Bentonia and Blues--A Southern Tradition that Keeps Jukin' Along

Bentonia and Blues:

A Southern Tradition that Keeps Jukin' Along

By Debbie Chaney - Sep 25, 1982

"We used to walk through the swamp to Canton with our guitars on our backs and juke all night and walk back home...playing the blues is something I was born with" -- Jack Owens 

As long as there has been heartache, working people, children and good ole corn whiskey, it seems that blues music has been in existence. It's an art that knows only tradition and feeling.

Sitting on a stool in the Blue Front Cafe located by the railroad tracks in Bentonia, Jimmy Holmes takes a puff on his cigarette and tells how the blues has become important to him, to others and to Black culture. 

Holmes talks candidly about how he has researched the history of the blues, particularly in the Bentonia area and how the music continues to survive. "Blues is a feeling," he explains. "It is a form of music that ex-presses life whether it's good or bad. If a guy's ole lady has left him, if he's not working or somebody has stolen his lady he sets down with his guitar and begins putting words together. To appreciate the blues, you've got to live it." 

Holmes has combed the county searching out blues singers, and one of the more notable is the infamous Jack Owens. Owens, who claims to be "up in the seventies" has been playing blues since he was "crawling on the floor." 

He learned, more or less, in "the cotton fields, the corn fields and the pea fields." 

His repertoire of music includes renowned blues titles such as "The Devil," "Cherry Ball," "Keep on Gambling," and "Catfish Blues."

"Jack," said Holmes, "is almost a duplicate of the type of music Skip James, the blues great, played. He knows the guitar like he made it himself." 

Owens and Holmes will be performing at the upcoming "Gateway to the Delta" Arts and Crafts Festival Oct. 2 at the Triangle. The annual event is sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce with adjoining activities sponsored by the Yazoo Arts Council and Ricks Memorial Library. 

Music performed during the festival will include concerts given by local choirs and singers, emphasizing black and white gospel, country, bluegrass and blues. Demonstrations will also be given in quilting, tatting, basket weaving, square dancing and other folk art. 

The folklife division of the festival is sponsored by the library and made possible through a grant from the Mississippi Library Commission and the Mississippi Arts Commission. Yazoo County is one of six areas in which folk life programs have been held. 

Holmes will narrate the blues division during the performance by Owens and his blind partner Bud and guitar blues artist Tommy Lee. 

Owens probably became known for his talents when he and friends would travel around the county and surrounding areas to "play at country jukes." He and Bud became partners when they "would go to the juke house and play." As far as Bud's handicap, Owens says there's no problem. "I just sit close to him so he can feel me moving— I don't know hardly how he can tell when but we just messed around so much," said Owens of the man's unique talent in being able to change keys and know when Owens is beginning another song. 

Holmes agrees, saying "Ben and Jack are like two peas in a hull. It seems like they are interchangeable. 

"They have an intangible relationship between the two of them." 

Visitors to the festival will have the opportunity to see and hear how the blues has touched the lives of these three men, Black culture and the South. And possibly even their own.

Furry Lewis Greeted Blues Revival with Smile, Wisecrack

Furry Lewis Greeted Blues Revival 

with Smile, Wisecrack 

By Roy M. Close - Minneapolis Star - Nov 13, 1974

"My right name is Walter Lewis," the elderly black man explained, "But I always go by Furry. I guess I started playing the guitar when I was just about 10 years old, and I'm 81 now. 

"I didn't call myself a professional in them days. I still don't call myself a professional, but you can put it like this: They call me a rabbit in a thicket, and it takes a good dog to catch me with a guitar." 

His face crinkled into a broad grin, and behind his thick glasses the dark eyes twinkled.

At 81 — give or take a few years — Furry Lewis is having the time of his life. Due to the revival of interest in the blues on U.S. college campuses, Lewis is financially secure for the first time in his long career. 

He's one of the stars of the Memphis Blues Caravan, a touring show that plays one-night stands in college towns and big cities, and he's sufficiently well-known to get occasional solo bookings in clubs like the University of Minnesota's Whole Coffeehouse, where he's scheduled to per-form Friday and Saturday evenings.

Lewis hates to fly, but he loves to travel. He enjoys the luxury of hotel rooms, the good whiskey he can afford these days, and the attention he receives from audiences, the press and the younger members of the blues caravan. 

Furry Lewis circa 1927

In Minneapolis recently before a blues caravan appearance in Northfield, Lewis was in an expansive mood. He spun out one anecdote after another about his early days with W. C. Handy's band and the great blues musicians with whom he's performed.

"I'm making more now than I ever made in my life," he said. "When I was growing up, you used to get two loaves of bread for a nickel, but the trouble was, where was you gonna get the nickel?"

He recalled the old days in Memphis, his home for the last 75 years, as "tough times." 

"We used to play all night for $3 apiece, plus all we could eat and drink. Now I wouldn't tune my guitar for $3." 

Lewis acknowledges that he has "a little money in the bank" as a hedge against possible future retirement. But now that he's finally earning enough to live comfortably, he takes a certain pleasure from professing poverty and regretting his failure to save any money when he was younger. 

"I could have been rich," he declared, "but 1 never did think of it till I got old and about ready to die. It was my mistake. I didn't have enough sense to know I would be down. Now I know: I been down so long it seems like up to me." 

Lewis remembers with pride his association with Handy ("he gave me the best guitar I ever had in my life") and can vividly recall the 1916 acci-dent that cost him part of his right leg. "I had $100 in my pocket, but I'm a hobo trying to save my money and hopping a freight."

Pittsburgh Post Gazette 1969.

The veteran bluesman has never married. "I don't see no need," he explained. "What do I need with a wife when the man next door got one?" 

As the senior member of the blues caravan — and the oldest practicing blues musician in the world — Lewis takes his share of kidding from his younger colleagues, who have their own nickname for him: Blind, Crippled and Crazy. 

But Minneapolis promoter Arne Brogger, who organized and manages the caravan, says Lewis is "an old fox." 

"He's sharp as a tack," Brogger declared. "He doesn't miss a thing. And he's the darling of the caravan. Every-one takes care of him, and he relishes that. He's perfectly capable of taking care of himself, of course, but he doesn't want anybody to know that." Lewis doesn't deny these things, but prefers to emphasize that he's getting along in years. 

"I'm thinking on retiring," he admitted. "But you'd be surprised how many people say, 'Don't retire! Don't retire!' By the time you been doing something 70 years, though, you get. tired. Maybe it's time to look up in-stead of looking down."

For the moment, however, Lewis doesn't intend to retire. There's no reason to slow down. "I got better health than the man at the hoard of health," he explained. 

Memphis And The Country Blues

Memphis And The Country Blues 

By Harper Barnes - St. Louis Dispatch - May 31, 1970

Sid Selvidge & Furry Lewis

The blues did not come from Memphis, but they arrived there early and have not left. There is no city with a place in the history of the blues comparable to that of New Orleans in the history of jazz. However, Memphis is, quite probably, the most important city in the development of the blues and its offspring. The tradition is still alive in Memphis, whether in the country blues of 107-year-old guitarist Nathan Beauregard or in the best-selling soul music of young singer-composer Isaac Hayes. 

Memphis is a few miles north of the Mississippi state line. The city, which sits on bluffs on the east bank of the Mississippi River, is the northern limit and major urban center of the Mississippi Delta, a 200-mile-long area of rich lowland lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The cotton plantations and farming towns of the Delta were a major source—perhaps the source—of the country blues, a music with its roots in the work songs and field hollers of the slaves but with a variety of other influences. W. C. Handy first heard the blues in 1903, in the Delta. 

After the Civil War, freed slaves began moving north to Memphis. The city, like other river towns, became a free-wheeling center of entertainment and there was work for musicians along Beale Street, the center of the black district, and in the outlying roadhouses.

In 1912, Handy, living in Memphis, published "The Memphis Blues," the first of 60-odd blues credited to the well-educated bandleader. By then, Memphis was the focus of a rich strain of music growing from the cross-fertilization of the primitive country-blues men and the trained band musicians. 

Bukka White

Bukka White said, "There's a lot of guys stuck behind these bushes you don't know about." He was talking to Bill Barth, a 27-year-old former New Yorker who came to Memphis five years ago. Barth had just told White that he was going to Brownsville, Tenn., to talk to an old country blues man a friend had told him about. Barth is a musician and blues scholar, one of a very small number of enthusiasts who spend their time poking into bushes to see if there are any blues musicians behind them. A lot of good ones made one record in the 1920s, and have not been heard from since. 

White, 60, was himself recorded by the pioneer blues scholars John and Alan Lomax. They traveled through the south in the 1930s and early 1940s, lugging several hundred pounds of recording equipment with them. In the last decade, after 15 or 20 years of being pretty much ignored, blues men such as White and his neighbor, Furry Lewis, have come in contact with a new generation of blues enthusiasts. Among them is Barth, who in 1966 got White, Lewis and a bunch of other musicians together for the first annual Memphis Country Blues Festival. The fourth festival was held last year. Although the reviews have been good, and National Educational Television sent a crew down last year to film it, the festival is in wobbly financial condition. Barth is going to hold it again this summer, but he is not quite sure when. He is looking for backers. 

Bill Barth & John Fahey

Brownsville is about an hour's drive east of Memphis. It is the home territory of John Estes, one of the best-known of the remaining country blues men. Barth stopped just outside of town to pick up a friend, a girl who had heard a man named John Jones play guitar and asked Barth to come down and listen to him. They found Jones in a weathered, three-room house west of town. At first, he was reticent about playing, but Barth, who is an excellent guitarist, did some traditional finger-picking for him, and Jones warmed up. He was rusty but good and Barth asked him to practice and to come play in the festival. 

Bill Barth came to Brownsville, Tenn., to hear John Jones play blues guitar, and record him. Jones, who had a small tape recorder, decided he wanted a tape of Barth's playing (above). At left, the musical hub of old Memphis, Fourth and Beale Streets. The old Midway club is a liquor store now and the vacant building across Beale used to be Joe Lafunzo's bar, a gathering place for musicians. 

Most records today are assembled from bits and pieces — a horn here, a vocal there — recorded at different times, but at Stax, the song generally is recorded as it would be performed. In these photos, singer Rufus Thomas, whose daughter Carla is a well-known soul singer also, works on his latest single, "All About Mary." The band is the Bar-trays, with Rufus's son, Marvell, added on piano, and engineer, Bobby Manuel. 

In the early 1950s, after a long lull, the music started pouring out of Memphis again. This time, white boys such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins took the urban blues and its commercial cousin, rhythm and blues, added a hillbilly twang and ended up with Memphis rock 'n' roll. The city began to grow again as a music center. Lately, the Chamber of Commerce has begun, in a small way, to promote the Memphis sound. It claims that Memphis studios and performers do about $100,000,000 worth of business a year. The Memphis music industry ranks fourth, behind New York, Los Angeles and Nashville. Presley still comes to Memphis to record and so does Johnny Cash, but recently the strongest force has been soul music. 

Memphis soul music is the standard mix of rhythm, blues and gospel, but the city's studio musicians add an easy, natural country feeling. 

The most successful record company in Memphis is Stax/Volt, founded about 10 years ago by a Tennessee farm boy, Jim Stewart. There is racial integration throughout the company, from the front office to the recording studio, where the house band, Booker T and the MGs, has two white and two black members. 

Until he died in an airplane crash in 1967, young Otis Redding was the major figure at Stax. The singer's records still sell steadily, along with those of other Stax performers such as Albert King, Johnnie Taylor and the Staple Singers. Recently, a young song writer named Isaac Hayes cut his first album at Stax, called "Hot Buttered Soul," and it was a best seller. If there is to be a successor to Redding at Stax, it probably will be Hayes. 

Interview with our most recent MZMF liaison Yamit Hagar

I am very happy to welcome Yamit Hagar as the newest liaison to the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund.  She has been doing good work in Israel on behalf of the Blues and we look forward to many other fruitful collaborations in the future. Below is brief interview from earlier this year...

Bringin' Home the Blues: An Interview with Yamit Hagar, founder of the Tel Aviv Blues Festival 

By Jennifer Greenberg - January 2, 2017

40 performances, 20 clubs, 2 days, 1 woman’s dream.

After just two short years, the Tel Aviv Blues Festival will kick off the New Year with its 4thedition, as Yamit Hagar satisfies our ABCs: acoustic blues cravings. Find out what drove the computer-geek-turned-blues-enthusiast to become the musical mastermind behind Israel’s one and only blues festival.

hat inspired you to start this project?

It began in 2012, when I invited Robert Belfour to perform at Barby. One thousand people came and another thousand wanted to, but we were sold out, so we had another show. It kept on growing from there.

You mentioned Barby…do all the shows happen there?

Not at all. We have shows in gardens, cafés, cinemas, houses, and clubs like Bar Giyora, Mike’s Place, Hoodna, Bascula…scattered all across Tel Aviv.

How did you get into the blues?

I was working in computers for eighteen years, then I heard Mississippi Fred McDowell on the radio and for that whole weekend, I was hooked. By Sunday, it was obvious what I had to do. I changed my career path right then and there.

And do you play any instruments?

Nope, not one.

Is this something you’d pursue someday?

I don’t think so. So many people are playing the ‘right’ stuff. I wouldn’t want to interfere.

So it’s more about promoting blues in Israel than playing it?

And enjoying it.

That’s a must. And how about the festival planning process? Any challenges?

We’re trying to do it biannually: a summer festival for electric blues and a winter festival for acoustic. The thing is, unlike jazz, which has festivals year-round, we only have one, so we can’t waste a minute. That’s why we’re already into our fourth season.

What do you find the effects to be of acoustic over electric?

I’m a traditionalist. If I could choose, I’d pick acoustic every time. Sometimes, I believe I was born in the wrong era, but then again, somebody has to keep two decades of music alive – Eli and the Chocolate Factory attest to this beautifully with their Louis Armstrong tribute. I believe blues traditions will never change, just like in Israel: modernists may exist, but tradition is never lost.

It seems that atmosphere is key to the festival’s success too.

It is. I spend the entire time hopping from garden to house party to club. Every venue is a new experience…I love it! We also give away T-shirts to wear on site.

Let’s be honest, free T-shirts are the best part—

And the free shows, guitar and tickets to the Mississippi Juke Joint Festival – which I’m guilty of attending annually.

What is the Israeli blues scene like in contrast?

In the last few years, the vibe has changed. Some musicians are performing in Hebrew, some in English, some are playing cover songs, but in general, there is more support from the media, which helps boost the scene.

And this is mostly in Tel Aviv?

No, no. I know incredible blues musicians up north and down south. We simply had to find one city to bring everyone together and Tel Aviv was centrally located.

How’s the local talent this year?

Out of 40 shows, we’ve got 38 local musicians…so you tell me.

Is there anything that sets this edition apart?

The Cinematheque is hosting a film & lecture series with journalist Sharon Kantor, and will even be screening a blues reality TV show, which I’m very excited for.

Any closing remarks?

Come to the festival. See all the shows, explore, remember that it happens twice a year…just come. That’s all. Because once you’re exposed to live blues, there’s no going back.