Escaping the Delta Read Free Page A

got about halfway there, and I said no. He said, ‘You got to do that if you want to be a better player.’ I said I guessed I was good enough.”
    Powell chuckled, and changed the subject, telling me about the busloads of Japanese people who come to see him every summer. I would have liked to hear more musical legends, but did not feel like pressing him.
    Frankly, to a northern blues fan, the Delta still had plenty of ghosts. Every town name reminded me of an old song, and it was an almost mystical experience just to drive through the monotonous infinity of flat fields stretching out to the horizon. That first visit, the annual rains had come stronger than usual, and the whole Delta was flooded,recalling the days before the levees were built. Lone houses stood on stilts, surrounded by sunken cars and telephone poles pushing up like reeds in a haunted lake.
    I visited the Delta several times in the next two years, choosing different seasons, when the land was dry and the cotton buds shone purple, or the white bolls hung waiting to be harvested. It was a deeply moving experience to drive through those expanses of empty fields, hearing the lonesome blues whining through my tinny car speakers. A piece I wrote at that time reflects the way it captured my imagination:
    It is hardly surprising that this should have been the birthplace of the most desperate and primal of American musics. Where musicians in the cities or the more accommodating eastern seaboard states could be cheery entertainers, in the Delta there was little money left over for entertainment. Music, dancing and drinking were not casual pastimes, they were the only available escape from the difficulties of day-to-day life. The music had to serve an almost religious function, to take the listeners to another world.
    I still believe some of that, but after spending more time in the Delta I began to wonder about my early reactions. Six years after that first visit, I was standing with Big Jack Johnson outside a grocery store that doubled as a juke joint in the tiny hamlet of Bobo, near Tutwiler. There was almost nothing there, just the store, a few small houses, and the big mansion of the plantation owner. It was the Delta I was used to, the grimly picturesque cradle of the raw blues, but that was not how Johnson saw it. As he looked around, he described the thriving town that Bobo had been in the 1960s. There had been houses all around, a school, a hospital, and crowds of people ready to party on Saturday night. The abandoned desolation I found so striking and romantic was astonishingly recent. Far from being the roots of the blues, it bore little relation to what had been there even thirty years earlier, much less to the thriving Delta communities of the prewar years, before the combination of new farm technologies and opportunities up North prompted a mass migration of black Mississippians to St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit.
    I got to thinking about how little my response to the region and its music matched that of the Delta artists I admired, and how much my own aesthetic differed from that of the average blues fan or musician of the 1930s. There was an obviousness to these meditations: I was born into a situation so different that it would be bizarre if I did not react differently to this world. But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself extrapolating to the broader blues field as I knew it, and being struck by the fact that virtually all the historical, musicological, or even impressionistic writing on blues has been done by people from backgrounds much more like mine than like those of the blues artists themselves. As a result, there is a tendency for even the most scholarly and well-researched pieces to be permeated with a romanticism that obscures at least as much as it illuminates.
    In many cases, this has only become more true with the passage of time. The earliest books on the blues appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s, barely