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BELZONI, MISSISSIPPI: The blues is when polio freezes your fingers
and shrivels your legs, you play a baby-blue Epiphone guitar on your lap
in a wheelchair, chording the strings with a butter knife. CeDell Davis,
crippled by that disease when he was 10, almost 63 years ago, lives
inside the blues.
The blues is when you find the fine, big woman of your dreams, she
dies in your arms of a heart attack just before dawn. James "T-Model"
Ford, who swears he would have married her, is wed to the blues.
The blues is when the searing light from your welder's torch slowly,
gradually burns much of the sight from your eyes, you sit on your porch
in the cool damp of the afternoon and sing to the rhythms in your own
mind, then go into town for a bottle of Wild Irish Rose. Paul Jones, who
knows the narrow roads in Belzoni so well he does not need to see that
much to drive, has surrendered to the blues.
"I believe in God, but the devil, he's got power, too," said Jones,
who, with Davis, Ford and a scattering of others, is among the last of
the Delta bluesmen who still live in the cradle of the blues. "Most of
what you sing about is suffering."
"Musicians who were not born here, who have not had their spirits or
their bodies broken who have never looked at these endless cotton fields
and hated them, can never truly play the blues," said Ford, who now
lives in Greenville, Mississippi, and Davis, who lives across the
Mississippi River in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Outsiders might play a tune
from the Delta, Jones said, but there is no feeling in it.
But here in the Delta, where most of the legendary juke joints have
slowly shut their doors and most of the bluesmen have died off or moved
away, the blues is fading from the very place it was born, say the
people who play it and others who live here.
They know their music survives, in the music collections of yuppies,
in college seminars on folk culture, in festivals and franchised venues
such as the House of Blues, B.B. King's clubs and others in the United
States, Asia and Europe.
But there is little live music left, the bluesmen say, at the source.
They play at festivals and the few weekend clubs that have endured, but
even on the jukeboxes in the surviving bars and fish houses there is
little Delta country blues. Hip-hop thuds from cars. Gospel, country and
soul music, sister to the blues, dominate the radio.
CeDell Davis says crack cocaine and the culture it bred turned the
already tough juke joints into slaughterhouses over the past 15 years,
driving people away and all but silencing the small live shows that are
now mostly folklore.
But the people of the Delta will come back to the blues, he said.
"The blues is about peoples, and as long as there's peoples, there
will be blues," Davis said. "The blues tells a story. Hip-hop don't tell
no story. It don't tell no story about women, men, trains, buses, cars,
birds, alleys, stores.
It is the very authenticity of the blues that endangers it. Mae Smith
grew up in Lula, Mississippi where a man named Frank Frost pushed a
broom at her school. Later, she found his name in a history of the
blues.
"I thought he was the town drunk," said Smith who helps run the Delta
Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and holds the title of
interpretation specialist. Many blues players live hard and die in
obscurity, and a piece of Delta history vanishes.
The Delta, like the blues, belongs to black people, the people here
say, though many do not own enough of it to root a vine. It was their
sweat that cleared its vast forests and transformed a 19th
century jungle into the richest farmland on Earth.
It lies in the deltas of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, an
indistinct triangle of vast fields, islands of trees and small towns
extending south from Memphis for about 200 miles, covering an area about
70 miles wide on both sides of the Mississippi.
What other place could produce a man like T-Model Ford, whose ankles
are scarred from two years on a Tennessee chain gang, who walks with a
cane because a jack slipped and a truck crushed one leg, who sings about
pistol fights, abandonment, murder and adultery, and smiles and smiles?
In Greenville, in a small house behind the funeral home, the
amplifier crackles like lightening in a box as he plugs in the guitar he
calls Gold Nanny, sister to Black Nanny.
He killed a man in Tennessee when he was young, stabbing him in the
neck with a switchblade after the man buried a knife in his back. "They
gave me 10 years," Ford said. "Mama got a lawyer and got me out in two."
If T-Model Ford is a character from a song, CeDell Davis is the
sadness not even the blues can describe.
When he as a little boy, a man working in a pea patch near his house
in Helena, Arkansas, dropped a harmonica, and Davis found it in the
weeds.
"I liked the sound," he said. He unwrapped wire from a broom handle
and stretched it on a stick to make a crude guitar. He learned to play a
real guitar, a big Gibson.
Then the polio twisted him. "They said I would die, and when I
didn't, they said I could never care for myself."
He figured a way to steady his guitar in his lap, above his useless
legs, wedged a butter knife between his thumb and fingers that were
stiff and clumsy, and over time, learned to strum with one hand and
pinch the strings with the knife in a way that makes the instrument seem
to cry, as if alive.
Like Jones and Ford, he made some money, squandered it, got cheated
out of some, and now lives in a small house that from the outside gives
no sign a legend is inside.
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