Text by Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
Samuel Reuben Kendrick, my great-grandfather,
was born a slave in Alabama.
In 1888 he founded a farming community called
New Africa on 160 acres [65 hectares] he bought
from the railroad near Duncan, Mississippi.
Among the tribulations he faced—floods, boll
weevil infestations, bank loans due—one incident
finally persuaded him to leave Mississippi. When
a sharecropper on a nearby plantation asked to
live and work on some of his land, Sam Kendrick
sent over a wagon for the man’s family and
belongings. A mob of whites led by the
plantation owner trapped my great-grandfather
and pounded him to the ground with ax handles,
cursing him for taking one of their workers.
Stealing from a white man, they called it. Soon
after the incident, on a cold January day in
1909, he was repairing the little wooden bridge
over the lake on the edge of his farm. His mind
may have wandered—perhaps to his plans for
starting anew in Texas—and he dropped his
hammer. He waded into the water to get it and
continued hammering. That night he felt chilled.
A few days later, at the age of 56, Samuel
Kendrick was dead of pneumonia.
Well, the blues am a achin’ old heart
disease,
Well, the blues am a low down achin’
heart disease,
Like consumption, killin’ me by degrees.
—Robert
Johnson
The phrase “having the blues” goes back to
18th-century England, where the “blue devils”
was slang for melancholia. But it was sorrows
like Sam Kendrick’s, common among blacks after
the Civil War, that led to a raw new music—the
blues—depicting work, love, poverty, and the
hardships freedmen faced in a world barely
removed from slavery.
If he had lived, my great-grandfather would have
been part of one of the largest peacetime
internal movements of people in history. Between
1915 and 1970 more than five million African
Americans left from every field and corner of
the South, most going to the nation’s booming
cities. Sam Kendrick’s eldest child, Swan, my
grandfather, settled in Washington, D.C., where
both my mother and I were born. Others in the
family followed the heavily traveled path out of
Mississippi to Memphis, where the blues spurred
the rise of rock-and-roll. This “blues highway”
led on to Chicago—the mecca for bluesmen and
other migrants.
One who landed in Chicago in 1936, Willie Dixon,
called the blues “the facts of life.” Dixon was
a blues songwriter, poet, and philosopher who
campaigned for more than 50 years for
recognition of the blues as the root of all
American music. “Everything that’s under the
sun, that crawls, flies, or swims likes music.
But blues is the greatest, because blues is the
only one that, along with the rhythm and the
music, brings wisdom.”
All routes from the South were paved with a
people’s blues, but no place is more closely
associated with the music than the Mississippi
Delta. This broad, rich floodplain—anchored by
the Mississippi and washed over by the Yazoo,
Tallahatchie, and Big Sunflower Rivers—spreads
200 miles [322 kilometers] from Memphis,
Tennessee, to Vicksburg, Mississippi. The black
Delta soil steams in the broiling summer heat as
I turn off Highway 61 onto a narrow paved road
that was a wagon track in my great-grandfather’s
time. Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues”
is playing loud on my tape, his brooding voice
and intense guitar seeming to conjure up Delta
spirits. I stand on a steel bridge—successor to
the one Sam Kendrick had worked on—and stare
into the murky water. Here in the place where
his life ended, I’m beginning a journey through
memory and into the blues.
Around midnight on a sweltering Saturday in
August, Mama Rene slides onto the barstool next
to me at the Do Drop Inn, just off Highway 61 in
Shelby, Mississippi. “No, honey, blues aren’t
just about us being sad. That’s why I opened
this place. It’s a way to remember. The blues
talk about black folk, how we lived, the way we
were treated. And we’re still going on.”
Irene Walker—Mama Rene—is a handsome woman of 63
who grew up a sharecropper’s daughter. For 33
years she’s been a nursing assistant with the
Delta Community Home Health Agency, based in
Clarksdale. Lately, she’s been trying to attend
to the blues with the same care she shows for
her patients. “Blues is fading away with young
black folks,” she says, shaking her head. “They
think it’s for old folks. They’ve let the rap
take their culture away from them, and young
whites are moving into our culture.”
Next to the bar is a brightly lit area with a
pool table and electronic game machines. Beyond
is a small stage and dance floor, dark but for
the glow of blue and green Christmas lights
strung along the ceiling.
On stage a hard-driving blues band with two
guitars, drum, and electric piano is connecting
with the sparse crowd. The lead singer, sweating
heavily, eyes shut, moans, “Have you ever seen a
one-eyed woman cry?” His mournful words elicit
emphatic shouts of release from the dancers.
“Yess, Lawd!” “Talk to me now!” With waving arms
and swaying bodies they seem to be pushing
through a doorway, if not to a better life, to a
better moment.
The scene is a reminder of what Worth Long, a
historian of the blues, told me. “No matter
where they’re playing, jukes or in a yard, blues
is music to move to.” Before the blues, songs
were sung to pace work—pounding railroad ties or
chopping cotton with hoes. Then, said Long, “the
work song moves to the dance, which was once
held in front and back yards. Then dancing moves
from the yard to the juke—commercial places.”
A year passes before I return to Mama Rene’s
to find a radio DJ playing CDs. He’s telling
everyone tuned in that he’s broadcasting live
from the Do Drop Inn in Shelby. The crowd is
younger, larger. “I’ve got to make money,” Mama
Rene sighs. “I’m trying to think how to bring my
blues night back the way it was. I’ll find a
way.”
Young black people still go to places like the
Do Drop to dance, but the blues doesn’t mean
much to them anymore, although it animates rap
and other music they listen to. Blues music
sprang from poverty and restriction, and for
many black Americans it has been something to
disavow. The often earthy lyrics didn’t help
either. Indeed lines like Sonny Boy Williamson’s
“Every time she starts to loving, she brings
eyesight to the blind” had some calling the
blues “devil music.” A straitlaced, nonsmoking,
nondrinking, hymn-singing churchman like my
great-grandfather Samuel Kendrick would even
have been offended by words like James Cotton’s
“raising a good cotton crop’s just like a lucky
man shooting dice.”
Mississippi Delta blues has been called “deep” blues. Musicians from the cotton fields—men and women like Muddy Waters, Willie Foster, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Memphis Minnie, and Son House—played and sang with extraordinary power. The land itself seems to demand it. In summer the Delta is a place of sullen heat and sudden angry thunderstorms, when heaven seems to short-circuit and puts humans in their place. Long rows of cotton offer no relief from the disorienting flatness. You always feel exposed and want to run for cover, into a juke joint with a bottle of whiskey or into a church. Both places maybe. Depends whether it’s Saturday night or Sunday morning.
My friend Sterling Plumpp from Mississippi, a poet, university professor, and sage on black music, reminded me that the spiritual music of the church and the worldly music of the juke joint are not that far apart. “The first time I heard blues was in my grandfather’s prayers,” he said. “‘Take care of Seal, the work-horse that’s sick. Drive the bo’weevils away. Put some softness in white folks’ hearts so they won’t cheat so badly this time.’”
In Yazoo City, the Reverend Arnold
“Gatemouth” Moore, 87, confirmed the tie between
blues and church. I asked him about making the
shift from popular blues singer to preacher.
“When I came to Christ, I changed the lyrics. I
got the same voice, same key, but the words are
different. Same music, same everything.”
So while I can’t imagine Sam Kendrick singing,
“If the blues was whiskey, I’d stay drunk all
the time,” I can hear him singing, “O Lord, O my
Lord, O my good Lord, keep me from sinking
down.”
As an educated black landowner, my great-grandfather was in a tiny minority. But the freedman’s blues he suffered linked him with the most uneducated black sharecropper. Across the South in the late 1800s Jim Crow laws tightened racial segregation, curtailing freedoms gained as a result of the Civil War. Curfews banned blacks from streets after sunset. Mississippi’s 1890 state constitution effectively stripped blacks of voting rights. Years later Sam Kendrick’s youngest daughter, my great-aunt Hattie, said she couldn’t look at the TV movie Roots because it reminded her of those bitter Mississippi days. “I find my throat dry, and stuff kind of boils up in me,” she said.
Since I last traveled the Delta a quarter
century ago, it has changed almost beyond
recognition. You don’t see people working in the
fields anymore. The sharecropper shacks, once
ubiquitous, are gone, replaced by a few neat
bungalows and trailer homes for the families of
the men who operate the tractors, mechanical
cotton pickers, and other implements that have
replaced human labor. Metal irrigation
sprinklers crawl across the land like giant
millipedes. Bright yellow crop dusters fly
overhead, spraying chemicals to hold back
insects and weeds.
Folks in drowsy towns like Tutwiler who remember
the old days don’t regret their passing. “You
picked the white man’s cotton. He takes it from
you and do what he want with it,” is how Judge
Davis Irving, 69, describes sharecropping.
“Judge” is Irving’s real name, but everyone
calls him J. D. (When white people addressed you
by your first name no matter what your age,
having “Judge” as a first name was one way to
protest the insult.) Until he was 18, J. D.
lived and worked with his father on Prairie
Plantation just outside Tutwiler. “It had maybe
200 houses on it and 50 mules, not counting us.”
Sharecropping usually meant a cycle of endless
debt. Half of what the sharecropper grew
belonged to the owner outright. To purchase
supplies or rent a “shotgun” shack (so named
because a blast fired through the front door
went straight out the back door), the
sharecropper borrowed from the plantation owner
in the spring. This loan was called “furnish.”
Repayment was due at “settle” when the fall crop
came in. Any money the sharecropper made came
from what was left over. Often he got nothing or
owed money. The plantation owner, “he got the
books and keeps the figures,” J. D. said,
frowning. “If you disagree, you move; you go to
another plantation.”
The blues sank its earliest and deepest roots
in fields worked by sharecroppers. Willie
Foster, still performing at 77, is one of a
dwindling number of bluesmen with the memory of
laboring to a song. “A man be way down in the
field plowing with a mule, singing, ‘Oh, my baby
gone. I’ll soon be gone myself.’ That was
because he couldn’t move off the plantation when
he gets ready. He would ask the man, ‘Can I
move?’ And if he say, ‘Naw you can’t move,’ he’d
run off and he would sing, ‘I’m gonna leave you,
baby, and I won’t be back no more.’ It wasn’t
his wife he was singing about.”
We’re talking in Willie’s small home in
Greenville. He is missing a leg and is legally
blind, but that doesn’t stop him from singing in
local jukes and touring overseas.
“I was born with the blues,” Willie says,
describing how his mother gave birth to him on a
cotton sack in a Delta field because the
plantation boss refused to give her time off.
With no brothers and sisters for company, Foster
taught himself to play the harmonica. (“It was
25 cents at the Rexall in Leland.”)
He imitated birds, trains, and train whistles.
“When I turned 17, I said, ‘Mama, I’m grown now.
I done learnt everything about the Delta, but I
heard so much about Chicago.’” Willie left home
on foot “without a dime in my pocket,” and by
taking various jobs along the way, he eventually
made it to Chicago.
Not only does every bluesman have a getting away
from the plantation story, they all have an
apprentice story related to that experience. In
1931 David “Honeyboy” Edwards, now 84, hopped a
Memphis-bound freight train with a guitar
borrowed from his brother-in-law. “Working for a
dollar a day all day was not for me,” he said,
remembering his life on a plantation near
Greenwood, Mississippi.
But he drifted back home a few months later.
“The music hadn’t learned me like,” he said,
referring to his lack of artistry. One night he
met Big Joe Williams, a well-known bluesman, who
asked Edwards if he could play the guitar he was
holding. “I played a few strums on it, and he
said, ‘I can learn you how to play.’” Edwards
left with Williams, “and I never did come back.”
After traveling with Big Joe for a time,
Honeyboy found his own path one day in Bay St.
Louis, Mississippi. “I was on a bridge. They was
catchin’ crab on it—had the nets down with meat
in ’em. Somebody say, ‘There’s a boy with a
guitar. Can you play that guitar, boy?’ I
started to play on that bridge, and people
started stoppin’ catchin’ crabs and listenin’ to
me. Gave me nickels and dimes. I say, ‘I don’t
think I need Joe Williams.’”
Honeyboy Edwards is still a blues master. Having
listened to a recording he made in 1941, I’m
astounded, hearing him in 1998, that the power
of his voice and playing has not diminished. In
the blues, as he shows, the singer’s vocal
timbre drives the emotional impact of the song
as much as the lyrics. Like Willie Foster,
Honeyboy is a living history of the blues, with
personal knowledge of every major blues figure
from Charley Patton and Robert Johnson to Muddy
Waters and Little Walter. When asked about
Robert Johnson, he smiles for a moment, mind
flashing back. “He definitely liked the women
and his whiskey.”
Now there’s got to be some change made
around here, people;
I’m not jiving, that’s a natural fact. . . .
I’m gonna jump up on one of these old poor
mules and start riding and I don’t care
where we stop at.
—Mercy
Dee Walton
The crucial difference between slavery and
sharecropping, best reflected by bluesmen like
Honeyboy Edwards, was the relative freedom to
move: from field to field, from field to
factory. Moving on is a frequent theme in the
blues, a refrain that is really a code for
freedom and opportunity.
By the turn of the century tens of thousands of
African Americans had already left the South,
some joining land rushes to Kansas and Oklahoma,
others going to northern cities, where
opportunities seemed greater and oppression
less. But with the advent of World War I and the
accompanying demand for increased production in
the industrial North, the real exodus from the
Delta—and the entire South—began.
Honeyboy Edwards was not quite two years old in
1917 when black America’s most widely read
newspaper, the Chicago Defender, ran this ad:
“The Defender invites all to come north. Plenty
of room for the good, sober, industrious men.
Plenty of work. For those who will not work, the
jails will take care of you. When you have
served your 30 days at hard labor you will then
have learned how to work. Anywhere in God’s
country is far better than the southland...Don’t
let the crackers fool you. Come join the ranks
of the free.”
Eighty percent of America’s ten million blacks lived in the South in 1917, when the nation entered World War I. Chicago’s busy brickyards, meatpacking houses, and steel mills had long attracted European immigrants, but the war halted this flow. Meanwhile white factory workers in the U.S. were going to Europe to fight, leaving a vacuum just as industrial demand was soaring. Southern black labor was a solution. Once under way, the movement out of the South ebbed only during the 1930s Depression, with the numbers between 1940 and 1970 exceeding a million people a decade.
You might think that in a region rife with racial tension, where blacks often outnumbered whites, the exodus was welcomed. Not so. “Where shall we get labor to take their places?” asked Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser. In Mississippi laws imposed fines or jail on agents—usually blacks—who encouraged laborers to leave the state. Charles Johnson, a sociologist who traveled in Mississippi in 1917, noted that an agent “would walk briskly down the street through a group of Negroes, and without turning his head would say in a low tone: ‘Anybody want to go to Chicago, see me.’”
In 1918 a ticket to Chicago from New Orleans cost about [U.S.] $20—nearly a month’s pay on some plantations. Many people sold their belongings—often at a loss—and gradually moved north, working and saving enough money in one town to move to the next. Sometimes families split up. One man with a family of five wrote to the Chicago Urban League, a black social service organization, for train tickets: “If you cant sen for all send 2 one for me and my brother he live with me he is 18 yers old then i can arang for the rest after i get out there.”
The Chicago Defender’s militant drumbeat contrasted lynching and racial oppression in the South with glowing descriptions of a free and prosperous life in Chicago. “Copies were passed around until worn out,” said one reader. People coming back home for a visit brought gifts, flashed money, and were full of all the news about living large in the big city. The North, the “promised land,” was the talk in cotton fields, on street corners, in churches, barber shops, and juke joints. As one Chicago letter writer noted, there was more to it than the search for jobs: “My children are going to the same school with the whites and I don’t have to umble to no one. There isn’t any ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir.’”
For those leaving the Delta, the port city of Memphis on the Mississippi was the first major stop. Trains from the South converged on Memphis, where passengers boarded the llinois Central Railroad for Chicago. If you walk a few blocks northeast of the old railroad station, now being renovated, through a crumbling neighborhood with cracked, weed-sprouting sidewalks, you come to Beale Street, once the heart of black Memphis.
“I found Beale Street to be a city unto itself,” writes B. B. “Blues Boy” King in his recently published autobiography. At 73, B. B. King still travels with his old guitar, Lucille, the two of them performing up to 300 days a year. To King, who was born on a plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, and first went to Memphis in 1945, Beale Street looked “like heaven. . . . There were three movie palaces, cafés, hotels, pawnshops—I’d never seen a pawnshop before—variety stores, and musicians everywhere. All my confidence from all those Saturdays playing all those little Delta towns vanished—just like that.”
A musician could play on the street for tips or, with luck, in a theater or club. Both blues and jazz blew into Memphis, reinforcing each other. In the 1950s B. B. King helped pioneer the use of spiritual and jazz elements in the blues. “As folks moved up and down the river, they brought what they saw at each end into song,” says Worth Long, the blues historian.
In Memphis in 1909 W. C. Handy, who had
traveled the South with his own bands since the
1890s, wrote what is said to be the first blues
song ever published. It was inspired, he said
years later, by a melody he heard in 1903 while
waiting for a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
Handy was awakened by a man “plunking a guitar
beside me. He pressed a knife on the strings of
the guitar. The effect was unforgettable.” The
song Handy wrote, “Mr. Crump,” was a campaign
song for Edward H. “Boss” Crump, the powerful
mayor of Memphis.
These days on Beale Street tourists choke the
blues clubs. Fast-food carryouts and souvenir
shops are inescapable, and the Monarch Saloon,
one of Handy’s hangouts, is vacant. The elegant
Palace Theater, which gave B. B. King and other
musicians an important boost, has been
demolished.
A. J. Burnett, 71, was just 13 when she began
dancing at the Palace in the 1940s as one of the
“Vampin’ Babies.” A tall woman, she’s still
given to lithe, quick movements. “What they are
doing in Las Vegas now, we were doing 50 years
ago,” she says, taking my hand as we walk down
Beale. In her day it was a street of jazz and
blues, men in suits, women dressed to kill or
die for. Everywhere music floated above motion.
“Decent people didn’t go to juke joints,” she
says, expressing disdain for today’s commercial
hustle.
Like it or not, Beale Street tourism swells city
coffers. But A. J. dislikes the way blues
instead of jazz has become the street’s main
flavor. As we pass Handy Park, where a blues
singer is passing a box around to tourists for
coins and bills, she snaps, “The street is
nothing now.”
From Memphis it’s on to Cairo, Illinois, the
halfway point to Chicago. As Judge Irving had
told me in Tutwiler, Cairo was where the North
began. “They had a black curtain on the
bus—white folks in front, us in back. They took
it down in Cairo.”
Hattie Kendrick, the youngest of my
great-grandfather’s five children, moved to
Cairo in 1927 at the urging of a cousin who’d
come up from Mississippi. In this “oasis,” as
Aunt Hattie called Cairo, she settled into a
boarding house and began teaching in a one-room
school.
I hadn’t been to Cairo since I was a small boy.
Then, I didn’t know enough to ask my aunt the
questions I wished to ask her now. She died in
1989 at age 94, but I’m grateful that during the
last ten years of her life she put her
recollections on cassette tapes.
Like many African Americans taking their first
steps in the promised land, Aunt Hattie found
that life in it wasn’t all that had been
promised. She was angered that black teachers
earned less than whites and in 1941 sued the
Board of Education to equalize teachers’
salaries. Thurgood Marshall, who was then chief
counsel of the NAACP and would in 1967 become
the first African-American justice on the
Supreme Court, took the case.
“Let me tell you a good story,” Aunt Hattie
liked to begin, when recalling the day her case
came to court. “Thurgood and this other attorney
were being called ‘boys’ by the defense
attorney. He went on about how only a ‘brilliant
attorney’ like the one who’d won a case like
this in Tennessee could win this one. After he
finished, Thurgood got up and bowed to him and
thanked him, saying: ‘I am that qualified,
brilliant attorney who handled that case.’ The
whole courtroom burst into laughter.” The case
was won.
In 1973 Hattie Kendrick charged that Cairo’s
at-large system for electing the mayor and four
councilmen discriminated against the city’s
black population. Seven years later her
complaint paid off—a consent decree resulted in
the creation of five wards, two with a black
majority population.
Aunt Hattie, like her father Samuel Kendrick,
sang no blues, though many of her tapes are
punctuated by songs she remembered from
childhood and church. Yet her life is a blues
story, not for any hurt that came her way but
because of her determination to move on to
something better. Like the great blues singers,
Hattie Kendrick was set on making her mark.
Well, I rode number seventy-four, boys, and
the rain was falling down.
Well, I rode number seventy-four, boys, and
the rain was falling down.
Well, you know I got awful cold and chilly,
boys, but I was Chicago bound.
—
Willie Love
For all the impact of people like Hattie
Kendrick, Cairo remained a backwater, stunted by
the decline of lumbering in the region and the
growth of Chicago as a railhead and port. Even
Aunt Hattie spent summers in Chicago, working as
a maid, enthralled by the city’s size and pace.
“You could just stand there at State and Madison
Streets and see things you never dreamed of.”
I like Chicago’s energy too. But the day I
arrived, newspapers were reporting the collapse
of a truce between two gangs. Another day,
walking down 47th Street, I saw two young men
make a lightning-quick exchange—a small packet
of white powder for money.
A tough, sometimes grim, but less
self-destructive black Chicago greeted Elnora
Jones when she stepped off the train from
Mississippi in 1945. A trim woman of 79 who
laughs easily, she’d just moved into a new
apartment near Lake Michigan when I visited her.
“Look at me now!” she exclaimed. “A
sharecropper’s daughter, and I got an air
conditioner, a view of the lake, and a reporter
in the house. Don’t tell me you can keep a good
woman down.”
Her mother had come to Chicago first. Elnora
followed a few weeks later with her three
children and her youngest brother, Eddie
Campbell. Eddie, once the band director for the
blues legend Jimmy Reed, is now a highly
regarded bluesman himself. They boarded the
Illinois Central in the Delta hamlet of Coahoma.
“We didn’t take much. We all had little
suitcases, sort of cardboard you know, the kind
you have to tie together or they would pop
loose. And shoe boxes of fried chicken and
biscuits.”
On the outskirts of the great city they passed
the fire-belching smokestacks of steel plants.
Pulling in at night at the 12th Street station,
they were greeted by noisy throngs, huge
buildings, and bright lights. “It was the
biggest place I ever saw.”
Elnora still shivers with excitement as she
describes the trolley ride from the station,
when she discovered that the rules of racial
etiquette so rigidly applied in Mississippi
didn’t apply in Chicago. “It was crowded, and
I’m standing there holding the rod when a white
man got on, and his hand touched mine. I let my
hand go, then I put it back. Wow!”
Not that there weren’t occasions for second thoughts. Chicago was crowded. There was a sharp color line in housing, and conditions were rough. “Roaches,” she shudders, talking about her first apartment, which she shared with three other families. “I’d seen rattlesnakes in Mississippi but not those things.”
Between 1910 and 1930 Chicago’s black
population grew fivefold, to nearly a quarter of
a million. Working-class neighborhoods—the
“black belt”—stretched south from downtown along
Lake Michigan. They were home to steelworkers,
packinghouse workers, janitors, porters, and
maids like Elnora, who draws herself up proudly
when telling me that even though she has a
third-grade education, her three children have
college degrees.
It was working people with extra money to spend
who made possible the musical success of men
like McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy
Waters. (As a child he liked playing in the
mud.) He had jumped off a train from Mississippi
in 1943 with his guitar and a single change of
clothes. Although he found a job paying [U.S.]
$45 a week on the loading dock of a paper
factory, he was soon playing at rent parties and
in loud clubs like the Chicken Shack on
Chicago’s West Side.
As musicians came to Chicago, exchanging ideas
and influence, the city pioneered the transition
from the folk, acoustic sound of the plantation
South to a more sophisticated urban, amplified
sound. Maxwell Street, on the West Side where
the poorest of the poor settled, became a
mile-long teeming bazaar on weekends. Musicians
sang or played on corners, and electric cords
stretched from sidewalk amplifiers to sockets in
apartment walls. Muddy Waters played Maxwell
Street occasionally, but he told an interviewer,
“I didn’t like to have to play outside in all
the weathers, and I didn’t like to pass the hat
around.”
Paralleling the growth of music in Chicago
was the growth of enterprise in communities like
Bronzeville, a sprawling, energetic South Side
neighborhood that ran from 26th Street south for
some 40 blocks. Today the blues hangs over much
of the area, but not much music is heard. It’s
late afternoon, and I’m sitting with Gerri
Oliver at the bar of the Palm Tavern on 47th.
“My family’s dream was for me to be a funeral
director,” says Gerri, another Mississippian who
moved to Chicago in the 1940s. “I just wanted to
put my son through school.” She didn’t pursue
her family’s wish but worked variously as a
check casher, hairdresser, and manicurist. Then
in 1956 she and her husband bought the Palm.
With its gloved waiters and starched white
tablecloths the Palm was soon the place for
local and visiting musicians to come for food
and drink. Gerri ticks off a long list that
includes Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, and the
Temptations. “To think I knew all of these
people who are now famous,” she says. “I took
them for granted.”
As we talk, one or two regulars drift in for a
drink. Most of the clubs and theaters that made
Bronzeville so vibrant have closed, and the Palm
doesn’t offer dinner anymore. “Those drug
dealers told me if I don’t let them sell from
here, I wasn’t going to get any business. I
don’t sell crack, and I sure ain’t making money
off martinis in here,” Gerri sighs. But this is
the life she knows, and so she’s holding on.
From the Palm it’s a short walk to the
Checkerboard Lounge on 43rd, where I meet
Sterling Plumpp, the poet and professor from
Mississippi. Sitting with him at a Formica
table, I glance around the room. Posters
advertising beer, some with a woman cuddling up
to a can, decorate the walls. A street sign
hanging from the ceiling reads “East Muddy
Waters Drive.”
The Checkerboard is one of a handful of places
on the South Side where you can still hear live
blues. Although black Chicago powered the blues,
live music has largely moved to posh clubs on
the North Side, where for musicians the pay is
better, and for the mainly white patrons the
walk safer.
“If you’re not living here, the neighborhood
seems dangerous,” says the bartender when I
comment on the empty streets. “Actually, it is
sometimes.”
Part of today’s problem is the flight of
middle-class blacks to the suburbs. As de facto
segregation north of the Mason-Dixon Line
crumbled in the 1970s, blacks fled inner cities,
much as an earlier generation in the South had
fled plantations. The facts of life, Willie
Dixon called the blues. The facts change; the
blues is simply how life feels as it goes on.
“There’s more continuity in blues as an
expression of everyday life than anything on
this globe,” Sterling says. That’s what connects
Samuel and Hattie Kendrick to Honeyboy Edwards,
Willie Foster, Elnora Jones, and others I met
along the blues highway.
The continuity lets me recognize myself in the
blues. Not unlike teenagers today, my generation
had dismissed the blues as too old and too
passive. We couldn’t hear. And for many of us,
our southern roots were distant. But now in
Chicago, at this journey’s end, I look back down
the blues highway and give thanks to those who
traveled it before me. Their music and their
struggles smoothed my way.
I settle into the music. On stage at the Checkerboard is John Primer, at 52 a bluesman of a younger generation than men like Honeyboy Edwards, Willie Foster, and Gatemouth Moore. Primer’s voice has a rough edge; his harmonica produces torrents of sound. It is as if he is trying to force life back into the bleak streets outside. “Sweet Home Chicago,” he sings, not with irony but fervent belief.