i'm with the mississippi blues trail, wantto talk about the interpretation of juke joints and other african american night spots, largerclubs for instance, on the trail. what i want to talk about in particular arethese venues, how the trail formed, i'm sure a lot of people are interested. we've had this amazing amount of interpretation,a lot of money has gone into this, and a lot of organizations from other states have lookedto us to say, "how did you do it?" we'll touch on that, we can discuss that later. i'm sure we'll have people who are very interestedin how we were able to put up so many markers both for the blues trail and also for
the country music trail. we have something also called the freedomtrail. the latter two use the model of the bluestrail, the same administration as well. i'll touch upon some of the issues about who benefits from this, right? that we have this new wave of cultural tourismin mississippi centered around the blues. our license plate now features b.b. king. you drive into the state, it's welcome tomississippi, the birth place of american music which is contentious but not provable. we haven't had any fights with memphis aboutthat thing so far.
there's a lot of issues in marketing theseplaces. i mean this image, i picked this one becauseyou have this iconic ... i don't know if you've seen pictures of po monkey's before? po monkey's is often used as this juke jointout in the middle of a cotton field run by this very interesting character named po monkey. i actually helped with that process and iworked on a book called mississippi state of blues. a large format, coffee table book and we havea picture of po monkey's on the cover of it. as a sociologist, i was a little divided,i should say is the background.
i'm a sociologist, i'm also somebody who workswith these issues of working for the tourism division of the state. i'm aware of some of the potential problemswith that, being involved in the process of documentation for the purposes of making money. the purposes of the blues trail are for education,historical documentation but it's also part of selling mississippi to tourists, right? getting more people to visit. there's a lot of problems with that. if you put this on the map and tell peoplewhere it is, it changes the dynamic of the
place. no longer the authentic place it once wasthough we're not only the force involved with that process. we, i think, we can, very positively, we cantalk about them and all of these efforts is helping us, helping to reshape our understandingsof these areas. these things that people took for grantedor often located in small places that urbanites don't know anything about. anyways, i was talking about the basics ofthe blues trail. right now, starting in 2006, we now have 189markers.
it's operated by the mississippi developmentagency through visit mississippi. we have a board called the mississippi bluescommission point east from the governor. the actual work is conducted by myself andjim o'neal who is the founder of the living blues magazine. we work per contract basis with somebody calledhammons and associates, an advertising firm. it's more than an advertising firm. they do a lot of very interesting culturalwork ingrained with mississippi where i reside. they also have done the design of the markersfor the country music trail and for the civil rights trail, the freedom trail.
the funding for this trail, the blues trail,is that we have a deal, i don't know the specifics of it because i don't know the budget forpaying people at tourism or advertising, but the basic idea is that when somebody comesout wanting, or for a long time, somebody wanted to put up a marker, if we approvedof them having a marker, the candidate would have to come up with about half that money. it was initially about 4 or 5000 dollars,i think it's closer to 10 now. i don't know what the breakdown is on that. i think labor, not my labor unfortunately,have got a little bit more money over the last 10 years.
anyways, the idea is the communities buy in,right? it's not the state saying, "we're going toput a marker here." there's a lot of collaboration with the communities. one of the interesting things is, as the mississippiblues trail has developed, it's become a hot trend within the convention and visitor bureauprofessions. that they see, "oh jackson has this many orclarksdale has 10. we want one." it's become a sense of validation in the professionaltourism community. anyways we have, like i said, 189.
most of them are in mississippi here, youcan see we've got one in ferriday, louisiana. i'm not sure who is the rep there. somewhere down there across the natchez, ferriday. got a couple in muscle shoals, couple in memphis. we don't have one in southern louisiana unfortunately. we also have, if we look at the reach of it,we've got additional ... i forgot to say that the communities pay half, and a lot of theother money is ada, neh and mississippi highway funds. then there's also the salaries of the peopleat tourism.
we additionally got some neh funding to expandthe blues trail to florida, bradfordsville. grafton, wisconsin where the paramount labelwas. chicago, brandt museum in los angeles. rochester, new york where son house livedfor many years and maine which is that there was ... there's a logic about placing thesemarkers that they reflect the impact of mississippi blues. there's a 25 year historical criteria. we probably would have rather had one in lafayettethan in maine, but it had a lot to do with the lobbying on the side of the communities.
in that case, there was a blues festival hadbeen there for a long time. we also have them in cahors, france wherethere's been a festival for a long time. notodden in norway which is the home of oneof the largest blues festivals in europe. we're also in the process of creating a mobilemarker which is going to be for europe, so we can move it around to different festivals. it's not very easy to put up a big sign, say,in london at the side of where the stones played or whatever. big cities generally don't want somethingthat big on the sidewalk. also we have everything is on the web.
we have a great app which i encourage peopleto ... you can buy it from ... no, it's free. we have a free app and you can create itineraries,look up a timeline. there are 15 videos that robert gordon frommemphis, who did a great stax movie, muddy waters film. the recent william f. buckley, gore vidalfilm. we've got gore vidal on the blues trail. anyways, the idea we have a website and thisblues trail has allowed people to see the whole of it. i think oftentimes when the state puts upa historic marker, they've been doing it for
so many years, i think there's some difficultlyin actually knowing where they all are. if there's a website which tracks ... we havesomebody from that agency here. i think it's often private people who areinterested in historic markers that catalog all of this. in our case, we have the full text of themarkers and an interactive map online. there's not actually a trail, i should say,it's just a bunch of markers. people ask, "how do we do the trail?" if you look back at these maps, there's notreally a trail. there's not a linear one anyways.
the idea, of course, for visitors is thatif you have that many places to visit, then you're probably going to spend a lot moremoney in hotels, meals, rental cars and things like that. the blues trail got going in the early 2000sin the wake of a clinton-era millennium trail project which never took off. it caused people to get together to talk aboutit. it really took off after 2003, it was theyear of the blues. we all remember martin scorsese had a filmseries, he got a bunch of directors. it didn't do very well.
everybody forgot about it that week, but anywaysmississippi declared it to be the year of the blues. congress declared it the year of the blues. a big push from pbs, sony, bmg, the scorsesepeople. it pushed to the forefront this idea of blues. mississippi was lagging behind, i think, ourneighbors that we saw the development of gill street early in the 90s. the development, they tore down the stax studiosand then rebuilt it as a tourist spot. louisiana, of course, marketing of the musicis central to tourism efforts.
tourism is central to the economy over theworld. i don't know here, i presume it's a pretty big thing here as well. coming down to go to the dancehalls or toexperience that culture. anyways, the actual project came about around2003 or 4, i started working with the b.b. king museum which was a 15 million dollarproject in indianola. the museum ended up going up in 2008. one of the interesting things that we addressedwas that indianola is in the middle western part of the state, over 2 hours from memphis. about an hour and half from jackson, an hourfrom an interstate.
it's out in the middle of nowhere relativelyspeaking. one of the things that we wanted to do wasto put up some markers which would make a path, a trail of sorts. you have a bunch of other sights between ... alot of people drive to mississippi after they've been to memphis and going to new orleans. looking at how do we get people to go to theseareas? everybody knows that the blues is from mississippibut they don't know where to go, right? that's generally viewed as something thatwas in mississippi, robert johnson, 75 years ago.
muddy waters was there until the early 40s. people didn't really have that much of a notionthat there's that much to see, just know that it was there. in any case, so with the b.b. king museum,we had a team together. we had a lot of money and we were working with neh consultants. in addition to trying to put the museum together,we decided let's use this team we've got, the grant writers and researchers, to writea grant for a blues trail. before we did that, these went up very earlyon and, as you see here, it says, "mississippi
delta blues trail." club ebony is one of the best know juke jointsin the state since 1945. people played there. two of these markers went up in indianolaand then, by 2006, our grant had come through for 9 markers to go up in 4 adjacent countiesin mississippi, all of which had a history of promoting blues. anyways, so we first went up in 2006. the first 9 were successful and eventuallythis one was replaced. let me show you what the markers look like.
there's a couple of differences. we now call it a nightclub and not a jukejoint. club ebony is a club that can hold 500 people,it was not a juke joint. juke joints are generally a lot smaller thanthat, little more ramshackle. this was a very nice club and i think we ... thelast of them said 1945. this one says after the end of world war ii. as in the fact that there was a previous nightclub,a nightclub that preceded it on an adjacent street. this is more text and the text is more correct.
i didn't help write the preliminary ones bythe way. we wouldn't have had the juke joint word onthere. this is what the backside of our markers looklike, right? if we think about typical metal sign, theraised lettering, the typical state marker has 40, 30, 40 words on it. the same on each side which you can't readwhen you're driving at 70mph down the road but anyways. you don't have a whole lot of interpretation. what was novel about what we did was said,"well why don't we print the backside flat
at the foundry and then use a big piece ofvinyl?" we have a 500 word essay on the side, we utilizedthat top area to put a photograph in. that's b.b. king at club ebony. indianola is where he grew up or at leastfrom the age of 15 to 20, where he calls it his hometown. it's where he got married, had a job as atractor driver, began singing gospel and playing blues on the street corners. the great thing is that not only we can havethat much written interpretation, but also all these great images.
that's essentially what our markers look like. i wanted to show you some other pictures ofwhat the club ebony looks like. this is from our book, kim murphy is the photographer. he's an architectural photographer so we havea wonderful tin roof with neon at the ceiling. the building was used pretty regularly upthrough the 90s on the chitlin' circuit. that it was a club that b.b. played at, bobbybland, johnnie taylor. it's declined considerably as the chitlin'circuit has moved towards civic centers. they have big shows now, you've probably seenthe blues is alright tour. it probably comes through here somewhere,it would be at the civic center.
there would be 5 popular soul blues artistsand it's like 45 bucks. you can bring in your own liquor and food. kind of at the expense of these clubs, right? the people organizing these tours, they findit probably easier just to work with.there's so many civic centers, you can guarantee thatelectricity is going to work. they have security guards, they have placesthat sell sodas and things like that. there's been a rationalizing of that marketwhich has a left a lot of these larger clubs behind. the idea of going and seeing one group with,say, a local band opening up is not something
you see very often. it's interesting. the club ebony was private. b.b. king married the daughter of ... hissecond wife was the daughter of the owner of the club ebony. he bought it from the owner from the early70s until sometimes in the 2000s. i don't know what he paid for it, but he subsequentlydonated it to the b.b. king museum which is about 200 yards away on the other side ofthe tracks. in the museum, we actually have an interpretationof juke joints.
that's part of the narrative of looking atwhat was the secular culture that b.b. king would have experienced in indianola. there's a little bit of history from clubebony and its predecessor. with the blues trail, we ended up interpretingquite a few venues among the various things that we looked at. club ebony is at the top but why do we lookat clubs on the blues trail? the blues trail is not just clubs by any means,it's not called the juke joint trail. when we got together, we initially decidedit would be 120 after that initial grant. half of them had to be outside of the deltaand the first 50 picks were, okay we got to
have muddy waters. we got to have howlin' wolf, we got to havecharley patton and so we had about 50 of those. then with the neh money, one of the stipulationswas that the trail would have to address humanities themes which was kind of vague what that meant. the things that we looked at were, in theend, were transportation so there's markers for highway 61 and for trains. historic sites such as dockery plantation,there's some others that address cotton. radio, record companies, like malaco records,ace records. issues about civil rights, religion and theblues, other things.
hot tamales and the blues, we like that for... in rosedale, parchman farm, in addition to clubs and also historic strips. like there would be the beale street of thesevarious smaller towns. venues became important, there just simplyweren't that many of them around. i don't know what the number of operatingdancehalls here is in louisiana. texas is but in louisiana, in mississippi,it's not a huge number. the ones that we've put up a marker for thatare still around, fortunately we haven't had any die out since we put the marker out. club ebony, as i said, it's not used veryoften anymore but they still do have shows
there. it's now owned by the museum and they keepit up. tourist groups can go there. the blue front caf� in bentonia, red's inclarksdale, po monkey's in merigold. i'm going to show pictures of all these ina second. 100 men club, bradfordsville blues club inflorida and then there's a couple of other places, buildings that are still around whichoccasionally have music but are not really music venues. the alamo theatre was a movie theater thathad talent shows in jackson.
the elks lodge in greenwood which a big partof the chitlin' circuit and mississippi was using fraternal organizations. the elks club made money or the other clubs,fraternal organizations would make money by booking bands. i don't believe any of them really do thatanymore but let me just go over some of the individual places. the blue front caf� in bentonia has beenaround since the late 40s. it was a caf� started by the holmes family. their son jimmy "duck" holmes is a bluesman.
this is the place where skip james is from. david evans talks about a distinctive bentoniastyle of blues, eerie style and "duck" holmes is very conscious about preserving that tradition. he plays in that tradition, he's not a masterof it the way, say, skip james was but he learned it from local people. it has very strong ... is very conscious aboutthe role of this place but it's still a place you can go drink beer, smoke cigarettes andhave fun. it's not a very active venue, it is a verysmall place. that's jimmy right there.
he's now recorded about 5 albums. i'm actually going to be interviewing himat the jazz fest, sunday april 24th. he's very eloquent at talking about the tradition. i think he retired, he worked for the schoolsystem somehow or another. he's retired and i think has a source of income. he doesn't ... he can't be making any moneyoff it. he sells coca colas for a dollar, sells cigarettesand chips, and has a festival once a year. this is the inside of the place. it was a caf�, no longer really serves food,just potato chips and things like that.
here's the marker in front of the blue frontcaf�. we have to negotiate, i think sometimes we'reruining the iconic images because it's hard to take a picture. people almost avoiding taking pictures ofother tourists for one, and the marker suggests i'm not the first person that was here. that's actually h.c. porter, an artist from vicksburg who did abook of blues photographs. red's in clarksdale. red's has become a really famous place inclarksdale.
it doesn't look like ... well it has the bluesclub on the outside but a lot of people drive by it. a lot of tourists are afraid to go in therebecause it's rough looking. it's just over the tracks from the downtownarea of clarksdale on martin luther king and sunflower avenue. you can often find people milling about onthe streets. red relishes its dangerous reputation andoften makes comparisons with a club that's 100 yards away, the ground zero blues clubwhich is owned by morgan freeman which is a faux juke joint.
they had this big building which was usedfor other purposes, and then they ... there's a film in which one of the owners, bill luckett,is talking about why do we look to birney imes book juke joint? we decided that we would get mismatched furniture,christmas lights and it was weird that he was talking about it so publicly. how they decided to fake it but they alsohad this weird thing of you can write on the walls, which i don't think is something thatmost ... that may happen but, of course, all those kind of restaurants, that's like a funthing to do. stick things on the ceiling or write on thewalls but that became also part of it, right?
you can disrespect the structure, not red's,you can probably write on the walls of red's but it's so dark, you wouldn't notice it inthere. it's also a place famous for buckets of wateron the tables. he's always raising money to replace the roof,but i think he likes the idea of it leaks a bit. bathrooms are pretty shaky as well. that's red and red is a belligerent guy. he has a front, i think he actually workedas installing carpet. one of his sons is a state legislator so ithink he's a lot more of a middle class guy
than he lets on. he has this rough and tumble act he puts on. as i said, he's also making ... he's oftenmaking these comparisons between his place, the real place, and ground zero, that moviestar place down the road. he makes fun of people being afraid to comeover to his place. one of the most interesting things about red'sis i remember going there, i guess, in the early 90s to see big jack johnson and otherartists playing there. it was, at that point, most of the audiencewas african american. over the years, now red's has become verymixed but actually mostly, predominantly tourists.
it depends on what season of the year it is. if it's february, you're more likely to seean african american crowd, never a very large one. i'll talk about that in a little bit. we don't actually have a marker for red'sbut big jack johnson, who was the greatest bluesman in clarksdale in the 60s, 70s, 80s,90s into the 2000s, that was his home club. we put up a marker for big jack, we decidedto put it up at red's, right? it also plays into local tourism. jack lived in a neighborhood, we generallydon't put up markers in the middle of neighborhoods.
although there is one in grenada, mississippifor magic slim which was very interesting. other people in clarksdale were born there,sam cooke, ike turner. the markers are not at their homes becausegenerally, probably for reasons that the areas are not deemed to be tourist friendly. there's also privacy issues but it seems desirableoftentimes to move markers to very dismal areas in the downtown, but there's also somepolitical issues there. another place in jackson is the queen of hearts,an urban lounge. the queen of hearts has been around sincethe early 70s. see the marker there in that photograph.
here's the interior of the club, it's a verycolorful place. a time machine back to the 70s, there's alittle, to the left of the jukebox, there's a little, tiny stage which has a big railingin front of it. ugly, i'm not sure why it's there, i've neverasked them about it. they have music on the weekends. there's usually not too much of a crowd, idon't know if the musicians make anything. i think it's like a place where musicianslike to go to play. that's chellie b. lewis. it used to be a major hangout back in thedays when malaco records out of jackson, which
was the biggest soul blues label, when itwas really a force in the 70s and 80s. little milton liked to hang out here, johnnietaylor, z.z. hill. locals including sam myers who of course becamea big texas artist after he got ... hansen thunderbird took him from here to texas. he probably improved his life considerably. sam was actually living upstairs, not in thebest of conditions. chellie b, i think he owns a number of otherbuildings. this is his club, i can't imagine he makestoo much money though. he does make a lot of money, i think, operatingas a, largely, as a takeout fish place.
you see a lot of people that come in, pickup food to go and don't really pay too much attention to the band. chellie b is often back there in the kitchen. that's the way it survived, it's a restaurantwhere you might come in and eat. generally speaking, people don't eat thereif they come to ... they don't come there just for the food, as far as i've seen. there's the dedication with some of the localmusicians. king edward, who is actually from here, kingedward antoine. his brother nolan struck came up around lafayettebut king edward has been in jackson ... that's
him with the bowler hat on. he still can pull out some french. he's always surprised when anybody knows anythingabout him. there's po monkey's again, this iconic placejust north of cleveland, mississippi. that's willie "po monkey" seaberry operatesit. he is a farmer. he farms the cotton on the property rightaround it. he's not owned the farm, but he also livesin the back of this place. it's open on thursday nights and it's a discotheque.
it's been a discotheque since the 60s. i don't know that there's any tradition ofhim ever putting on live bands. this has created issue with the developmentof cultural tourism. people want to see a band in a juke joint. recently, people they want to come down andfilm a band playing at a juke joint. sometimes film companies will hire a bandto pay po monkey a couple of hundred dollars, and then try to recruit people. it's often very difficult, probably for thefilm makers, to recruit the people they'd like to see dancing, african americans.
usually a bunch of college students come overso it becomes an odd thing for the film makers, for other people who are in search of theauthentic experience. it's a very authentic experience, i think,on thursday nights when you go there. they're playing not quite hip hop but mostlysouthern soul and rnb. when there's not some tourismy kind of eventgoing on, it's a packed place where people are dancing. it actually is a juke joint in the sense thatpeople there are relaxed, they dance. they used to have strippers there on mondaynights. now that there's a lot more publicity, hedoesn't do that anymore.
no loud music. no loud ... it's interesting that means loudmusic, it's not loud music. it's rap music, okay, and that's somethingwhich i think is very interesting. if we look at development of juke joints,maybe you can ... you think about there's generally, particularly among musicians, avery strong dislike of rap music which carries a social component. it's not just a musical one, but i think youcan see that there's a lot of different forms of music which were, more or less, acceptable. if you play motown, if you play muddy waters,if you play tyrone davis 70s music but there's
a cut-off. you don't play hip hop, right? at the juke joints, it is, i wouldn't sayit's rooted in the past necessarily, because there's still a lot of contemporary southernsoul artists who get played at these type of places. there is a difference between hip hop andrap. yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. among the proprietors who are 70 years old,the whole different signifiers. no hats turned to the side, no pants pulleddown and they call these places grown folks
lounges. grown folks mean you act respectable, youdon't have your pants hanging off and so there's respect. that's an interesting issue for the survival,i think, of the juke joints. if you don't want that, well hip hop startedin the 70s so you're starting ... maybe it's the case that people who are hip hop fansback then, are now grown folks that don't want to be messing around with the currentforms of it. what kind of folks did you say? what's that?
rum folks? grown, g-r-o-w-n. you see that a lot as a signifier for, thisis for adults. don't come in here. 30 and older. 30 and older, right? yeah, exactly, right so that's ... you seethat often grown folks lounge. you kids go over there, older people, youcan be here. you don't have to be around young people withall those implications, whatever.
old people always think young people are rudeand their music is too loud, whatever. anyways, you can see he's saying there, "allpictures taken 5 dollars." there's actually somewhere you can put moneyin if you're not there. let's see what else we've got here. it's an incredible place from a folk art perspective. he has all these monkeys hanging from theceiling, photographs and you can bring stuff in. it pretty much developed probably organically. he also tends to, particularity if there'smore tourists there, he'll switch outfits.
he has a lot of very colorful suits, and he'llchange suits 5 times in a evening. he also has some pretty x rated jokes, jackin the boxes things where things pop out which are not dolls. there's a ... i'm not going to go into thattoo much. he does some things which are pretty shockingfrom a ... entertainment. when the people from boston come down, don'tknow quite what they're thinking about that. he tends not to do that when there's ... ifit's a crowd of mostly african americans, he tends to be a little bit more less of acharacter, i guess.
he's not playing the role. he's more likely to be grumpy or just watchother people. if it's tourists, he seems to be more actingthe part but anyways. it's a pretty fascinating place. there's one of him in one of his fancy suits. he's been doing this for, like i said, nearly50 years. how old is he? in his 70s. unfortunately all the guys that are runningthese joints are in their 70s.
there's rarely ever a son around who wouldseem to be the obvious heir. like i said, with red, there is definitelya ... there are sons who might take it over but i mean he seems to have made his money,probably bought his house. he probably is getting social security. he can afford to run a club and not make verymuch money. po monkey, on the other hand, is charging5 dollars to get in on thursday nights. he probably doesn't pay any rent and he maybeis bringing in sometimes a thousand dollars on a thursday night. he's selling a lot of beer, there used tobe more vice there, but he only really does
it on thursday nights. if he rents it out to the tourists then hegets, i don't know, 500 dollars plus he gets to sell beer. po monkey's got a thing going. he still does farm into his 70s, but thisis not just a hobby. it's definitely ... he's making a very goodliving, i mean relatively speaking when you consider that he's not paying rent, right? you ever ask him why he calls it po monkey? i'm not sure why he calls it po monkey.
that's his ... i can't remember what his brother'sname is, it was something else monkey. that term po monkey, you can find it in otherplaces. there's actually a juke joint in eastern maryland,maryland eastern shore, in a place called ... there's a place like boston called pomonkey maryland. i don't know what the etymology of that is. then this place is a dancehall of sorts exceptthis is on the coast. it's african american place called the 100men hall. it was a benevolent society. i don't think it was necessarily built asa dancehall but, like a lot of benevolent
societies they were denied social securityand other things like that, their original purpose as a burial society declined. in tandem with the relative decline of theelks and all those other kinds of organizations. people tend not to belong to those kind oforganizations anymore for the last 30 or 40 years. most of them have been pretty well decimated. it was the benevolent society in bay st. louiswhich is just east of new orleans. it became an important venue on the chitlin'circuit in the post-war era, post-world war ii era.
we don't really know what was going on beforethen. they may have had some concerts, but it becamea full fledged joint where you could see big jeff turner, ray charles, it was that large. deacon john also. deacon john, yes, deacon john was at the openingof it. we've had all the touring circuit. i guess the new orleans artists would comeall the way out. i don't know if they'd go to east texas ornot, but they would certainly go to florida. most of those artists who were booked by stofalls,is that right person?
who booked them, it was a circuit that wentalong the coast. they would also come up and play fraternityparties in mississippi. i don't know how much new orleans artistswent above jackson, but it was an important stop on that circuit. deacon john remembers it very well. this place was ... you probably know whatthat means, right? it was slated for destruction after katrina,had been serving as a disabled veteran's organization. had nothing to do with music after sometimein the 70s. a couple from california bought it and restoredit, formed a non-profit and a mississippi
blues trail marker was part of the dedication. part of the validation of it, bringing overdeacon john and other artists who played there. it's turned into a venue that's open, i think,once a month. they have concerts there but you can see now. the blues trail serving as a validation ofsorts for, we have an important place. we want a marker. i don't know if po monkey wanted a markeror not, but a lot of other places ... hollywood caf� in tunica which is ... what's the song? walking in memphis talks about the hollywoodcaf� in there which is not only a bluesy
reference exactly. they wanted one so we have an issue of lotsof times committees are looking for, we want a marker. can we have a marker? sometimes we can do it, sometimes we can't. we can't put one up in front of morgan freeman'sclub, it's not old enough. we can put one nearby that talks about culturaltourism and things like that. we have a lot of flexibility for interpretingthings. i want to quickly just address some of theissues i've already talked about.oh there's
bradfordsville, oh sorry. there's one from bradfordsville, florida whichi don't know very much about that. very interesting venue but that's obviouslyan older bunker type joint. that's a seating area out back, that's nota hard structure. that's a very good article by richard granton al jazeera, about the cultural tourism. it's probably about to disappear from theinternet since al jazeera no longer exists, basically stopped. anyways you can see that bentonia, it's been... that place has been used in many films over the years.
when japanese would come, if they wanted areal blues environment or background, they would film there. in recent years, yazoo county tourism hasbeen underwriting the festival. jimmy heads and jimmy runs it. it's not that people have taken over, butpart of the way that spurred the blues trail has been local communities are starting toput on municipal festivals. aiding with, how do you get people to comehere? let's put on a festival, let's get a bluesmarker, let's put on a festival. what other kind of events can we put on thattap into this imagined market of blues tourists?
po monkey's, this is an example of the deltastate, the delta center for culture and learning at the bottom. you can see that they're advertising realdelta blues in a real delta juke. they'll argue that j-o-l-k is the authenticway to spell it and that's ... they're working with cat head which is a store in clarksdale,which is a clearing house of information. i'll wrap it up right now. they also, when dollar general was puttingheadquarters in the delta, they bring them by to educate them about the community. they're modifying it but also trying to incorporateit, this is official cultural heritage now.
oh and then here, i want to talk ... i latelysaw this issue of garden and gun. my girlfriend threw it down and we weren'tsubscribers. she vowed to never look at it again becauseof this juxtaposition of, hey let's get some shabby looking buildings and some beautifulmodels. it's been an interesting process.
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