Amazing Minnie Artwork

Minnie's Amazing Headstone Dedication Narrative

Interview with Mississippi Fred McDowell

By Barry Foster, an undergraduate at Bowling Green University in 1971 in the Journal of Popular Culture 5:2 (1971).

Click HERE to read about our dedication of his headstone

During the current blues revival, there have been certain traditional bluesmen to rise to the forefront. Mississippi Fred McDowell is one of them. Fred is the innovator of the "slide" or "bottleneck" guitar, and has played and visited with such current superstars as Johnny Winter and The Rolling Stones. 

BF: How long have you been playing the blues? 

FM: Well, I'll tell you, off and on—I started when I was a boy about 14 years old. After I learned how a little bit, I quit, you unnerstand, because I wasn't interested in no guitar much no how. So I quit . . . my mother she asked me to quit playing because she wanted me to go to church, you unnerstand. So I quit playin, and when I got started back again I was just about grown, you see, and—it's about six years ago 'fore I got more interested in a guitar than I was then, you unnderstand, see, 'cause there have never been no-body down through my home—you sec my home is in—you see everbody calls me Mississippi Fred McDowell, but my home is in Tennessee. Rossford, Tennessee where I was born and raised. But after my mother passed, well I have a sister lives in Mississippi, you see, and she and I stay close together that's why Pm down there now, you unncrstand. I likes it okay, it's good. I like that better than I do my own home, now.

BF: How did you develop the "bottleneck guitar"? 

FM: How I come by that, I was a small boy—my uncle was a guitar player and he played with a beef-bone not a bottleneck —a little round bone come out of a steak. He filed it real smooth and he played with it on this finger (pointing to his pinkie), sec I play it with my ring finger and that's why I said if I ever learn to play the guitar that's what I'm going to get me, a bone. But I didn' get a bone, I started out learnin' how to play with a pocketknife. Well, you see you can't make a chord with a pocketknife—see, you got to hold it this way (between his ring and small finger). When you're playin' the guitar—see you ain't got no action with these fingers here at all (pointing to his first two fingers), you see. So I discovered that bottleneck, an' made it myself.

BF: What do you think of people who have modified the "bottle-neck" guitar style, say like Johnny Winter? 

FM: Well, I tell you, nothin' but it's good. See, Johnny Winter, me and him plays together a lot, and he really can use it and also J. B. Hutto, Muddy—but they all don' play with a bottleneck, they play it with a bar, you see. But it sounds good to me, I like all.music. I don' care who's playin' it, just like those words I put on "I Don't Play No Rock'n' Roll," see a lot of people think just because I play blues that I don' like rock'n'- roll but it's a mistake. You see—that's just a good hit for me on my album, you understand, 'cause I like all music, I don' care who's playin' it. Whatever you play, you feel it and if it sound good to you, it sound good to me too, you understand. That's the way that goes.

BF: Then you like the electric things that BB King has been doing. 

FM: Sure, sure yeah. You see, I used to play acoustic all the time 'till about three years ago.

BF: Do you write most of the songs you do, or are they traditional blues handed down, or exactly what?

FM: I don't write any songs. I makes my own words—just a sound to my music, I don't write no songs. 

BF: So once you've done them, they're gone. Like the things you did tonight we'll probably never hear again. 

FM: Who won' hear it again? Well, here, you know, when you play music, man—this is the way I play, I play what I feel. See, I sing these different words with feelin' to them 'cause I feel them myself because of this—see, you come up, probably you don' know what a hard time is, see I do. See, you get to thinkin' how you been used, you unnerstand, now that's where the blues come from. Now the blues, where it first started from, when I was comin' up as a boy they didn' call what we's singin' now the blues, you know what they call it? They call it the reel, well they change that name from the reel, to the blue, that's what that is. 

BF: Do you think that a lot of the feeling is gone out of music? 

                 Copyright Gary Tennant 

FM: No, it's comin' back in. You take like four years ago, and I'm from Mississippi, see, I live about 40 miles on this side of Oxford, but I played at Ole Miss at the university there about every other month, and it's gettin' popular there. See, they don' care nothin"bout the rock'n'roll, they call me an' say we'll get you on such and such a night. They done fell in love with the blues, they changed from what they were. And they seem to enjoy it better. 

BF: Do you think the blues has had much of an effect on rock music? 

FM: Yeah, it's taken a big turn. That's correct. That's true. Because they're gonna pay more attention, and they're gonna listen more to it than they did when rock was first startin' out. Still, you're always gonna find somebody who likes rock-'n'roll. Because, you know why? Because its a fast piece, and it's a fast dancin' piece and you can do more things with it. All of it's good, hell, I like it all. 

BF: Do you think the volume of rock, in decibels, has hurt it at all? 

FM: Yeah, 'cause you see, last year, I was in Ann Arbor, I came from Toronto with John—I went up with him in the bus, an' come back in the car with him. Well that Sunday there's a rock festival, a blues festival over there where they give it the year before last. (At this point, Fred relates a story about a killing at the festival and expresses the feeling that this had a lot to do with the cancellation of another Ann Arbor Blues Festival) 

BF: Well there are going to be some blues festivals this summer somewhere aren't there? 

FM: But not there (Ann Arbor). I don' know, I would tell you yeah-I know we're going to be into soinethin', I don' know what the hell it is, that's week after next in Philadelphia, I don' know what that is. Then we're supposed to be in Washington, D.C., I know that's a blues festival, goin' to hold it there in that hotel where they had it last year you unnerstand. 

BF: Since the last Ann Arbor Blues festival, a lot of the traditional blues men have passed on, do you see this as an end to tradi-tional blues, or will there be people to carry it on? 

FM: Yeah, I'll tell you, yeah because they likes it, they're just like me, and I don't think they're gonna change (talking about J. P. Hutto, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, etc.). 

BF: Do you see any difference in Chicago blues and urban blues? 

FM: Yeah, because I'll tell you, see, I play jus' a straight thing, but they get so many different beats, sorta halfway into rock and halfway into blues. An', you see, it's not their own tune, now you take Elmore James—everybody plays blues in Chi-cago, they got his lick in there, they got his run. Now they change the words, an' they change .the beat, but that's still his sound, you see. An' you can't find now, you can't find a one, —'cause I been with him, an' I've traveled with him in Germany and I've traveled with him everywhere, on the busses, and they have tried it and they've tried to play it but they can't do it. 'Cause they don't know how the guitar's tuned. 

BF: With your new album on Capitol, and Columbia's releases of old blues material, do you see a coming traditional blues re-vival? 

FM: On my album "I Do Not Play No Rock'n'Roll," that cat that plays bass . . well that white boy, that's the first time lie ever saw me, and the first time I ever saw him, he's backin' me on that bass—and he's good. 'Cause he can play any kind of thing that you want to hear, and he knows exactly what beat to get, and what to play. 

BF: Did you know Bessie Smith, or did you ever hear her sing? 

FM: No, I heard her, but not in person. I ain't gonna tell no lies and say yeah, I know her—no I don' know her. 'Cause I was small when Bessie—See, Bessie was singin' with W. C. Handy an' them at that time you see, an' I wasn' nothin' but a little boy. But I can remember this, see, W. C. Handy had a home band, he had a few guitar players with him you unnerstand, that played with the band, and they used to run a train that they called "The Excursion," that was on the Fourth of July, that's for the white people, see, you'd have a picnic on the Fourth day of July where they'd get them bands, from Mem. phis, and they'd get that train to bring trainloads of people to Rossford, Tennessee—that's my home, and we'd slip down there stand around there and sit on the fence—you couldn't go over there. 

BF: How do you feel about people that have taken the blues and covered it with white artists and studio musicians?

FM: Well, some of them have been sold for a lot more money, but you take like last year, you take Johnny Winter, see Johnny has a good manager, and Johnny had stuff that some of the people, they'd really like it, you unnerstand. Well, he come in to a good pile of money. Well everybody at that festival, they didn' pay him much attention 'cause they didn' like what he did. Well hell, they was wrong. They were tellin' me, "You know who should have had that money? Y'all, you an' Muddy an' them, Of s'posed to have it." No, I didn' neither. If we shoulda had it, we woulda got it through by our manager And if people—like he made that hit, that was his hit, not out one you see. But they couldn't see it that way, they wouldn't have much to do with him. Me and him, we went aroun' an' got drunk—damn 'em, he had that money in his pocket. 

BF: Who are your favorite blues artists, that is, who has most in-fluenced your sound? 

FM: I like BB, I like Lightnin', I like the 'Wolf, I like all of them, really. 

BF: It must be nice to play a club where you`know that your audience really knows the blues. 

FM: Yeah! You know one thing? Ever since I've been here, they listenin', but a lot of time, you got to talk to people, and get them to unnerstan' what you doin'. Now I have been that-a-way, see, I'd get good applause, but they just didn't unnerstan' what the blues was all about until I stopped and talked to them. Tell that the words mean this, and to listen at the words and listen at the guitar, and every word that I said. Then I'd play one or two more pieces, you could tell the difference, they'd start gettin' with the music, 'cause they'd be gettin' to unnerstan' what you doin'. Now you hear me sing, that guitar will say every word I sing, see I learned how to play like that. I can't play a guitar without singin' to it. That's just my way you unnerstan', you see. I don't out-play nobody, and I don't try to out-play No-body, 'cause that's nothin' but shit, you sec. When you ask somebody to play with you, and run off and leave them, that just makes them feel bad. I wan' to ask you a question, do you think a white per-son can play the blues as well as a colored person? 

BF: No way. 

FM: You wrong, see, I had this person ask me in Seattle, he said Muddy said that a white person couldn't play the blues like a colored person, but if he can't play the blues like a colored person, what do you want with that harp player with him? That's all he's playin' is the blues, and he got him back there playin' with him. I'm going to tell you this, see, I've done traveled as much as Muddy, and I saw these two brothers, and Muddy or no damn body could have beat them playin' the blues to save your life. I don't give a damn where you come from. See, know music man, and there were two guitar players, and this other boy played this here thing that you lay across your lap. . . . 

BF: A dobro. 

FM: Yeah, boy, that son-of-a-gun would bust your heart with that there thing, those boys behind him with that guitar. Boy if you think they couldn't play the blues—boy, you wrong! tell you and Muddy both that. 

BF: At least I know I'm in good company when I'm wrong.

Juke Joints: Cradle of the Blues

Cradle of the Blues

By Donna St. George

Philadelphia Inquirer March 23, 1991

MERIGOLD, Miss.

The Big Star is a tin-patched roadhouse at the edge of a bean field, a wood-frame one-room juke joint where beer is served in quarts and tissue-paper flowers fill vases on rickety tables. On weekends in the Mississippi Delta, the Big Star beckons across miles of flat farmland.

It’s late on a Friday, the night is cold and the Wesley Jefferson Band is burning up the place. Thirty people are crowded on the dance floor, shoulder to chest to back, shaking and bobbing and swaying. The room is loud and alive. The plywood floor feels ready to collapse.

This is where life's hard edges are eased for an evening in America's poorest countryside. Even if a crop is killed or a town is crumbling, even if people are unemployed and dirt poor, juke joints keep going in the Mississippi Delta. They falter and fold, open and reopen.

Juke joints carry on today much as they have since just after the Civil War, when they were established as a black alternative to white roadhouses. In them, people drank moonshine, rolled dice, danced to music. They were one of the few places a blues artist could play and one of few public places where blacks were treated with dignity in the segregated South.

Juke joints remain a gathering place within small isolated communities, a world maybe 50 people share regularly: more crowded when crops are ripe, more desolate when land is fallow. They are the black equivalent 'of the white honky-took. They are the secular equivalent of the store-front church. And in the birthplace of the blues, they are its cradle.

Even as times change — and some shun juke joints for more sophisticated clubs in bigger towns, where they can hear more rap music and disco — new generations in the Delta continue to find solace in its road-houses of old.

For some, confined by money or miles, that's because there's no choice.

For others, like Jimmy Holmes, it’s because the connection goes deep. ‘

Holmes is a college-educated, second-generation juke-joint owner who for six years taught community-college sociology and biology classes. The Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, 25 miles northwest of Jackson, has been owned by his family since he was born, in 1947. It is a cinderblock roadhouse, painted Olympic blue, with two windows, a bare concrete Moor, a stained pool table, two arcade games and six Formica tables-for-two. Bags of chips and cookies are neatly stacked on shelves behind the bar, near big jars of pigs' feet and pickles.

It's late on a Saturday night as Holmes, in a suede jacket and slacks, talks softly from his seat on a ripped black-vinyl bar stool.

Two men are leaning back in folding chairs beside a room heater made out of a four-foot segment of oil pipeline. Blues are bellowing from a 25 year-old Seeburg jukebox that is lit with 1960s neon moons. One woman is dancing with her image in front of a horizontal mirror on the wall. Several young people are lined up at the bar to hear rap music on a color television.

Judy Holmes, Jimmy's older brother, reminds everybody that his favorite song is No. 115: "Hattie Mae" by Artie "Blues Boy" White. His smile widens when someone pops a quarter in the jukebox and punches his number. Jimmy Holmes says whenever rap music is placed in his jukebox, he makes sure it's replaced by blues.

This is a quiet evening. It's rainy and cold. The place really jumps when the blues are live. Most of the time, that means the performers are Jack Owns, an 85-year-old guitar player, and Bud Spires, 59, a blind harmonica player. They are inseparable old-time bluesmen — as hard to come by on some nights as a good-paying job.

"When they play, you can't hardly get in," enthuses Robert Hicks, 35, a millworker who stops in the Blue Front a couple of times a week and counts himself as one of its best pool-shooters. Jimmy Holmes grew up helping his parents run the road-house; he's operated it since 1970. He may return to teaching in the fall, he says but he'll never leave his juke joint. Now it's part of him.

Some of his customers are loyal regulars of the Blue Front; others stop for a beer on their way out to a fancier club. When someone in town is looking for somebody, they often stop to ask Jimmy Holmes.

"Ninety percent of the people come by some time during the week," says Holmes, a thoughtful man of 43 who is known as "Duck" to his customers.

"People bring in all kinds of problems," he says. "It's almost like a family unit. In a juke joint, almost everyone knows everyone or is related. You could fill up this place right now and there wouldn't be two strangers."

It's a similar sense of belonging that keeps people coming back to the White Rose Cafe in Tutwiler, Miss.

It is a rose-pink stucco roadhouse, marked by a neon Miller sign, in a town that, like many others in the Delta, has been declining for many years. Florence Seawood, 68, a lively woman of firm ideas, has owned the White Rose for 28 years with her husband, Claude.

The Seawoods run an old-time juke joint, with two jukeboxes full of blues. The bar looks like a lunch counter; the mint-green walls are adorned with cardboard beer signs. Business is slower than it used to be, Florence Seawood says. But her customers are loyal, she says as four middle-aged friends laugh and talk at the table beside her, crunched beer cans piled before them like a centerpiece.

Suddenly inspired, one of them, Bill Goss, 45, takes Seawood's hand.

Under yellow, blue and red crepe-paper streamers, across the linoleum floor, Goss and Seawood twist and sway to Clarence Carter's "Dance to the Blues." By the time the song is over, six other people have joined them.

"She's the one that taught me how to dance," Goss gushes as everyone in the White Rose applauds. "I've been coming here for five years, and I feel like I'm at home."

Delta life has long found expression in its juke houses — through music and art and dance, through love and fighting.

It shows in the color and designs of juke joints, which often include brightly painted reds, yellows and blues; some are adorned with more intricate paintings of women or animals, as was portrayed by Birney Imes in his recent book of photographs, Juke Joint.

Every now and then, expression comes in violence —ginger that erupts in rock-throwing at one juke joint, a beating outside another.

From the early days, though, it was the music of juke joints that most evidently expressed Delta life. Such legendary bluesmen as Robert John-son, Charlie Patton and Muddy Waters played in Delta roadhouses, singing about cotton and catfish, poverty and heartbreak. These days, down-home Delta blues artists are fewer, and the old blues arc less popular among blacks.

But a good blues band still jams a juke joint.

At the Big Star in Merigold, where strings of Christmas lights blink color onto the bare walls, people are applauding loudly.

The Wesley Jefferson Band is in high gear. People are dancing fervent-ly, some from their chairs. Hands are waving through the air, heads nodding. The bare wooden floor is shaking, heaving.

“Play the blues!” one woman screams.

The band veers into the lonesome swoon of "Sweet Sixteen" by B.B. King.

The place is throbbing, but the quiet-mannered lead guitar player is holding a blank gaze above the crowd.  He's in a fix: His wife, from whom he has been separated, has shown up on the same evening as his new girlfriend. One woman is watching him, the other watching her.

Roosevelt Buckner stands across the room, smiling. He's the warm, robust factory worker who owns the juke joint and whom everybody calls "Stool." Most weekend nights, he spins 45s on a record player behind the bar.

"I don't make enough to pay my light bills," he admits in a reflective moment, "but 1 like being here."

Delta Man Sings 'That Ole Blues' And Touched By Spirit Of The Lord

Leon Pinson: Fame Not Elevating Lifestyle, Income

By Janet Pardue - Clarion Ledger - Feb 22, 1976

CLEVELAND — Songs of Jesus and the promised land drifted through the Mississippi Delta more than a century ago. Today, many of those same songs composed by slaves ring through downtown Cleveland when the Rev. Leon Pinson plugs in his electric guitar and "sings with the spirit of the Lord." 

On any Saturday. he might be set up on the sidewalk here, performing traditional spirituals with a gusto that sometimes spreads to passersby. "Every once in a while someone will jump in with me," grins Pinson. He feels "if it ain't got no spirit about it. I just ain't gain' nowhere."

Pinson, with little money or education, has shaped his life around his music. Spinal meningitis as an infant rendered him almost totally blind and crippled. yet he grew up singing spirituals at churches in his hometown of New Albany and at outlying Guntown and Booneville. Now 57, Pinson has his own following in Cleveland, sings on a Sunday morning radio program and twice has represented Mississippi at the Smithsonian Institution's folklife festival. But recognition has done little to elevate Pinson's lifestyle.

Sometimes people donate a little something when he sings, but he says that money barely pays the monthly water bill. And stretching his welfare check from month to month is fairly impossible.

"As soon as you get it. when you start to pay the bills, you don't finish," Pinson worries. "I ain't wan-tin' to be rich. I ain't lookin' to get rich. I just want a living where I can get things when I need them." Pinson waits on the front porch of his four-room rent house behind the Cleveland bus station, He barely can discern the shapes of passing cars.In the muddy yard, two wood-en chairs have been left out in the rain. 

Inside his house on a stormy day, a space heater keeps the living room warm and humid. The walls, floor and furniture, as well as his suit, are blue — Pinson's favorite color. Two roomers share the house with him. but they're out working. Except for an occasional rooster's crow in the distance. it's quiet as Pinson limps across the room to turn on the amplifier.

He settles down finally on the couch with a bright red Gibson guitar on his lap. "My people used to sing a long time ago." Pinson says. "Three brothers used to come to our house and play guitar and fiddle and sing. They used to play that ole blues like their fathers used _ to. So, I got to liking music and got to playing myself." 

Shades of "that ole blues" emerge when Pinson sings spirituals such as "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen- or "I Want To Be at the Meeting. - But the reverend insists it's sacred music, not blues. that he performs. "I don't think there's nothing as stayable as spiritual music. I think that's what God is pleased with." 

When Pinson lived "up in the hills" at New Albany. he was a minister at the Church of God. Upon moving 12 years ago to the Delta. he had to give up the ministry because there's no Church of God here. Helping people find God can be accomplished through his music. Pinson says, because "with so much robbing, killing and shooting these days, it's what we need to get people's minds off all that stuff."

Mississippi slaves had the same idea in the 1820s when they sang spirituals as a mental and spiritual escape from life's hardships, says historian Dr. Bennie Reeves at Jackson State University. Forbidden to communicate with each other in their native African languages. the blacks created the "invisible church in the woods or in the fields and composed spirituals to go with it, says Reeves. They sang about their oppressed state and about hope of something better in another world, he says. Such songs as "Steal Away to Jesus" also played a major role in spreading messages of the under-ground railroad by which slaves could flee bondage. 

The solitary Pinson, singing "Soldiers' Plea- in his blue living room is oblivious to his role in continuing a black folk tradition. Electrified sounds bounce around the room as he launches into "How Great Thou Art."
 

The artist becomes enraptured when he plays. a necessity in effectively spreading the sacred word, he says. When you be singing, if the spirit don't touch you. then you can't reach no one. When people find God. they just shout out loud in church over the songs. It lets you know you're touching people. You know they're feeling the spirit." Pinson says. 

Mostly, the reverend likes to sing well-known spirituals he's picked up over years of listening to tapes and records. A large stereo dominates an entire wall of the room.

Pinson threads a tape player and proudly turns up the volume so the recording of his voice rises now and then above the tape's static. Pinson says he'd like to cut some records as have his favorite groups . the Swan Silvertones, the Harmonizing Four and the Pilgrim Travelers. But he doesn't have the money to finance the project. . Would he like to be famous? "It'd suit me," Pinson says. "I'd get to meet a lot of different people. go places I've never seen and do things I've never done before." Also, there's the money. ain't never worried about if I'm going to get too much."

Blues Most Every Day The Rev. Leon Pinson leads a solitary life dedicated to his music. The Cleveland man no longer preaches and spends much of his time listening to recordings of spirituals. But on Saturdays he plays and sings on sidewalks, drawing crowds in the Delta town.