Shake 'Em On Down

{I felt like I almost died making this trip, and got spooked the fuck out when we breached the *real* crossroads -- out by "old" Highway 61 -- where, at dusk, even the dust is bedeviled. Or maybe I'm a sucker for lore, and someone was just pulling my Legba. Originally published in 1992 (?), and unearthed now in remembrance of R.L. Burnside and Paul "Wine" Jones. I'll revisit this with some footnotes that will make for a much more interesting tale. Editorial compromises, writerly sloppiness, hangovers, cliches. But, for now ...}


Near Holly Springs, Miss. - Junior Kimbrough's sad eyes spark with mischief as he hoists a pint bottle of clear liquid and takes a warming swig.

"We ain't drinkin' no corn liquor," the longtime blues singer announces, sly as a fox, as the sweet intoxicant begins to tickle his belly.

Across the dusty floor of the barn-sized juke joint known only as "Junior's place," an antic Sunday-night crowd laughs, offering shouts of affirmation between sips of beer and the irregular clack of pool balls.

It could be a scene right out of "Deep Blues," a lively documentary survey of Mississippi's contemporary blues scene that features vital performers such as Mr. Kimbrough, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Jack "The Oil Man" Johnson and Lonnie Pitchford. It runs through Wednesday at Cinefest on the Georgia State University campus (651-2463).

Each musician is an inheritor of the traditional blues legacy, keeping the mu sic alive as entertainment, a soundtrack for social dancing and as an up-to-the-minute oral history.

Narrated by former New York Times critic Robert Palmer, who wrote a DON'T YOU AVANT ME, BABY?
definitive 1981 musical history also called "Deep Blues," the film rambles through the juke joints and tin-roofed shacks where the music has been nurtured for decades. It travels south from Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., now, sadly, a Disneylike mall for tourists, to the hard-rocking Playboy Club on Greenville, S.C.'s, crack-infested Nelson Street, where most tourists fear to tread but the music is some of the Delta's hottest.


Nothing on celluloid, however, compares to the real-life scenery of a long night spent jukin' at unreconstructed, rustic blues haunts such as Junior's. Only six hours by car from Atlanta, this hot spot in Mississippi's northern hill country might as well be on another planet, one where the rough-hewn music and festive social rituals seem virtually unchanged since the days when seminal bluesman Robert Johnson roamed the crossroads.

Midway between the regional cultural meccas of Oxford, Miss., and Memphis, Junior's is directly on Robert Avant's Anheuser-Busch beer route. Only on this recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Avant, in his mid-30s, is hauling firewood with half a dozen companions. The logs are a gift for Mr. Kimbrough, whose juke is a multipurpose facility that serves as a community gathering place, party central and a magnet for anyone willing to sit in or drums or guitar.

"We've got some of the goodest guys around here as you get anywhere," Mr. Avant says, ready to work in bluejeans, a flannel shirt and an old baseball cap. "They can play anything you want 'em to play."

A former musician who gave up guitar when on the verge of regional fame, he laments the onset of professionalism. "Back then [1960s], people would go out and play for something to drink or to party or for food," he says. "Now they're more organized."

They're even using cordless electric guitars - "You couldn't buy that stuff when we were playing," Mr. Avant says - but rarely at Junior's.

Yet in rural towns like Holly Springs, no less than at corner jukes in Clarksdale or Memphis, playing blues is not so much a way to make a living as an essential tool for communication - something to let off steam after a long day working in the factory or field.

"There are more musicians in Holly Springs than you'd ever know," says Norris Hibbler, who, like his friend Mr. Avant, has patiently waited at least an hour for Mr. Kimbrough to arrive and open his club. "They'll be playing so much music, people don't want to leave."

That's a home truth, whether the venue is Green's Lounge in South Memphis - where the house band the Fieldstones wraps its last set around 3:30 a.m. - or Margaret's Blue Diamond Lounge in downtown Clarksdale, whose busy concrete dance floor is lighted only by two bare bulbs, one red, one blue. At Green's, the crowd may be dressed to the nines - 82-year-old regular Willie Williams even sports a ruffled tuxedo shirt as he squires dancing partners one-fourth his age - while the regulars at Margaret's wear overalls straight from the job site.

But a juke joint is always a juke joint, distinguished by a visual language that is part folk art, part functional and part found object.

Decorated by twinkling Christmas lights, malt liquor posters and hand-drawn signs that warn "No dope smoking" and "No outside beer" -often with creative spellings - the clubs are havens from workaday reality. For decades both incubator and preserve of blues heritage, juke joints are perhaps the only place to hear the music with all its vibrancy and quirks.

"People who have never set foot in a real moonshine-swilling, gun-toting juke joint have been declaring the down-home blues dead, or dying, or anyway, not what it used to be," Mr. Palmer contends, writing in the liner notes to the "Deep Blues" soundtrack album, financed, like the movie, by former Eurhythmics guitarist and blues fan Dave Stewart. "But the blues is enjoying an unprecedented resurgence in the areas that originally nurtured it."

That's the argument "Deep Blues" persuasively makes. Yet the jukes always have been jukin', even when the outside world failed to take notice.

"In the African-American community, especially, people like to be with each other and hear blues music," says Judy Peiser, director of the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis and a regular at Green's Lounge -where your $4 cover charge includes a frisk by a friendly rent-a-cop, an almost genteel nod toward patron security. "So they have these . . . bastions of cultural survival. Living, breathing, wonderful places where men and women can listen to live music on weekends."

An outgrowth of segregation, when blacks were compelled to run their own nightclubs and house parties, juke joints continue to offer a loose, open space for musical performance. "At first, the reason there was such incredible musical creativity [on Beale Street] is because there was a segregated society," Ms. Peiser says. "The musicians might perform at country clubs, but after hours . . . that's where the real jam sessions took place."

Holly Springs guitarist R.L. Burnside, 64, who lives next door to Junior's an d performs his "Burnside style" blues in the documentary, says he always plays best in juke joints - though he's made several tours of Europe.

"You get a better feelin' about it," says the performer, who has eight of his 12 children playing music. "It makes you think about the old, way-back blues and the house parties. In those days, you could really enjoy it. Wasn't as many young people out there as there is now, buggin' people. Heh, heh, heh."

Esau Shaw, 48, a local gospel choir leader and drummer, confirms that there's more to the scene than just music. "The atmosphere's a bitch!" he volunteers, drinking a Budweiser outside Junior's as night falls. "It's loose. No tension. Everybody learns to leave the tension home. Nobody wears no tie. Everybody knows everybody."

When at last Mr. Kimbrough arrives, handshakes are exchanged all around and a wood-burning stove begins to smoke in the rear of his club, its walls lined with an extravagantly colorful series of folk art like portraits of young black women in a variety of high-fashion poses.

"C'mon, Junior!" somebody yells, as a vocal, mostly male audience begins to gather not long after dusk. When Mr. Kimbrough smiles in response, the lean angles of his face suggest an African-American Lenny Bruce.

Nodding to the grandson and son of Mr. Burnside - 14-year-old drummer Cedric Burnside and his uncle Dwayne, 24, who doubles on bass and guitar - the musician grabs the guitar in his lap and conjures a flowing, hypnotic vamp. The song is called "All Night Long" and for one obvious reason: Mr. Kimbrough loves the tune so much he can't stop playing it.

For nearly half an hour, primal rhythms shake the room. Dwayne Burnside, a driving force in his father, R.L.'s, Sound Machine, pumps the bass with cocky ease while Cedric attacks the drum kit with the joyous aggression most kids save for shooting hoops. But it's Mr. Kimbrough's chilling, spectral moans that carry the song, making him seem a force of nature - no less than the breeze that sweeps through the piney woods of the north Mississippi hill country.

Mr. Kimbrough, nearly recovered from a stroke that has left him with a limp but "didn't take away my hands," doesn't play as a matter of profession. What's evident as he sings - sometimes with a predatory groan, sometimes in a high, mournful wail - is that he does this because he has to. And because he does, he functions as a kind of backwoods oracle, an admired figure who receives tokens of cigarettes and beer while he performs in the creche-like band area.

"Sometimes you play, you get the feelin' that it is the blues," Mr. Kimbrough says, taking a seat and firing up a menthol cigarette before he begins the first, open-ended set of the night. "Just like you out working in the field or something like that, and it's close to quittin' time and your blues hits you and you start to sing. Heh. Gettin' close to quittin' time so you know, work all day in the field, and then stay up all night."

He doesn't jest. But Mr. Kimbrough's stamina is almost a running gag in Holly Springs.

"We joke about that all the time," says Mr. Burnside, who first met Mr. Kimbrough 35 years ago in the same juke joint. "Tell 'im, `We have to pull the plug to get you to stop, here.' He gets to drinking, you know, and the women get to dancing."