(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)
Just one corner of the decorations upon decorations that adorn the Rainbow Inn in Hollandale, Miss. "A lot of people don't got an artistic mind," says owner L.C. Hutchins, who decorated and painted the place himself. (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
A dead bird at Dockery Farms, once home to blues originals Charlie Patton and Son House, along Route 8 between Ruleville and Cleveland, Miss. (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
Greg Corner, left, and Stanley Madison fish at a pond in Indianola, Miss. They aren't big blues fans, but they appreciate the local connection. (AP Photo/Derek Anderson)
The owner of the Rainbow Inn opens in midafternoon and hobbles around the cluttered, excessively decorated, spray-painted place, turning on every party strobe and every string of blinking Christmas lights so he can show off what a happening joint he runs.
He gets up and acts as MC to a Rufus Thomas song called "Do the Funky Chicken," using words we can't print here while standing up at the microphone on two shaky legs. He wears a cowboy hat, knee-high socks and suspenders to hold up his shorts.
Behind the bar, there's a handwritten sign advertising the various items for sale: pig feet, pickled eggs, pickled sausage. Then, right beneath that, Rolaids and Alka Seltzer Plus.
"I'm 67. I'm tired," L.C. Hutchins says, sucking on a piece of peppermint candy that had turned his few remaining, precariously tilting teeth pink.
Mississippi Delta juke joints are full of sadness. Frail club owners talk about bygone days, and the deserted ghost towns around them have little left to share with the passing visitor of the bustling, bluesy life that once was, save a good story or two scavenged from a resident's memory.
But underneath the sadness is an obvious pride for the lasting musical and cultural legacy the once-lively blues scene catalyzed. And it's the pride for those roots that could help the latest generation keep it going through a new era.
"People were back to back and face to face," Ruleville, Miss., resident James Washington recalls of the town's Main Street, now torn up and empty. It used to be affectionately called Greasy Street, he says, because of all the people cooking fried catfish and other oily food. Now, that life is history.
"This was the main attraction. All I had to do was open," says bluesman Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, who owns the Blue Front Cafe juke joint, in Bentonia, Miss. "At one time, you couldn't even tell a Saturday night from a Monday night."
At Club Ebony, in Indianola, Miss., legendary owner Mary Shepard hosts world-renowned bluesman B.B. King every year for a homecoming concert. For more than three decades, Shepard has run the place, watching nearly every blues legend there is take the floor. It's everything to her: "My daughter says all I do is talk about `Club Ebony, Club Ebony.'"
But at 63, she's had two strokes (one in the back room while King was playing), and says she has a pact with God not to keep up the struggle of owning a club for too much longer. She's too old to tempt fate.
Her story is familiar. Most juke joints are closed. They have long been on the decline, drying up and dying out. People fled north, towns emptied out, shacks were razed, drugs and violence brought decay, casinos lured customers away and bluesmen kicked the dust. Writers and music fans have been lamenting the death of the blues for a while now.
But just as the last of the old-school holdouts are letting go of their tremendous legacies, a budding enthusiasm is cropping up. Because it's fertilized by the same rich Delta soil that created the genre in the first place, the new blues generation is clearly fueled by a sense of pride that can only come where roots are deep, where you can take personal ownership of a heritage.
Three young men from North Mississippi who play in a hill-country blues band called The New Generation, just east of the Delta, said playing that music makes them proud to be from Mississippi. They specifically seek out local blues legends' descendants to learn from them. During an informal Easter Sunday jamming session with the late R.L. Burnside's family, percussionist David Duke was so overwhelmed with the experience (or the heat or something) that he passed out.
Another young local musician says he was pleasantly surprised to discover that the contemporary music he loved could be traced back to his own hometown. "I listen to what's out now and then I get bored," says Phillip Carter, 25, a Clarksdale, Miss., resident who works at the Ground Zero juke joint. "So I look at what influenced them" -- and the people who came before them -- "until you end up at the blues."
One Delta scholar has an explanation for this feeling. "If you know why the place you're from is important, it'll affect your sense of self," says Luther Brown, director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, in Cleveland, Miss.
Local curiosity and pride are only just beginning to experience rebirth. Blues enthusiasm exists more ardently just about everywhere else -- Detroit, Chicago, Europe, Japan, academia, journalism, literature and music theory classes. The few young people from the region who do show interest in the blues tend to up and leave the Delta for more cosmopolitan ground.
But no matter how much somebody knows about Robert Johnson or Son House or Albert King or any other legend, no matter how much somebody from outside the Delta loves the White Stripes or the Black Keys or some other modern bluesy rock band that seems to be ushering the genre into a new era, true pride for the blues -- the kind of pride that old club owners have for their dying juke joints, the kind of pride that has kept the blues alive -- should belong to young Deltans. They should claim it as, one by one, they realize why the place they come from is important.
That's the power held in the land that bred the blues. Where there is reverence for the past, there is hope for the future.
Part I: Young and old at the crossroads
Part II: Blues truth and blues tourism
Related Story: Did juke-joint hokum steal your mojo?
Hillary Rhodes is an asap reporter.
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