QUEEN OF THE BLUES DIES

I was raised in the Mississippi delta in a little town called Rolling Fork.   Mississippi at that time was the heart of segregation.  The only thing Rolling Fork is known for, is as the home of Muddy Waters; but Muddy Waters would have had to step into the road and look at the ground if a white woman was approaching on the sidewalk. 

I have no warm memories of living in the Mississippi delta, but I have always had a warm spot for Delta Blues singers.  

Denise LaSalle , of my generation and born in Leflore county, Mississippi , recently died.   At age thirteen she moved to Chicago and eventually got into the music business.  

She will be missed by those of us who have grown up with the blues.





If you have a headset you might want to put it on and kick up the sound.
O'B












Denise was a popular performer in the black clubs in the early days and some of her songs were sexually explicated.  Here she tells us to treat your woman like a postage stamp.












A true lady that grew up in the height of racial bigotry and discrimination; but did it her way.

The generation of the of the roots of the Delta blues and R&B is passing by.

the Ol'Buzzard

MISSISSIPPI RAMBLING

I was raised in the Jim Crow south during the era of segregation.   My grandmother and I first lived in Kentucky and then when I was eight we moved to her hometown in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.  I was always considered and outsider: no father, from the north (Kentucky,) not Baptist and on top of that I was small for my age.   When I was nineteen I left Mississippi, joined the Navy and never returned.  

Decades later, when deciding to retire, my wife agreed to move to the small town in western Kentucky where I spent my youngest days, a time that had produced fond memories. 

The south is still covertly segregated.   The people in the south aren’t bad people; they are congenial, thoughtful and resourceful, with strong family ties.   But, their religious bred ignorance so permeates every facet of their life that it made the six years we spent in Kentucky uncomfortable.     Their religious prejudices are as strongly held as the Jim Crow prejudices held during segregation. 

The only good memory I have of Mississippi is the food.   Mississippi home cooking, strongly influenced by the black community, was in a class by itself.   Fried chicken, not breaded but lightly rolled in flour and then fried in bacon grease in a cast iron skillet until the skin was crispy; greens cooked with ham hock – cooked for hours until it surrenders a rich pot liquor – eaten with a dash of Louisiana Hot Sauce; catfish and hush-puppies with white beans; fresh slice, tart, acidy tomatoes with a dollop of mayonnaise, salt and pepper; homemade biscuits and eggs cooked in bacon grease with a side of grits with butter for breakfast; these were common fare and the memories I still carry.

And Oh yes, the music – the Delta Blues

 Black people in that Mississippi Delta town were looked down on, considered inferior in every way, exploited and often brutalized.  The irony is that today the only claim to fame that Mississippi town promotes is as the home of Muddy Waters. 

the Ol'Buzzard

IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN - TIME FOR A HAIRCUT

REMINISCENCE

I tend to get my haircut when I get so shaggy that my wife insists.   We are going to a playhouse this afternoon to see a production of Figaro.   Being wild and wooly, and wishing not to be too embarrassing to be out with, I got up this morning and went to the barbershop.  

Our barbershop is pretty generic – like the waiting room in a dentist office.  There is a coat rack on the wall when you enter, a half a dozen chairs along the wall, a table with magazines, the local rock station playing on the radio, three barbers chairs with three women barbers displaying pictures of their families on the counter in front of mirrors.

I can’t help thinking of the barbershop in Rolling Fork, Mississippi where I grew up during the 1950’s.

The barbershop in Rolling Fork was the original man cave.    There was no café in town so the barbershop was a place where older men came to hang out and young men came to get their hair cuts.  There were deer heads and mounted bass on the wall, along with one calendar with pictures of tractors and one with pictures of scantly clad young women.  There were two spittoons on floor for tobacco chewers and the atmosphere was always full of smoke.   There was one older, skinny, shriveled up barber with orange nicotine fingers that cut your hair with a cigarette hanging from his lips.   The counter where he kept his clippers was full of bottles of colorful hair products with exotic names like Lucky Tiger, Jerris, and Wild Root Cream Oil…   The talk in the barbershop was always man’s talk: stories from deer camp, hunting, fishing, farming or veiled comments about women. 

My grandmother would give me seventy-five cents at the beginning of school to go and get a haircut.  As a young boy with no father the barbershop was my contact with the society of men.   I always got a friendly ribbing when it would be my time in the chair, but it was part of the initiation to manhood. 

I know that era wasn’t good for everybody; but back then men had an identity; today the rolls between men and women are blurred and we live in a homogenized gender society.   That special camaraderie and primal identity that men had then doesn’t exist today…

Today the barbershop is a place to get your hair cuts.

I just saying

the Ol’Buzzard

HISTORY, RECOLLECTIONS AND RAMBLINGS

When you are my age you have much more past than future.   This definitely skews your perspective.    You also find yourself thinking more about the past than the future.  

Paraphrased from Orwell’s (Eric Blair) 1984: He that controls the past controls the future and he that controls the present controls the past.  

In my seventy plus years I have seen the history of the past skewed and in some cases rewritten.   When I taught history classes in high school I would impress on my students that history is written by the winners of wars and that the same event seen from different cultures and different locations could be viewed totally different – and in all cases things are lost in translation.  There is no absolute truth.

Even just in this country events are seen differently in the west, south, north east, mid west and with different perspectives in different cultures.  Each of these groups will attempt to see history recorded from their own perspective. 

Where am I going with this?   Hell I don’t know. 

During my school years I was raised in the Mississippi Delta in a town called Rolling Fork.   Rolling Fork was the county seat of Sharkey County.  It had a strong Confederate history that it clung to – a pride in the South and the Civil War and a disdain for all things not southern.  The Confederate flag flew over the Mississippi Capital in Jackson. 

 

Rolling Fork was segregated and proud of it.  White people ran the town and defined its history.    Today Rolling Fork is a dusty Delta town and its only claim to fame is as the home of Muddy Waters. 

 

Events flow through time.  You can’t mold liquid.

The Ol’Buzzard

REMINISCENCE – TRANSITION TO THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA

At age eight, just before starting the second grade, my grandmother moved us from Kentucky to her ancestral home in the Mississippi Delta.  

Just so you know - an eight year old is capable of experiencing cultural shock. 

Kentucky was all I knew.   My grandfather’s people were rooted into the history of Crittenden County Kentucky all the way back to the Civil War.  Family ties extended across the county - people knew me there and I was accepted. 

My grandfather had worked for the Illinois Central Railroad until retirement.  My grandmother and grandfather were divorced, but my grandmother has a pass to ride the trains.   We rode an old steam engine passenger train from Paducah, Kentucky to Rolling Fork, Mississippi.

Rolling Fork is located in the center of Sharkey County, which is located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.  The land is flat and hot – cotton country.   The black people greatly outnumbered the white people in the county, but this was segregation and black people didn't count. 

It is funny when you think about it:  in the late 1940’s black people in Rolling Fork were considered inferior – just above field animals.   Now, in the twenty-first century, the only thing Rolling Fork is known for is as the home of McKinley Morganfield: Muddy Waters.

The house we moved into was one side of a duplex; then known as a shotgun house because you could shoot a shotgun through the front door and it would exit through the backdoor – the hall went down the center of the house from front door to back.   The house was built off the ground on brick pilings, as were most of the older houses because, before the Corps of Engineers built levies, yearly flooding of the Mississippi river was once common in the area. We had three rooms: two bedrooms and a kitchen.  

We shared the house with an older couple – the owners.  There was a screened porch across the front of the house furnished with some wicker rocking chairs and a swing.   During the summer, because of the heat, my grandmother and I and the old couple would sit on the porch at night until bed time.  I would often fall asleep in the swing.   There were screens on the windows and at night we slept with the windows open and an oscillating fan blowing air across the bed.   I can remember many nights trying to get to sleep, sweating – with the sheet pulled over my head, as mosquitoes buzzed over the bed.

My entrance into school was not pleasant.  I was from Kentucky and so the students decided I was a Yankee.   The Civil War was the proud culture of the area.    ‘The 4^th of July’ was not celebrated because that was the date that Vicksburg fell to ‘Grants army of northern aggression.’ 

Mississippi State Flag

We had a telephone.  This was before dial phones.  Our telephone number was 26.   My grandmother’s brother’s telephone number was 3.   Numbers really didn't matter, because you could pick up the phone and tell the operator you wanted Claude Kelly’s telephone and she would ring it.   The operators knew everybody in town, and it wasn't unusual for an operator to tell you that the person you were calling had gone to Vicksburg and wouldn't be home for a couple of days. 

Note: I could not find a picture of a telephone on Google without the dial on it.   Our phone was black with just a small white placard in the center of the receiver that had our telephone number printed on it. 

School ran from 7:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon.  There were no spring or fall breaks – straight through until Christmas and then straight through until summer; I believe we did get Thanksgiving off.  

Just before moving to Mississippi my sister/mother gave me a J.C. Higgins, 26 inch, red and white bicycle.  

I rode this bicycle to school and back until I entered the eleventh grade.    In the early days the bicycle was my get away vehicle after school.   My bicycle was named Fury for the horse of Straight Arrow – my comic book and radio hero.

The high point of each day began after school at 5 p.m. when I would sit on the floor at home, in front of the large Philco radio, with a mayonnaise sandwich and a glass of milk, and tune into one hour of kids programming. 

For those of you that can’t imagine a time before television - radio was just as exciting – and perhaps more so than TV.    Kids today watch television along with distractions; but radio took your full concentration.   Somehow you became more a part of the program than you can with television.  

The afternoon programming could be Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his wonder dog King; The Lone Ranger and Tonto; Tarzan; Roy Rogers; Rex the wonder dog; Lassie – or others.   Saturday mornings were also kid’s time: I listened to Sky King; Flash Gordon and Space Cadets.  

My favorite Saturday radio show was Straight Arrow.  

In a moment Steve Adams rancher is gone - and in his place
Yes Fury it is I Straight Arrow.

The mild rancher Steve Adams would be confronted by evil doers then ride his horse across the badlands and jump it across a canyon into a secret cave– there he would change into his Indian outfit and emerge as Straight Arrow riding his golden horse Fury.    With his bow and arrow he would defeat the villains and then return to his persona as the mild rancher. 

 

Nabisco shredded wheat included Straight Arrow Indian craft cards with its cereal.  These cards were magical: they showed you how to build tepees  identify animal tracks and make all sorts of Indian paraphernalia.   I hated shredded wheat but ate it to get the cards.

I spent hours making war shields, tomahawks, spears, bow and arrows, and building shelters.   When away from school I spent much of my time occupying some elaborate fantasy

My toys were simple by today’s standards.  Along with my Indian outfit that I made, my other prize possessions (other than Fury) were two cap pistols and a cigar box of toy plastic soldiers.   The soldiers entertained me for hours on rainy days in the house. 

Now that I think about it, guns (toys or otherwise) have been a part of my life almost as far back as I can remember.  

Kids today can not fathom life without electronics.   If they aren't in front of a television or their computer then they are on their cell phones or being entertained with some organized activity – otherwise they are bored. 

I also had electronics when I was a kid: I owned a flashlight.

On Saturdays my grandmother would give me a quarter and I would go to the movies.    It cost a dime to get in – popcorn was a dime and a coke was a nickel.    There was usually a western double feature showing on Saturdays.   Black people could go to the movie but had to sit in the balcony – they had no concession stand.  

The town was a safe place to live and since we lived three blocks from the movie theater my grandmother would sometimes let me go to movies at night.  They always showed the horror movies at night.  They scared the hell out of me but I loved them.  I remember hiding under the seats during the scary parts; and after the movie I would run home through the dark streets so fast I don’t think my feet touched the ground.  

 

When I was ten years old I got a Daisy air rifle for Christmas.  Like the boy in A Christmas Story, I slept with the BB gun beside my bed.   It was the greatest gift I ever received. 

BB’s were ten cents a tube.  I don’t remember how many BB’s were in a tube but there must have been at least a hundred.  You would twist the cap on the end of the barrel and pour the BB down the loading chute.  I must have shot thousands of rounds over a four year period.  

When I was fourteen I helped an uncle pack a van with his household furniture when he moved his family to New Orleans.  Just before he left he gave me a bolt action 22 cal. rifle (which I still have.)    I am not sure what happened to the BB gun; perhaps it got passed down to a cousin. 

That gift pretty much ended my childhood.