The story of the BLUES
It all started with WC Handy, but it was BB King who introduced all of us (U2 included) to magical Beale Street
There have been 45 presidents of the US since King George was sent packing. The US, though, has had three Kings, who have left a lasting legacy. Next year is the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King’s assassination and last week, we followed in his footsteps, from Memphis, where he made his Mountaintop speech and was assassinated, to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson and the opening of a new chapter in the Civil Rights story. This week we look at B.B. King, Blues and Beale Street, before finishing in Graceland with Elvis Presley, The King.
WOKE up this morning! Well, this is Memphis, Tennessee, home of the Blues. So there was really only one thing for it – I headed down to Beale, which is, of course, the first place every visitor comes to when they first arrive. Even this early in the morning, 9am, the Blues are blaring out from the bars and clubs, despite the fact that they won’t open until early evening.
We had been in B.B. King’s Blues Club the night before, dancing into the early hours to the house-band, working off the barbecue chicken, rice and catfish, and going back for seconds – rolling down the river to Ike and Tina Turner’s Proud Mary.
Riley King first came here from his native Mississippi in his late teens but really started making his mark when the sole black radio station in town, WDIA, championed him while he was in his early 20s and christened him Beale Street Blues Boy, which became abbreviated to Blues Boy and then just B.B. (he was just B to his friends).
B.B. has been intertwined with Beale Street ever since.
His club is at the foot of the pedestrianised stretch, where revellers mill every night, spilling out of the clubs, taking the party outside.
WC Handy, the Father of the Blues, looks down the road at us all from outside the pedestrianised cordon further down Beale Street... while his boyhood shack has been recreated in loving detail nearby.
IT was bandleader Handy, travelling around the Mississippi Delta around the turn of the 20th century, who first curated the sounds which would later become the Blues, developed them and brought them to the mainstream in Memphis. His standard, Memphis Blues, which was originally called Crump’s Blues, was written for a mayoral candidate.
Handy, his trumpet in hand, stands across the road from the Robert Church Park, named for the South’s first black millionaire, who along with Handy, did most to turn Beale Street into a cultural and commercial hub for black Memphians.
Today, it is a tourist hub but it is also a living, breathing, musical experience and as is explained to us, it provides work for gigging local musicians. And it has the seal of approval from the Blues experts in our party.
At the heart of Memphis life then, as now, is the Church, and the historic First Baptist Church has special resonance. They all came here to worship and sing Gospel. Gospel was B.B.’s first influence – when he watched his own pastor play guitar in church back in Mississippi.
Jerry Lee Lewis’s club is down Beale Street, one of many jumping joints, including the highly- recommend Rum Boogie Bar where our own Wolfgang boldly got up to play harmonica, and earned a tenner from the band – his first-ever paid commission.
There’s an Irish bar too, obviously – Silky O’Sullivan’s – which boasts duelling pianos, a Blues museum and numerous soul dinsense ers. There’s also Lansky’s, which claims to have been the clothier to the King. Elvis, like B.B., was from Mississippi, which is where we’re headed next, to see where it all started.
The Blues Trail is a 200-marker route through time and Mississippi, chronicling all the great Blues singers: B.B.; Muddy Waters; Charley Patton; Son House; Sonny Boy Williamson; John Lee Hooker et al – and retelling their stories.
If you are an independent traveller, you really should make use of the Blues Trail app.
Personally, I can never trust my of direction – regardless of how straight these roads are – or my command of technology.
But that’s just me, and thankfully, our 20-strong party has laidback and knowledgeable Southerner Clint driving us and educating us about the Blues – cranking up the sounds on the CD deck.
Short of sleep... it’s all these late Bluesy nights, I drift off into a dream as we pass the open flat brown fields that, at one time teemed with black slaves and later sharecroppers.
Oh, I wish I was single because
my lady is driving me mad. And suddenly I’m back... it’s the music. In truth, you could never mistake Modern-Day man with Bluesman – they were a different species.
No woman nowadays would allow it. Not that they seemed to then either.
Every Bluesman has his woman leaving because ‘he done them wrong’, though there’s always the assumption in the songs that he’ll talk his way back.
All Bluesmen are the same, the same, but also different.
And then on top of all that, there’s Robert Johnson, the Baddest Man in Blues, who, legend has it, made a deal with the Devil at a crossroads, close to where we stop off at Dockery Plantation, after which he returned to town with a newfound guitar style that set him apart from his peers.
Whatever the truth, and who wouldn’t want to believe this story, we do know that Robert was a bit of an oul Devil for the women.
He seemed to have one in every port or town, more often than not somebody else’s, which ultimately was his own undoing: he was poisoned at the age of only 27. According to one theory, the jealous husband of a woman he had flirted with laced his whiskey with strychnine.
Our own hero, B.B., also loved. and was much loved by women.
He even named his guitars after women, or should I say one woman – Lucille, a damsel in distress. Legend has it that two fellas were fighting over her at one of his gigs when a fire broke out, interrupting the concert and forcing everyone to evacuate the building. B.B., realising that his favourite guitar was still inside, rushed into the burning building to retrieve it and thereafter named his guitars after her.
I get to caress Lucille later in our trip at the Westin Hotel in Jackson, where as part of a promotion, replica guitars of the greats are left in selected rooms.
Women held a special affection for B.B.; he married three times and fathered at least 11 children and possibly even 15.
When love came to town, BB sure didn’t turn it down.
And that’s worth singing about.