A One-String Memorial for Lonnie Pitchford

Lonnie Pitchford (Photo: Lauri Lawson)

On October 8th, 2000, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund dedicated the large granite headstone of Lonnie Pitchford at the Newport Baptist Church cemetery in Ebenezer, Mississippi--only a few feet from the headstone of Elmore James. Specially designed with a playable, one-string diddley bow mounted on the side--per the wishes of his family--the funding for the memorial came from John Fogerty and Rooster Blues Records. His death at an early age was a blow to the hearts of many in the Mississippi musical community and the memorial service held on a frosty fall evening was attended by dozens of family, friends, and blues fans.

Bill Steber plays the diddley bow on the marker
© Euphus Ruth 1998

Lonnie Pitchford was born on October 8, 1955, near Lexington, Mississippi. His mother Rosie S. Pitchford had two daughters, Ersine and Brenda, and four more sons named Willie Douglas, Andrew James, Edward Charles and Roosevelt. Raised about five miles outside of Lexington, he made a one-string instrument at the age of five years old. In the liner notes to the only full-length album he ever released, All Around Man, Pitchford talks about his instrument:

"When I was five or six, I would make a one-string guitar upside the wall. I would get me some baling wire or wire from a broom that my Mom had discarded, and some old rusty nails - didn't have new ones - I had to pull them out of the old boards. Then I would pound them into the wall upside the house, wrap the wire at both ends and lay a snuff can under the bottom. Then I'd just go to playing anything that came to mind."

While playing in several bands in his teen years, he learned a host blues songs. He also enjoyed playing in church groups, which he started doing at the age of twelve. In 1971, the fourteen-year-old met folklorist and ethnomusicologist Worth Long, who recognized his talent and booked him to perform at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folk-life. His warm reception solidified the youngster's reputation and position alongside some of the living masters.

Lonnie Pitchford learned his Delta blues from Eugene Powell, of Greenville, who recorded with Bo Carter, of the Mississippi Sheiks. He also learned Delta blues from Robert Junior Lockwood, whose stepfather was Robert Johnson. When Lonnie Pitchford was thirty-six, he toured Australia, Europe, and the United States. Besides singing blues or making records, he was a gifted musical instrument maker and carpenter, alternating between the two occupations, framing houses and playing at blues festivals across the country. Lonnie Pitchford contributed one or more songs to several compilations and movie soundtracks from 1980 until his death.

• All Around Man (Rooster CD R2629) his only solo album
• Living Country Blues USA Vols 7, 9, 10 (1980)
• Roots of Rhythm and Blues: A Tribute to the Robert Johnson Era (CBS 48584)
• Deep Blues (Atlantic 82450-2)
• National Downhome Blues Festival (Southland SCD-21)
• The Harry Smith Connection: A Live Tribute To The Anthology Of American Folk Music (CD SF 40085)
• Played slide guitar on one track of John Mellencamp's album Mr. Happy Go Lucky

© Bill Steber 2009

Where is the Grave of Elizabeth Cotten?

When Elizabeth Cotten was a little girl growing up outside Chapel Hill, N.C., she used to dream about playing a guitar and having crowds of people join her in song.

She lived that dream many times.

Best known as the songwriter of "Freight Train," "Shake Sugaree," "Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie," and other classic country blues, she played at clubs and festivals from New York to Hawaii. She was an active performer well into her 90s, often appearing with her singer/songwriter granddaughter, Johnine Rankin.

Cotten's wit and storytelling skills remained sharp, though her hearing had faded and her voice had grown a bit thin.

In concert, she complained she “can't play like [she] used to," and she warmed up with an old blues guitar progression. Between songs, she pulled the long fingers of one hand through the other, complaining of the cold. But she projected a warmth that drew little children to her and compeled an audience of strangers to sing aloud the songs she taught them.

"0l' Georgia bug, ol' Georgia bug, ol' Georgia bug said so," Cotten sang, watching the crowd. "Sing, son," she prodded as a little boy joined in.

She sang "Freight Train" with a little wide-eyed, red-haired girl she called up out of the audience, then "I'm on My Way to the Promised Land," "Do Lord Remember Me," and "Tell It on the Mountain High."

She ignored the repeated requests for "Shake Sugaree."

In her later years, she left the blues to granddaughter, who sang her own songs, her grandmother's songs, and traditional folk and gospel songs in a rich, ringing voice.

"I don't sing the blues no more unless I have to," Cotten said in her later years. "When I joined a church in Chapel Hill, the deacon said I couldn't play those worldly songs and be a member of the Baptist Church ... so now I play church songs, and it's done me a world of good."

By her own account, Cotten had it hard much of her life. As the youngest child in a family of five, she worked as a domestic for 75 cents a month. She bought her first guitar for $3.75 at age 9, and wrote "Freight Train" two years later. Her parents, two of her brothers, and her sister died when she was young.

She learned to play the guitar by picking out a tune on one string and then adding to the skill. She played left-handed, but with the guitar strung for a right-handed player, so in effect she played upside down. Her rhythmic "Cotton picking" guitar style influenced many other blues and acoustic guitar players. She learned to play the banjo by listening to her older brother and sneaking practice time on his banjo when he was at work.

"He didn't have to show me nothin' 'cause I heard it day and night,” she admitted. "I was always breakin' the strings. I'd play it till the string said pwang, then I'd hang it hack up on the nail and hide under the bed."

Morristown Daily Record, June 30, 1987

After a move to Washington, she went to work for the musical Seeger family. She had been working in a department store when she met Ruth Crawford Seeger, and left to help with housework and care for the young Pete and brother Mike (both became well-known folk singers). She also helped raise her own five grandchildren.

It was with the Seegers in the early 1960s that Cotten picked up her guitar and began performing again, eventually joining the Seegers in concert.

Early in 1984, Cotten, who moved to Syracuse, was named National Heritage Fellow along with 16 other traditional folk artists. 

She claimed that her favorite song was "On My Way to the Promised Land," an old spiritual, “cause I'm on my way.” She ended her concerts with “God Be' With You Till We Meet Again.”

Her body was cremated after she passed in 1987.

Tutwiler: The Paradox of the Delta - 1979

TUTWILER

By Murphy Givens - 1979

Photos by Jimmy Dempsey & Bill Ferris

Like they say, the Delta is the Delta. Period. People who try to explain it are oblivious to all that it is, and was.

THIS SMALL Delta town lies on the map an index finger north of Jackson and a ring-finger's length south of Memphis. It is the railroad junction where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog. The town sits pretty much in the center of the Mississippi Delta, which is as much a state of mind as a geographically defined place. People tell you the Delta is, well, the Delta, as if to say that is all the explanation needed, or as if the Delta is beyond description. One of the best quotes comes from David Cohn. which is often mistakenly attributed to William Faulkner. The Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”

It owes its official allegiance to Jackson, but it is north toward Memphis that the Delta looks. It is Memphis where the Delta Blues were “hearsed and rehearsed” giving the country a new style of music unlike anything else in the world. And it is to Memphis, first, where the Delta poor escape, trading the hot dusty fields for the steamy city asphalt.

But the Blues came straight from the dusty fields and the Saturday night juke-joints of the Delta, and it was in the small town of Tutwiler where W.C. Handy, known as the originator of the unique ballad form, first heard this haunting music.

In his book The Father of the Blues, Handy says: "One night at Tutwiler, as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulders and wakened me with a start.

"A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags: his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar... The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly. “Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog.”

THAT IS ONE of two reasons for the visit to Tutwiler. There is a footnote to Handy's Tutwiler experience in a Mississippi historical brochure of a decade ago, and it shows a picture of man named Lee Kizart, called "a current Blues singer in Tutwiler."

I wanted to talk to Kizart about the Blues. And secondly, after living in Mississippi for eight years, it was time to test my toes in the Delta. There is just too much sung and written about it. One has to see for himself what all the commotion is about.

When visiting Jerry Clower in Yazoo City, he stopped his Cadillac at the top of a modest hill and pointed north. That is the Delta, and this is the last hill for...awhile." It is said that no two hills are exactly alike, but every-where on earth plains are one and the same. Texas and Oklahoma are no different from the Pampas in South America. Flat land is flat land. But that is not true of the Delta. It has that sameness, true, but it also has an infinite variety if one looks close enough.

The Delta is a great field of green plants — cotton and soybean — with dirt roads straight as plumb lines running at perpendicular angles off Highway 49, through the fields.

The monotony of all that flatness is broken by deserted brown-shingled tenant houses, sitting in the middle of the fields. They once housed share-croppers who have long since fled to the cities. It has been many years now that the weary backs gave way to the bright new machines — startling green cotton pickers that can swallow eight rows of cotton at a time, moving down the rows faster than 50 field hands.

Looking at the ungothic shacks, I remembered some-thing in a story about a letter found in an old abandoned home, something written from one sister to another that said, "We are not like to ever see each other again.”

The Amazing Discovery of a Blues Legend's Headstone

Henry "Son" Simms and McKinley "Muddy Waters" Morganfield at Stovall, MS in 1941

Henry “Son” Simms—the Delta blues fiddler and guitarist who recorded with the eminent Charley Patton in 1930 and McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield in the early 1940s—was thought to have been buried in an unmarked grave at Bell Grove Baptist Church Cemetery in Clarksdale, Mississippi. According to Gayle Dean Wardlow, who interviewed former associates and relatives of the blues fiddler, Simms experienced “acute bladder problems” in the late 1950s, and he went through “surgery on three occasions,” the last of which he did not survive. The World War I veteran from Anguilla and Delta blues fiddler died at the Memphis VA Hospital on December 23, 1958.[i] His death certificate reveals that Memphis funeral directors R.S. Lewis & Sons prepared the body of Simms for travel so that his wife of more than a decade, Lizzie Simms, could remove his body for burial in Clarksdale.[ii] The document lists no “name of cemetery or crematory,” but recent discoveries reveal that it was, in fact, not Bell Grove Baptist Church Cemetery.

Skip Henderson, board chairman and founder of the Mount Zion Memorial Fund (MZMF), a non-profit corporation dedicated to the preservation of African American cemeteries in Mississippi since 1989, had first suggested the idea of erecting a marker for the fiddle player over a decade ago. It was not until recently, however, that the group began to conduct some research in preparation for erecting a headstone on the unmarked grave of Simms. T. DeWayne Moore, the recently appointed executive director of the MZMF, located a headstone application for military veterans filed by Lizzie Simms in January 1959, which requested that a flat, white marble marker be placed on her husband’s grave at “Shoevillie [sic] Cemetery” in Lyon, Mississippi, a small community outside of Clarksdale. According to the application, the federal government ordered the headstone from Columbus Marble Works, of Columbus, Mississippi, and shipped it to Charles C. Stringer, owner of Stringer Funeral Home at 119 Fourth Street in Clarksdale.[iii]

Two other names appear on the headstone application: Henry Hudson, who signed his name and appears to have filled out the document, and Nanettie Harris, the cemetery sexton, official, or superintendent. The Clarksdale city directory lists Hudson’s occupation, in various years, as postal carrier, driver for the post office, and messenger. He was, therefore, most likely an acquaintance of Lizzie Simms who helped her complete the application and, perhaps, possessed the means to transport the headstone upon delivery. Shufordville Cemetery official Nanettie Harris had worked as a teacher at Lyon School in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She later worked as a maid at the Brandon Clinic while living at 207 Hopson Street in Lyon.[iv] It was Harris who apparently authorized the installation of Simms’ headstone.

MZMF director T. DeWayne Moore located the military
headstone application of Henry Simms

Moore sent a copy of the headstone application to Euphus Ruth Jr., a Greenville-based photographer, tapophile and MZMF board member, who set out to locate the long hidden and neglected grave marker of Simms. He contacted Coahoma County blues enthusiast and local historian Robert Birdsong, some of whose descendants were buried in Lyon at historic Shufordville Cemetery. Believing it the burial ground referred to in Simms’ headstone application, the two men visited the large cemetery on March 28. Ruth walked around in the black section of the graveyard looking for markers from the late 1950s, and he located an upright, white marble headstone bearing the name “Hemry [sic] Simms.” It had sunk into the ground over the past fifty years so much so that only the name remained visible. Birdsong, therefore, retrieved a shovel and removed the dirt from around it, revealing his status as an army private during World War I and his correct birth and death dates—August 22, 1890 to December 23, 1958. All the information on the marker corresponds with that given on the application as well as his death certificate—except, of course, for the misspelling of his first name.

Robert Birdsong unearths the headstone of Henry Simms
© Euphus Ruth

To get to the headstone of Simms, head west on Shufordville Road and turn left after passing the sign for Shufordville Historical Cemetery. Park at the gate and follow the road to the right, leading to the back side of the graveyard. Locate the mausoleum of Dr. P.W. Hill and walk an estimated forty yards from the rear of the mausoleum towards the fence. Facing the fence sits the white marble military grave marker of Delta blues fiddler Henry “Son” Simms.

NOTES

[i] Gayle Dean Wardlow, “Henry ‘Son’ Simms,” 78 Quarterly 9 (1995): 11-18.

[ii]“Henry Simms,” Tennessee, Death Records, 1908-1958 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.

[iii] “Henry Simms,” U.S., Headstone Applications for Military Veterans," Ancestry.com, 2012.

[iv] 1946, 1951, and 1953 Clarksdale, Mississippi City Directories.