Tommy Johnson's Grave: Ode to Singer Took Years of Wrangling

By Therese Apel – (Jackson, MS) Clarion Ledger – February 5 & 7, 2013.

Click HERE for the follow-up article showing it was not vandalism

The 2001 Dedication at the Railroad Park

in Crystal Springs, Mississippi

The niece of a Mississippi blues legend was heartbroken Sunday morning to find the marker she and others had fought since 2001 to have erected for her uncle had been vandalized. Vera Collins Johnson's uncle is Tommy Johnson, a blues leg-end from Crystal Springs who was portrayed in the movie "0 Brother Where Art Thou." His family commissioned the headstone, and the nonprofit Mount Zion Memorial Fund paid for it via a grant from singer Bonnie Raitt. "They tried to take the headstone completely off the grave. It was screwed down, and it was kind of difficult to take off," she said. The vandals left tools and a two-by-four, but only after smashing parts of the headstone when they couldn't pull it up. "We didn't touch anything. There was one part that had his face, his picture on it, and they broke that into pieces," she said. "It was something that was deliberately done. They didn't mess with the rest of the graves." Collins believes the destruction is racially motivated. "The only thing I would have to say is that I thought Crystal Springs had outgrown their old tricks, and this kind of thing has been going on since I was a girl," she said. "This is an act of nothing but hatred."

"I thought Crystal Springs had outgrown their old tricks,” hurled Vera Johnson Collins.  “This is an act of nothing but hatred." Her statement in the wake of the incident certainly seemed to ring true in the one-time safe haven of the MWK, and a recent incident of unabashed racism shown by the congregants of Crystal Springs Baptist Church did little to dispel the bold claims of Collins.

Collins said she waited four hours by her uncle's grave for the Sheriff's Department to come out and take a report. No one ever came. Someone at the sheriff's department told her they were very busy, she said. Copiah County had three fatal accidents within 24 hours between Saturday and Sunday. "They could have come and just taken a report," she said. Copiah County Sheriff's Department officials said a deputy was unable to locate the graveyard on Sunday and that they are looking into the incident.

Johnson's headstone was dedicated at a public ceremony in Crystal Springs on Oct. 20, 2001, but it wasn't until last year that Copiah County was able [magically, or perhaps due to some act of God, apparently] to create an access road to the cemetery.

"I'm very weary of this. We've been doing this for so long. I've had to comfort Vera, who was weeping, understandably," said Skip Henderson, the director of the Mount Zion Memorial Fund. "I have to go back to Bonnie Raitt now; she's going to be very upset." [No one was too upset really except for one man from West Virginia who shamelessly pushed the desecration myth and dubiously left crucial pieces of evidence to the contrary out of accounts on his once very active blog, The Pomeroy Jazz & Blues Society.]

The Warm Springs Cemetery sits back in a rural area of Copiah County. It used to be next to the Warm Springs Methodist Church, which burned down in the 1970s. After the road was abandoned for a while, it became the property of the landowners.

A lot of politics and legal wrangling [Interviews with all involved and a lot of serious research, the solicitation of many different attorneys before finding one willing to work pro-bono, and the filing of a single, deliberate and strategic lawsuit against private landowners] finally restored the road to the county, said District 5 Supervisor Jimmy Phillips.

"This took several years. I worked on it for almost 10 years," he said, adding that the process sped up when Ole Miss doctoral fellow [DeWayne] Moore got involved a little over a year ago.

"I told him, 'All I want you to do is get me a right-of-way to that property, and I will build you a road,"' Phillips said. "As soon as he got the right-of-way, we built the road. It took up the biggest part of the summer." [We met with the County Board of Supervisors in October 2011, and the cemetery access road had not been added to the E-911 map of county roads at the time of the incident].

Moore said he worked with the Board of Supervisors to secure an easement. The matter was finally settled out of court after more than 10 years, Moore said. "One of the things I wanted to do was work with them and see what their actual argument was for why they couldn't protect a site that was recognized by Mississippi Department of Archives and History," he said.

According to Phillips and Collins, Moore basically saved the project.

It has only been within the last few years that Copiah County officials have known the historical gold mine they sit on, Phillips said. "We all grew up in this county and didn't know that much about blues." Former Cultural Affairs director Janet Schriver "sat us down, and we all went to blues school," Phillips said.

"Most of the people in this area don't understand the importance of the blues in Copiah County. We've got Tommy Johnson, and we also have Robert Johnson." Tommy Johnson's best-known songs are "Canned Heat Blues," "Big Road Blues" and "Maggie Campbell Blues." A recording artist for Victor and Paramount Records, he was born in 1896 in Terry and died in 1956. Phillips said he doesn't know much about the vandalism, but it made him angry. "I hope they find out who it is, and I don't care who it is and if they are white, black, green or purple," he said. "I hope they burn their butts. It's wrong to desecrate a grave." 

Tommy Johnson: “Time, Not Vandals, Likely Culprit, Investigator Says”

By Therese Apel – (Jackson, MS) Clarion Ledger – February 7, 2013.


Damage to Copiah County blues legend Tommy Johnson's tombstone appears to have happened when the marker fell over instead of as the result of vandalism, sheriff's department officials say, but family members say missing fencing equipment leads them to another conclusion.

Vera Johnson Collins, who found her uncle's 500 pound headstone broken in pieces when she showed up Sunday at the rural graveyard where he is buried, said Wednesday that almost $2,000 worth of materials to build a wrought-iron fence around the grave were taken over the weekend as well.

"All this happened between Friday and Sunday," she said. The Warm Springs Cemetery sits on a county road that has been newly re-opened. When Collins found the headstone broken Sunday morning, she called the sheriff's department. Officials said because the road is not on E-911 maps yet, a deputy could not find the location.

The cemetery is at the site of the old Warm Springs Methodist Church, which burned in the 1970s. It was given a certificate of historical recognition in 2001, said William Thompson of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Sharing the graveyard with the celebrated musician is another kind of hero, his nephew, PFC B.W. Johnson, a World War II veteran who died in 1967 at the age of 45. Another Tommy Johnson and his wife Inez are there as well. Collins said those were her great-great-grandparents. In another grave lies Sally, a midwife who delivered over 90 babies in her community, Collins said.

Tommy Johnson's headstone stands roughly five feet tall, is more than two feet wide and about four inches thick. It is not attached to the ground anymore, and the screws that bolted it in place at one time are broken. Sheriff's department investigator Milton Twiner said authorities recovered the screws. One was completely bent down, he said, and the other was broken off even with the slab.
However the stone went down and someone took the time to put the bottom part back up. Someone...

A photo taken by Collins on Sunday shows a pick or a screwdriver of some kind wedged beneath the stone. On Wednesday, the same tool was there, and it kept the headstone from rocking forward. Removing it made the stone unstable. Collins said she doesn't believe the stone was off its pins on Sunday. She said she pushed on it with a stick and that it didn't budge. Twiner said while he can't rule out the headstone being pushed over, it doesn't look like it was hit with anything.

"At this point, I believe that the stone fell over. There's no indication that the stone was beat or hit with a hammer when you look around it. I believe it fell on the two-by-four and it broke the top off it," Twiner said. Twiner points to equilateral marks on each side of the front of the headstone that seem to be at about the same spot where the stone would have hit the piece of lumber if the tombstone had fallen on it. A crack can be seen coming from one of the two marks. "This cemetery is not sitting beside the road where you can see it or anybody would see it to create any drama about it, for lack of a better word," Twiner said. William Thompson, a cemetery expert who works with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, said in his experience working with abandoned cemeteries, headstones will turn over if land shifts. If a tombstone isn't set well when placed, over time gravity can take its course. "It would take more than just a year, I would imagine, for a headstone of that size to just fall over," said Thompson. "But if you bump into it and it falls over, that force would be enough to crack or break it."

Bill Barth: Carpetbagging Savior of the Blues

Bill Barth was a musician, concert promoter, and entrepreneur, who has been described by some as "underrated" and misunderstood even among his own coterie of friends and collaborators. He may be best known for acting on information forwarded by record collector Gayle Dean Wardlow (obtained from musician Ishmon Bracey) and tracking down 1930s blues artist Skip James.

Barth wrote about his experience locating Nathan Beauregard in the 1960s.

He is also mentioned in this article by Stanley Booth about the Memphis Country Blues Festival from 1966-1970.  Click HERE

Barth was a central reason that it came from Memphis.  He co-founded the Blues Society too.

Skip Henderson had provided almost every single original concept for the city of Clarksdale's eventual blues tourist landscape, but he wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper that put him on the wrong side of the new library director, Ron Gorsegner, who, along with the library board, took steps to take control of the tourism industry from the visionary. He was lucky that Bill Barth and Tim "The Royal Truth" Kendall--who lives near that dread place known as Paganhill, bought the Crossroads Bar from him as well.

Kendall corrected an often reported error about the re-discovery Skip James in the 2000s. He emailed Ed Denson not long after Barth died to confirm that Denson only engineered the early re-recordings of Skip James with Fahey and was involved finding Bukka White. He also engineered stuff for Fahey's Takhoma label and managed Country Joe and The Fish. Denson, however, denied having anything to do with finding Skip James in Tunica.]

Bill Barth, John Fahey, and Henry Vestine, of the band Canned Heat, found him posted up in a Tunica, Mississippi hospital in 1964. After paying his supposedly modest medical bill, the trio drove the rediscovered legend to the Newport Jazz Festival, where his surprise appearance delighted the audience and set in motion the second and perhaps even more influential musical career of Skip James.

The Grave of a Proprieter for the Early Blues

Calvary Cemetery, Memphis, Tennessee