Motor City Ain't Burnin No More

By Laurel Hughes - Clarion-Ledger - 1986 

Mississippi has, of all 50 states, been one of the half dozen leading contributors to the main currents of American music. The blues of African Americans "embraces several side streams boogie-woogie, stomps, ragtime, gospel, spirituals, rock and roll, and barrelhouse, but it may be broadly categorized as blues."  The music depicts black America, and most masters of the rhythm are blacks or are devotees of the "black sound," a powerful channel of musical expression. The "rhythm and blues" label for years applied to a musical underground that was spoken of, scornfully by some, as "race music," but its insistent beat broke out in the late 40s and early 50s, taking the air waves by storm.

TWIN BREAKOUT

The public as a whole curiously enough, became aware of the blues about the same time that country music surged into the national consciousness: and both have deeply influenced the popular music of the last two decades. In the mid-50s, they met and produced a hybrid called rock and roll which charged American music with an electricity it had not previously known. While Elvis Presley represented the white side of the fashion, two Mississippi natives named Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker embodied the black side. Other names prominent in the advance of the blues are such Mississippi born or reared artists as Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, B.B. King, Sonny Boy Williamson, Joe Turner, Bill Walter Horton, Mississippi Joe Callicott, Johnny Young, Furry Lewis, Booker T. Washington White (who performed as Bukka White), Son House, Skip James, Ike Turner, and still more.

DELTA FOUNTAINHEAD

Several of the artists came from the Mississippi Delta which has led to the claim by some blues buffs that within a 50-mile radius of Cleveland came more blues stars than from the remainder of the United States. While this has not been specifically reunited, the record does show that a number came from other sections of the state. A most prominent artist, John Lee Hooker came from the Delta. John Lee Hooker was the son of' sharecroppers, an occupation that prized children as an economic boon in unpaid labor.  There were 13 children in Hooker's family. Hooker's stepfather was William Moore. a blues guitarist himself and widely known in the Delta region. It was from him that John Lee learned the guitar.

BLURRED BY TALES

Hooker's personal history is blurred by the legends and stories that grow around noted individuals, particularly those with a past that lends itself to romanticism. Hooker's first attempts at music were characterized by two stories — one concerns Hooker's grandfather teaching him to pick melodies on strips of inner tube nailed to the barn door at various tensions and one about his own homemade instrument made under the direction of his father. Whatever were his first encounters with music, Hooker developed his own rhythmic complexity countered by simple harmony.

At 14, John Lee began playing for country suppers and fish fries. Hooker ran away to Memphis and the famous Beale Street where he obtained a job selling candy at a theatre. His concerned parents soon found him and took him home; Hooker made frequent escapes, however, and was soon allowed to reside in Memphis.

GOSPEL STRAIN

Coming from a religious background. he sang gospel with a Baptist group in Memphis and worked in a factory. From the time he left Memphis to escape the deeply engrained and resilient forms of racism prevalent in the Jim Crow South, Hooker was a drifter, working in various factories during World War II. The new friends he found in Detroit encouraged him to pursue his musical career again and soon local clubs began featuring him at after-hours sessions. Some clubs gave him work on a regular basis, which opened the door for him to make his first recordings.

Delta Blues Fest 1978

Original 1978 Delta Blues Festival Poster

Remembering Furry Lewis in 1981

 Ernest Herndon - September 21, 1981

[Editor's note: In this personal recollection, Ernest Herndon pays tribute to pioneer blues guitarist and singer Furry Lewis of Memphis.] 

MEMPHIS — Furry Lewis died this month, and the tradition of the blues has lost a major force. Furry was up in years, in poor health, with a wooden leg, and he died after lapsing into a coma following a heart attack. But he was well-known among Memphians and among aficionados of the blues as one of the founding fathers of the Beale Street sound. Furry started out, he used to say, with a cigar box and broom handle for a guitar. By the time he was in his 80s, which was when I knew him, he played an old six-string with frequent use of the bottleneck, which he developed to a high art. A so-called bottleneck is actually a steel cylinder which fits around a finger and is slid up and down the strings for a whining, haunting effect. When used poorly it has been said to resemble cats fighting. But I never heard Furry use it poorly.

HE LIVED in a small house in one of the poorer parts of town, not far from downtown Memphis. Despite the fact that he made a number of albums and even had a part in a Burt Reynolds movie, Furry, like most master bluesmen, never accumulated much money. I have heard tales that such a state resulted from greedy and dishonest managers who gobbled much of the profits — but I really can't say. [Then let me chime in. The truth is often obscured by the impetus to ignore racial segregation, it's pernicious effects that continues to linger into the late twentieth century, and the benefits of white privilege. By disavowing white privilege, white America can view itself as the victim of such initiatives to bring about equality as affirmative action. The same can be said about the "greedy and dishonest manager." By placing the onus on one unknown and evil individual, blues pilgrims blinded themselves to the larger problems of white society and it's long-term effects on the financial status of African Americans. Editor's note]

We used to go to Furry's house on cold winter evenings. I would carry my guitar in hopes of learning a few techniques from a master of that instrument. The tradition was to bring Furry a quart of beer or pint of whiskey — he liked Jack Daniels. He'd say, "Go get us some glasses in there in the kitchen and pour us a little." Furry would be propped up in bed, his wooden leg leaning against a chair. I would hand him the whiskey and then, after chatting a few minutes, he'd ask for his guitar.

CHANCES ARE, if Furry were alive now he wouldn't remember me. I suspect I was one of many pilgrims who came irregularly to see this master of the blues, to sit at his feet, as it were, and listen to him strum and sing "John Henry," "Going to Brownsville," and "My Dog Blue."  His version of "St. Louis Blues" remains perhaps the most chillingly beautiful versions of that classic I have ever heard. He played it slow, sliding out the graceful notes with his bottleneck.

Summer 1983

"I hate to see that rising sun go down," he would sing. I'd sit in the chair across from his bed and listen, maybe strumming an uncertain backup to his lilting bottleneck licks. Then he might ask me to play. I watched his bottleneck style closely, and I practiced it myself at home until I could match the notes on some of his easier songs. Then one day he gave me a great honor when he said, "Say, that boy's pretty good."

OLD FURRY had a lot of friends. He was soft-spoken in a gentle manner. He knew the blues. And he knew how to sing them and play them.  I read that at his funeral several hundred persons attended. I didn't make it, but maybe tonight sit down and play the "St. Louis" blues and think about him for a while.

Sid Selvidge and Arne Brogger were two of the contributors and music lovers who funded both the upright marker and the smaller footer in the summer of 1983. The marker remains atop his grave. In 2016, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund marked another grave inside the cemetery and straightened the thick marker of Furry Lewis.

 

The Death of Virginia Travis-Robert Johnson’s Wife

Of all the events in Robert Johnson’s short life the one that might have had the most impact may have been the death of his young wife, Virginia. Robert and Virginia Travis were married in Penton, Mississippi, on February 17, 1929. They lied on their marriage record, Robert claiming he was 21 and Virginia stating she was 18, when he was really 17 and she was only 14. Johnson had already been a performer before getting married, but apparently, he loved his young wife enough to put his music playing on hold and try family life and farming, an occupation from which he had always run. 

The young couple moved to a farm in Bolivar County, Mississippi, where Johnson’s older step-sister Bessie and her husband, Granville Hines, were living. There the couple lived for over a year until a pregnant Virginia decided to leave Robert and the farm to have her baby in her family’s care in Penton. Virginia died in childbirth at two a.m. on Thursday April 10, 1930, without Robert at her side. G. M. Shaw of Robinsonville listed her cause of death as “acute nephritis [child birth], eclamsia [ sic ].” She and her baby were buried shortly thereafter in Dark Corner Cemetery. 

The Death Certificate of Virginia (Travers) Johnson
Courtesy of Chatmon family researcher Ed Payne

Johnson scholars have noted that although Virginia died on April 10, the April 11, 1930, census for Beat 3, Bolivar County, Mississippi, listed Virginia as still living with Robert. Whoever provided the census taker with that information did not know that Virginia had died the day before. There is reason to believe the information was not provided by Robert Johnson, but rather by a neighbor or his step-sister Bessie (one did not have to be present for an enumerator to account to list data). With Virginia gone to Penton, Robert may have taken the opportunity to do some guitar playing, working his way up Highway 1 to what he expected would be his wife and newborn child. This speculation is given additional fuel by the stories claiming that when Robert arrived at Penton with guitar in hand, Virginia’s family and the community blamed him for her death because he had been out “playing the devil’s music.” 

He may have taken their claims to heart. Whatever the case, after Virginia’s death Robert Johnson embarked on a life of travel, womanizing, drinking, and music. 

But exactly where was Virginia when she died, and where was she buried? 

Just where is Dark Corner Cemetery? 

Attempts to find any record of Jesse or Mattie Travis, Virginia’s father and mother as listed on her death certificate, have thus far come up empty. So did Virginia go to her parents’ home to have her baby, or did she head to some other location? Another 1930 census record, this one from Monday, April 7, provides the answer: Virginia was staying on a cotton plantation in Penton with her grandmother, Lula Thomas, along with five of Thomas’ other grandchildren. Her parents may not even have been with her when she died. The April 7 census record is the last formal acknowledgment of Virginia while she was still living. No one knew that she and her unborn child would be dead in less than 72 hours. And Robert Johnson had not yet arrived in Penton. One has little success if one tries to find any historical records of Dark Corner Cemetery in Mississippi, but the director of the Tunica Museum located an undertaker in Tunica who recalled that Dark Corner Cemetery was the previous name of the small cemetery just behind the current Rising Sun Missionary Baptist Church on Green River Road, off Old Highway 61 in Penton, just over the Tunica/DeSoto County line. Although her grave marker, if one ever existed, is either gone or overgrown, here rests Virginia Johnson, Robert’s wife, and their only child.

The Rising Sun MB Church is listed as another name in local cemetery records as well as on the below map.  It was apparently called "Dalkhorn Church" by someone at some point, and the grave of Virginia Travis is actually sitting unmarked in Dalkhorn Cemetery.