Highway 61 by Derek Bright

Author:Derek Bright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750954907
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

At some level I knew that these photos were hackneyed, that they had been taken by every blues pilgrim before me. But the power of the tale was too strong to resist … Over time, once I’d retuned to a frenetically urban, post-industrial London, that railway bridge began to tell a new tale and I came to see the hand of modernity in my photograph.37

Yet looking around, it also occurred to me that the most recent changes in Delta society – the casinos among the cotton fields – were actually less incongruous with the past than might at first be imagined. There is in fact a long-standing and close connection between gambling and the blues in Mississippi.

Blues guitarist Albert King is said to have told Detroit Junior a story about how he once walked into a juke joint to see Howlin’ Wolf play. A man lay on the floor and people were resting their feet on him whilst gambling. When King enquired as to why they had their feet on the man, he was informed that they’d just killed him. King rounded the story off by saying that not only did the men carry on gambling, but that the Wolf carried on howlin’.38 As if to confirm that gambling is nothing new to the area, the Tunica Museum, which also reminds visitors that the Chickasaw Indians were the first people to own slaves in the area, has an exhibit from one of Harold ‘Hardface’ Clanton’s establishments, established in conjunction with Sunbeam Mitchell, who had his club on Beale Street. Preston Lauterbach refers to the black entrepreneur Clanton as someone who proved exceptional to the rules of the sharecropper system that dominated Tunica society and states:

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