
          Radio Series Showcases Mississippi Blues
          By Nossiter, AdamAdam Nossiter
          Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, p. 20
          
          This is how Lee Andrew "Cotton" Howell, 72-year-old ex-sharecropper
and small-time bluesman from Holly Springs, Miss., describes the birth
of a blues song, in a new public radio series:
"Id just play. Make up something, and sing to it. Just the sound
with the music. That's the way they was made up, back in them
days."
          Howell is expressing in words what this new series graphically
demonstrates. For the blues musician of the country juke joint and the
fish fry like Howell, the line between everyday speech and the
sing-speech of the blues was a fine one. Rhythms and phrases of
everyday speech, with the help of harmonica and guitar, became
song.
          In "The Original Down Home Blues Show," a new series of radio
documentaries about the works and days of country blues singers, we
hear how close are the speech patterns of rural Southern blacks like
Howell to their music.
          The twenty-four shows consist of interviews with ten bluesmen from
north-central Mississippi, punctuated by recordings of famous players
the bluesmen listened to and idealized in years peat, as well as with
their own efforts. The programs were produced with the help of the
Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, a branch of the
university's library. The archive is the largest collection in the
world of blues recordings and documentary material about the blues.
          Broadcast already on fifteen public radio stations around the
country this year, nineteen more are elated to air the program, said
one of the show's producers, Craig Koon. He is talking to potential
underwriters in order to distribute it free to all 347 public radio
stations.
          The interviewer on the programs is the research associate of the
Blues Archive, a Swiss-born blues artist named Walter Liniger who
plays harmonica for well-known bluesman Son Thomas.
          Liniger'a aim wee to cull memories of work and social conditions
from rural Mississippi blacks, so in these programs he deliberately
stayed away from blues musicians like Thomas who have achieved
renown. Conscious of the exploitation rural musicians have suffered at
the hands of eager Ph.D. candidates, Liniger instated on paying
them.
          His artists do not, for the moat part, have memories of standing in
recording studios. Their music is considerably rougher and more
uncultivated than those who do. Moat are like 76-year-old Stonewall
Maya, who spent much of his life milking cows: "Back in them days,
they'd give a little fish fry," May remembers. "I'd play
guitar. And man--we'd get things going!"
          Even more compelling than the memories of life on the white_man's
plantations--which have, after all, been gathered elsewhere--is the
language of the old bluesmen.
          It is the poetic language of the songs, delivered without
accompaniment: "I come up the hard way. Didn't have no shoes on my
feet...Didn't have no mama or daddy. Just out there by myself,"
remembers Wilburt Lee Reliford, a blind harmonica player who once
played with Howlin' Wolf.
          The language in that reminiscence is both figurative and literal:
the absence of shoes summarizing succinctly a childhood of hardship
and deprivation; "out there by myself" abstracting the loneliness of
an orphaned youth.
          He lost his eyesight at an early age, Reliford remembers, and
"cried for about ten years." This is the semi-exaggeration of
song. Eyesight is valuable, he explains, because you can see things
before they get to you."
          Reliford, 62, still plays a powerful speaking harmonica--which he
keeps in a brown paper bag, according to Liniger.
          Famous blues artists like Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamaon,
and T Bone Walker do make musical appearances in the show. Liniger
asked his interview subjects to choose the music they listened to in
their youth. That music, pulled from the Blues Archive, helped bring
to the surface their memories of life forty and fifty years ago.
          Liniger, an intense blues enthusiast who says he reamed much of his
English listening to blues records, wee searching for the "subjective
remembering of facts" the musical memories would stir.
          Sometimes, the music is a direct reflection of those memories. In
the interviews, Howell, Mays, and Reliford talk about getting behind a
plow at the age of six, going without shoes, the ravages of the boll
weevil, and the hard times during the Depression. Then we hear Charley
Patton singing the "Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues," or Sonny Boy
Williamson plaintively pleading that he not be "sent down to that
welfare store."
          "We have a blues archive here," explained Liniger in the
cavernous room at Ole Miss which houses, among other things,
B.B. King's record collection.
          But what we actually have is a documentation of the
industry. What we don't have is field recordings documenting the
region we're in."
          That region provided a harsh livelihood for these old men: "It
was pretty rough," remembers Howell; "It wasn't easy at
all," says Mays. And yet they remember their lives with a
surprising absence of bitterness. Their life reminiscences are spiced
with memories of the things which made life pleasurable: women, fried
pies, even hard work--and above all, the life giving blues.
          "They'd pay a dime to dance. Then they'd dance round and
round," remembers Howell.
          
            Adam Nossiter covers Alabama and Mississippi for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. To learn when the series
will be broadcast in your area, or for more information, call Walter
Liniger, Blues Archive, University of Mississippi,
601-232-7753.
          
        
