Insight Guides USA the South (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Insight Guides USA the South (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Author:Insight Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, USA
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2016-07-14T00:00:00+00:00


If Robert Johnson really did sell his soul at a crossroads in Clarksdale, it probably wasn’t the one advertised to tourists by garish guitars on a pole at the corner of Highway 322 North, State Street, and Desoto Avenue. However, rumor has it that if you head about half a mile west from here, you’ll see the real deal.

The area around Greenwood offers no fewer than three graves for Robert Johnson (for more information, click here), two at Morgan City, and in Quito south of Highway 82. Past lta Bena, fittingly between Quito and Morgan City where his two gravestones are, is a Robert Johnson Monument.

The third grave is a few miles north of Greenwood at Little Zion Church. The neat white church has no sign, but an address marker reading 63530. Unlike the other two, the grave here is unmarked, in keeping with most of the Johnson lore. This is, however, the site credited by blues scholars including John Hammond, Steve LaVere, and Steve Cheseborough.

The first blues heard by W.C. Handy was the spot ‘where the Southern Cross the Dog,’ and Moorhead is where that is. The Southern and the Dog are, or were, the railroad tracks that made a perfectly perpendicular intersection. Tutwiler station was where he was snoozing when the Clarksdale train was nine hours late. He was awoken by ‘a lean, loose-jointed negro’ singing Where the Southern Crosses the Dog and playing a guitar with a slide, a sound he described as ‘the weirdest music I had ever heard.’ Handy researched and developed the sound, becoming known as the Father of the Blues. The Tutwiler Arts Project has commissioned a number of blues murals, and the commemorative plaque at the station gives the date of Handy’s meeting as 1895, but the event is well documented as having been in 1903. When you stop by a restaurant, order catfish if it’s on the menu; this one-street town is enriched by catfish farming in the surrounding lakes. Just outside Tutwiler, by the foundation stones of the Whitfield M.B. church, is the marker that Lillian McMurray of Trumpet Records in Jackson (for more information, click here) erected for Sonny Boy Williamson’s grave.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.