he had friends who had, and he knew a house where, if I could stay in it all night, the owner would pay me ten thousand dollars. Taking my cue, I asked him about the stories of bluesmen using supernatural powers to improve their playing. “Oh, yeah,” he said, smiling. “They say if you put some rattlesnake rattles in your guitar, that’ll make it sound better. I tried it, but I never did hear no difference. Then somebody told my mama that if I did that, when the rattles go melt away to dust I was gonna go blind, so she said to get those things out of there.
    â€œThey say, ‘Take some graveyard dirt, you’ll be a great guitar player.’ Hacksaw Harney told me to try that, he said that’s why he play so good. He took me along with him to get some, but I