One trip, I stayed at the John Lee Hooker hotel and began a road trip — as fate would have it, late afternoon on Halloween. Driving a hotted-up muscle car, I took off to Parchman's penitentiary, got moved on by cranky Highway Patrolmen, then high-tailed it to Dockery Farm.
Then I hurtled towards Tutwiler, resting place of Sonny Boy Williamson II, when the angriest, darkest, most furious storm I have ever driven in broke loose. It's a "nice straight road" — a narrow 65 MPH road punctuated by slow-moving combine harvesters taking up the lane, causing me to repeatedly screech the brakes. The road's narrowness was accentuated by the deep flooded torrent of a culvert running beside it, a metre or so to the side.
The inky black sky — "Delta storm inks Tutwiler, on my horizon" — dumped such heavy rain that I couldn't see through the windscreen even with the wipers going frenetically. So I tried opening my side window to look out, only to have the rain sting and blind my eyes. I couldn't pull over, because there was no space apart from that flooded culvert running beside the highway.
I limped into Tutwiler and searched around for Sonny Boy Williamson's gravestone. I was fortunate to find it — it isn't secured and can easily fall over, but nonetheless, it is a historic monument.
Tutwiler is a cradle of Blues history. The old railroad platform is where W.C. Handy first heard, and gave the first written description of, the Blues that still exists. The old undertaker's parlour, where Emmett Till's body was embalmed, stands only a few metres away.
Despite all that history, there are also modern juke joints back in Clarksdale where the locals are grinding and pumping out their moves to modern sounds — all of it derived from the same wellspring of music that is in the air, in the soil, and in the water of the Mississippi Delta.
