I Don’t Like the Blues (Part I)

Out of the cruel heritage of slavery and then Jim Crow violence and oppression came a Black genre of music that we call the blues. It began with solitary singers telling the story of how lonely they were, how mistreated they were, and how hard life was for Black people. Eventually white people heard the music and recognized something meaningful in the lyrics and the new way of singing and playing instruments. It’s safe to say that without the music called the blues, there would have been no Elvis Presley and no Rolling Stones.

Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the leaf-shaped region called “the Delta,” is often referred to as the home of the blues. The town has cultivated this image to attract tourists to blues festivals and blues music venues. The former train station is now the Delta Blues Museum, which shows photos of the days when the blues began and the people who began it. The Stovall Farm, a short drive outside of town, is where Muddy Waters lived, driving a tractor in the daytime and played blues for Black folk at night. Magnificent blues singer Bessie Smith died in Clarksdale. The intersection of highways 49 and 61 is commemorated as “the crossroads,” symbolic of where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in order to get his magical skills on the guitar.

The leaders of the town of Clarksdale—mostly whites—promote blues festivals and hire musicians to play in blues clubs throughout the year.

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Excellent book: B. Brian Foster, “I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, & the Backbeat of Black Life,” University of North Carolina Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4696-6042-4