(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)
A spooky night at the old commissary of the Hopson plantation in Clarksdale, Miss., now the Shack Up Inn. (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
At the Shack Up Inn, a film crew from Los Angeles works on the next "Hot Chick Hotrod" DVD, about sexy female mechanics who fix up the last working Bluesmobile from the Blues Brothers classic feature film. (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
James "Super Chikan" Johnson shows his handmade "shitar," a working guitar made out of a toilet seat top. (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
After flitting about his cluttered workshop, James "Super Chikan" Johnson settles on a glittery, sparkling, hand-painted instrument. He plucks it from a hook on the wall and takes a closer look at his newest creation.
"This used to be my ceiling fan," the bluesman says, as if he doesn't even believe it himself. These days, it's a working guitar.
Super Chikan, 55, has about a dozen guitars made of cigar boxes, gas cans, washboards and toilet seat covers (which he calls "shitars") in his workshop at home. He uses pool cues and broomsticks for the necks, paints them with scenes from the Mississippi countryside, and glues on plastic rhinestones.
"I'm a strange cat," he says, scrunching up his nose and laughing at himself. "They ain't seen nobody like me."
Super Chikan's guitars are one of the quirky ways in which the spirit of Delta blues music endures today, even as blues tourism threatens to distract audiences from understanding the harsh conditions in which it was born. The fun overshadows the pain.
Greenville, Miss., bluesman Mississippi Slim wears mismatching socks and shoes. He dyes his hair sometimes in solid bright colors, like his idol Dennis Rodman, and sometimes in stripes, "like a snow cone."
Willie Seaberry, the owner of Po' Monkey's juke joint outside of Merigold, Miss., changes his suit five or six times a night during his Thursday parties. He lives in the same shack where he throws his renowned shindigs, with stuffed monkeys and dollar bills hanging from the ceiling and a sign out front that says, "No loulnd music."
Nobody's going to correct his spelling to "loud"; the blues world thrives on quirks. Just look at their names: "T-Model Ford," "Super Chikan," "Mississippi Slim," "Howl-N-Madd," "Tater," "Duck" and "Spam."
Coming organically from the blues world itself, the calculated packaging of modern Delta blues is a far cry from the real-life struggling and suffering that created the genre.
But when it comes from above, from the puppeteers and marketeers of blues tourism, it can come across as superficial, or at least inch uncomfortably close to threatening authenticity. At times, the bright candy shell of happy-go-lucky blues tourism masks a less cheerful reality.
In downtown Clarksdale, actor Morgan Freeman and two powerful local businessmen own the five-year-old Ground Zero Blues Club. Its mission is to operate as a real juke joint, and to bring authentic live blues music to the area at least four nights a week.
The look is purposefully gaudy, complete with pool tables, mismatching furniture, Christmas lights, torn-up couches outside and writing on the walls. In all this, it mimics the decor of classic jukes.
They credit themselves with significantly helping blues preservation. And few would dispute that they have introduced blues to a younger generation, paying artists a better rate and giving the Delta a boost.
"Since we opened, other clubs have popped up, and I won't say they're living off us, but they exist because of us," says Bill Luckett, one of Ground Zero's owners.
But George Messenger, the longtime owner of Messenger's club and restaurant in Clarksdale, says Ground Zero is on the side of the tracks that barred blacks during the segregated sharecropping era.
These days, visitors come into town looking for The Place Where the Blues Began. But by staying on the traditionally white side of the tracks, they just miss it, Messenger says: The real bluesmen used to hang out on the other side
"They used to walk these streets," Messenger said. "Ike Turner. Sam Cooke was born here. Bo Diddly. Lena Horne was here. Ray Charles. And a lot of other blues musicians."
The Shack Up Inn, also in Clarksdale, offers charming, down-home fun on a slightly alarming premise. It's an old cotton gin, commissary and cluster of former sharecropper shacks, transformed into a sort of Disney Plantation hotel. People come from all over the world to practice blues riffs on the front porches of real sharecropper shacks -- with air conditioning and indoor plumbing, of course.
"There are blues nuts in every corner of the planet," said Bill Talbot, one of its owners. "It's a magical segment of the world population."
Even more magical is the ability to strip a shack of all the sorrow and oppression it once knew and turn it into a cheerful tourist hot spot -- THE place to be if you're a blues traveler in Clarksdale.
If a tourist could see past the allure of the Shack Up Inn (which would be hard; its great atmosphere inspires instant camaraderie among fellow travelers), he might discover the Riverside Hotel, another place significant to blues history but often overlooked because of its location.
It's the former "colored-only" hospital where Bessie Smith bled to death, and all of the rooms are named after various bluesmen who have stayed there at one point in their lives since 1944, when it first opened for lodging: Robert Nighthawk, room five; John Lee Hooker, room six; Sam Cooke, room seven; the Staple Singers, room ten.
Sure, the bathrooms are communal and there isn't any air conditioning. But if you're in the Delta to catch a whiff of the blues, doesn't it makes sense that you forego at least some minor modern luxuries?
The blues, of course, SHOULD be celebrated. It's good and uplifting by nature, even if the conditions under which it was born were not. It makes sense that in the modern world, now that times have changed, one would want to keep the good and shed the bad -- to dance, have fun, be down to earth, jam with friends and toss back a cold one on the front porch of a cozy little hut on a dusty Delta road. Everybody's entitled to a good time.
But to be happy about the blues is one thing. To forget the problems that did (and still do) exist is another thing entirely.
"I've been struggling and straining all my life," says Indianola, Miss., bluesman David Lee Durham.
"I'm world famous," says Super Chikan, "but I can't pay my bills."
For every surge of wealthy, happy, dancing, digital camera-toting, Muddy Waters-loving tourists that come 12-bar-ing through the Delta to stay in a sharecropper shack and ask Morgan Freeman for his autograph, there's an old bluesman who dies poor.
So by all means, visit the Delta. Dance. Drink. Shack up. Have fun. You got your mojo working now. But remember the tears shed and bodies worn. And know that for many, the blues is still sad.
Part I: Young and old at the crossroads
Part III: A proud past. But what of today?
Related Story: Did juke-joint hokum steal your mojo?
Hillary Rhodes is an asap reporter.
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