The text of the promotional site (and the narration of the videos) has some clumsy generalizations and a touch of exoticism (“Folks in Como believe that…,” “In Como, everybody sings and everybody prays,” etc.) but the singing is wonderful, and with the photographs that are displayed in the videos evokes the place where I lived and worked for a very difficult year better than anything else I could suggest.  I will be buying the album.

I visited the area in the early 70s with Bobbie Lee herself. At that time I worked with her in Las Vegas. We have remained friends ever since. Much of the area in and around the famed Tallahatche Bridge is not what it was 30 years ago, actually poorer. It is in Chickasaw County, not far from Greenwood Mississippi. The bridge was, back then, almost unuseable. The so-called Choctaw Ridge is just one of many areas identified by the locals as “up on the ridge”, all with various little names. It is unlikely any map would identify the exact location of a Choctaw Ridge, people of the area called the same place different things. I can only say it is a real place, and probably long forgotten by most in the area now.

This is interesting, though “Chickasaw County” is not especially near to Greenwood, and the Tallahatchie River does not enter it. History is strange.

I’ve not posted anything in quite a while. Stress and procrastination are partners. I’ll add a few posts soon.

Choctaw Ridge doesn’t turn up on many sites apart from those with Gentry lyrics. It seems to be an archaic description.

We saw Honeyboy Edwards, the 90-year-old bluesman who knew Robert Johnson and was present when he died. (I am told that it is his account of Johnson’s death that is widely considered most credible.) He sounded quite like I would have imagined, playing acoustic Blues as a man who played it when all Blues was acoustic.

Then last weekend we all reunited for the first time in Oxford. And what a relief, to decompress with my peers who are experiencing similar trials. Or even to chat over drinks with people my age, somewhat hip and somewhat liberal and somewhat well-educated. It sounds ugly and provincial, maybe (if it isn’t too backwards a use of provincial), and I do not mean it to be derogotary to anyone outside of that description, but what a relief it was, ugly relief or not.

I was perhaps unreasonably pleased to find this map of Panola County printed in the Wirt books mentioned in my last post, and though I will not deny a map fetish, neither am I wholly without reason. First, a map of a place like Panola County is a rare bird. Sure enough the county appears on maps of the state of Mississippi (more or less as an intersection of I-55 and Highway 6, with a dot for Batesville), but the towns of Sardis, Como, Crenshaw, Courtland, and Pope, though they may perhaps appear as dots, surely are not indicated by perimeters comprising finite areas. Additionally, I am pleased by any map that clearly demarcates the Delta, whose boundaries are so unambiguous when they are crossed but which are nevertheless so ambiguous on maps. I have seen only one other map that so clearly indicates the region (stolen from npr.org).

And of course the quaint hand-drawn character of the map is reminescent of the maps of Middle Earth included in all of Tolkien’s books, which maps were endlessly imitated by me and all other bookish but warm-blooded nine-year-old boys with good hardy souls in them; and the likeness surely activates some psychological trigger.

What’s more, the map heightened my appreciation of a song. I did not know, before seeing this map, that Choctaw Ridge names the boundary separating the Delta from the Hills. The coldness of the (mother’s?) lyric Nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge, in Bobbie Gentry’s lovely song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” now benefits from a suggestion of the historical antagonism between the Delta whites and the “Rednecks” of the Hills. Since it is in Panola County that the Tallahatchie River crosses Choctaw Ridge, I suppose the Tallahatchie Bridge central to the song is Panolian, and that the song’s speaker and her family are having breakfast at home somewhere in the western third of the county.

On an entirely different note, a few pages before the map Wirt’s Politics of Southern Equality begins with an inscription allegedly left by a Union soldier on the wall of a Mississippi home, where we are told it remains legible:

To the owner of this house — Your case is a hard one and I pity you.

A Google search does not return any instances of the phrase. I wonder if the inscription is real, and if so where in Mississippi it is.

I drove down into the Delta on Friday and saw B.B. King’s annual homecoming in Indianola. I missed the five-dollar advance tickets, and thus can say only that it was the best ten dollar concert I ever saw.

Iron & Wine was playing at some dive in Oxford, and I would have loved to see them, but B.B. King is B.B. King, and he’s eighty years old this year, and diabetic, and playing in his Delta hometown for cheaper than I&W in Oxford. So the decision was made.

I drove down to Laura Manion’s place in Indianola, taking the 55, and she had arrived there ahead of me with Ruth. The three of us went to a barbecue at the house of some other second-years in the MTC, and later walked in a big group the two or three blocks to the concert.

The show was great and B.B. seemed healthy and lively, though he spent the whole show in a chair, which he did not do some years ago. His band played for a while before the fireworks that were apparently to introduce the man himself. Upon his arrival they played several of the standards, and what I think was a version of Darlin’ You Know I Love You changed to address Indianola by name. B.B. sought and received the participation of the audience in When Love Comes to Town, which he introduced as having been written for him by his friend Boe-no from U2.

Dozens of children crowded the area nearest the stage, and I learned that they were waiting for the dance competition which is held before the final song. At B.B.’s cue his people began to select children from the crowd. “I don’t want all blacks,” he announced plainly, “and I don’t want all whites; I want some blacks and I want some whites and I want whatever other color there is.” First they had a competition for kids between five and eight years old, and another for kids nine to thirteen. (One of his people suggested raising the limit to fifteen, and he said that fifteen-year-olds are a-dults as far as he’s concerned.) He killed some time during the selection by asking the younger kids the age at which they thought young people ought to marry: answers ranged from thirteen to forty.

Each of the two competitions included five boys and five girls. The winner of each sex – chosen by audience applause – then competed against the winner of the other. Grand prize was ten dollars cash, second place was five, and everybody on stage got a buck. The faces of the younger children revealed some measure of awe at the prospect of receiving ten dollars.

He stopped the music once in order to lightly scold some of the kids in the audience who were booing one of the dancers. He had been on many stages, he told them, and he knew that booing could really tear a person down; if you don’t like somebody, keep your mouth shut, but don’t tear nobody down. The admonition was met by some applause from further back in the crowd.

The winner of the older girls competition was a skinny white girl who declared herself to be eleven but dressed rather older than that, I thought. Her dancing was, if you understand me, mature, and the audience laughed and cheered. A woman to my left was in hysterics, tears of laughter running down her face; she was covering her eyes with her hands and saying again and again that she couldn’t believe it, that she couldn’t believe she was dancing like that. I thought the woman must be the girl’s mother, be I learned that she was the mother of the girl’s friend. After the girl won, and left the stage, a child asked her where her mother was, and she said, “Not here!”

Kids
From Robert Pollack, at flickr.com.

Earlier in the show I was stunned at the sight of a boy ahead of me, almost immediately next to the stage, surely no farther than fifteen or twenty feet from B.B. King – and who was nevertheless playing a Gameboy. I later figured he must have come just for the dancing, and therefore had understandably to kill some time during all that music which had to be suffered first. Of course I stole a photo.

After the dancing and the last song B.B. threw some pins to the folks up front. I was busy with the camera but Laura dove for them and came up with one for me. (Thanks, Laura – and for the living room floor and the pancakes, too.)

After the show B.B. was going to play for the a-dults at Club Ebony, and I heard that it was to cost $50 at the door. The rough consensus among the MTC kids was that the price was too high, though it did occur to me that I would be paying a comparable amount to see him play in a pavilion back home. And that here it would not be a pavilion back home, but a tiny club – the tiny club where he got his start, they say – in Indianola, Mississippi. The show in the park didn’t end until after midnight, though, and we were all tired. And I did just spend fifty dollars on a watch. And I was in an unfamiliar town. So.

Next year – supposing Mr. King is up to continuing the tradition as he approaches his eighty-first birthday – I will go to the Club Ebony show. If mountains be in my way, I shall move mountains. The invitation for company is hereby sent.

I returned to Oxford up the 49 to Clarksdale and then on the 6 from there. The drive was lovely and I took pictures from my car, which are now here. All of the Indianola and B.B. King pictures are here. I also took a few short videos of the concert (with the video feature of my digital camera, so their quality is mediocre) that can be made available to interested parties upon request.