For Pete-Vacation Spot for you Long
hepron
92621
This is the article I was telling you about. Enjoy
CLARKSDALE, Miss. - ''You wanna take a shower and go see some graves?''
It's well past noon and Rick Thomas is living on Delta time, lounging on the
front porch, sipping coffee, shooting the breeze with his friend Loren
Rullman.
So far, it's been a fine trip for the blues fans, both of them Midwestern
college administrators in their 30s. They've seen not one but two reputed
burial plots of Robert Johnson, and now they're heading out to find
Mississippi John Hurt's marker. Best of all, they're staying in a unique
guesthouse that looks so rustic you wouldn't be surprised to see an old man
in bib overalls playing harmonica.
''The blues is all about feeling,'' Rullman says, ''and you really feel it
in a place like this.''
There's a rusted tin roof overhead, a leaning outhouse out back, a bottle
tree trimmed with cobalt-blue Skyy vodka bottles in the front.
A place like this? These guys are paying to sleep in a shotgun shack.
Every summer, backpacking pilgrims from around the world journey to
Mississippi to see the land where the blues was born. Never mind that John
Lee Hooker and most of the other bluesmen who started out on Delta cotton
plantations couldn't wait to get out. For true blues travelers like Thomas
and Rullman, it isn't enough to hear Robert Nighthawk coax plaintive notes
out of a slide guitar; they want to feel what gave him the blues.
No place gives them more to soak up than Clarksdale, an old cotton-trading
town of 20,000 an hour south of Memphis. In the space of a few blocks,
visitors can hit half a dozen blues clubs, see Bessie Smith's death chamber,
stand inside the cabin where Muddy Waters got his mojo working, or drive to
the crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have given his soul to the
devil in exchange for supernatural musical prowess.
And now, on top of all the live music and dead legends, Clarksdale has what
may be the world's first tourist court made up of shotgun houses. They call
it the Shack Up Inn and pitch it to the blues crowd as Mississippi's oldest
B&B - ''bed and beer.''
When I visited Clarksdale recently, I wasn't sure I wanted to stay there.
Gimmick motels are fun to look at, but it's seldom very satisfying to spend
the night in the Wigwam Village or Alamo Plaza. And this particular gimmick
comes with some heavy baggage.
As housing types go, shotguns rank not much above straw huts and
dirt-floored hovels. The classic specimen has two or three rooms stacked one
behind the other, the doorways aligned so you could shoot through the front
entry and out the back without hitting anything. Shotgun houses don't have
to be shabby, but the style is indelibly associated with mill villages,
sharecropping and all stripes of Southern poverty. Alan Lomax, the
folklorist who first recorded many of the Delta bluesmen in the 1930s and
'40s, understood in his memoirs when he discussed shotgun houses in a
chapter titled ''There Is a Hell.''
To be honest, there was another reason for my reticence. An authentic
shotgun shack would probably not have indoor plumbing. So I was relieved to
find out that the Shack Up Inn's shacks had been upgraded. The houses were
relocated from nearby plantations and retrofitted with plumbing,
electricity, air conditioning and other amenities. Otherwise, the houses
look pretty much the same, rough wooden siding and all.
''We could have Sheetrocked the walls, but that would've been so Comfort
Inn,'' says Guy Malvezzi, one of the partners in the enterprise.
The shacks are four miles outside Clarksdale on one of the oldest cotton
fiefdoms in Mississippi, the Hopson Plantation. According to the historical
marker out front, Hopson was the first plantation to convert completely to
mechanical cotton pickers, in the early 1940s. As machinery took over the
cotton belt, thousands of field hands migrated north and left their shacks
behind. The structures were bulldozed, burned down, left to the elements.
Once commonplace, they are slowly vanishing from the landscape.
James Butler, a Clarksdale man who married into the Hopson family, wanted to
save some of them. Problem was, all the worker housing on the Hopson farm
had been torn down. So he and his partners started buying shacks from other
plantations, moving them in next to the old Hopson commissary, which they
turned into a blues club. They spent thousands of dollars repairing five
shacks, putting in new systems and furnishing the interiors with vintage
pieces and a veritable flea market of Dixie kitsch, everything from Mardi
Gras beads to funeral home fans.
The result is an edgy mix of homage and irony. The people who stay at the
Shack Up Inn, blues groupies and musicians, mostly, aren't that different
from the literary tourists who want to commune with Hemingway's spirit by
lifting a glass at Sloppy Joe's in Key West. One of the guests, a guitarist
from Detroit, wasn't happy until someone took him out to play over Sonny Boy
Williamson's grave at midnight.
The notion that you could appreciate what it was like to toil on a cotton
plantation during Jim Crow days by sleeping in an air-conditioned shack is,
of course, dubious at best. Considering our history, I wasn't surprised to
hear that the Shack Up Inn had been in operation three years before it had
its first black guests.
Malvezzi checked me into the Robert Clay shack, a three-room,
450-square-foot model that's bigger than most hotel rooms I've stayed in,
only they didn't have a refrigerator on the porch. It's named for the field
hand who lived in the house for decades, raising seven sons without power or
running water. Clay is dead, but his memory inhabits the place like a
friendly ghost. His portrait hangs in an honored spot in the kitchen, over
his ironing board. His outhouse squats in the back yard, along with the
post-hole diggers he used to clean out the pit.
I sank down in the sofa and looked around. It felt authentic, all right: fly
swatter, funeral home calendar, a pastel portrait of the Kennedies and the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a massive black iron stove, the vent pipe
twittering with birds. The dim lamps and threadbare furniture made it all
feel like the inside of a tourist cabin where Bonnie and Clyde might have
hidden out.
There was a rap on the front door: Malvezzi again. ''I've got something for
you.'' He walked to the bedroom and laid a Moon Pie on the pillow. ''This is
your good-night mint. Eat it before the mice do.''
When I woke in the morning, I could see Mr. Clay's splintery outhouse
through the tattered screen of the back door. As I turned to go to the
bathroom, I wondered what he would think about all the creature comforts
that have been added to his home for tenderfoot travelers like me, and I
felt, for a moment, a little blue.
Related Story: Bessie Smith shrine a must-see on blues pilgrimage
If you go
Where to stay
. Shack Up Inn. As the Talking Heads once sang (sort of), ''You could find
yourself sleeping in a shotgun shack.'' Shacks from $50. There are five
guest houses, with a sixth on the way: the Pinetop Perkins shack, named for
the blues pianist, who used to drive tractors on the Hopson Plantation.
(662) 624-8329. The Web site is pretty amusing: www.shackupinn.com
. Riverside Hotel. The place where Bessie Smith died and numerous blues
musicians have bunked is rather seedy-looking. If John Kennedy Jr. could do
it. ... (662) 624-9168.
. Hampton Inn. If you don't feel shacky, this is the nicest of the local
chain motels. Weekend rates starting at $53. 1-800-426-7866,
www.hamptoninn.com.
Things to do
. Delta Blues Museum. Located in a former railroad depot, it has exhibits on
the wealth of musical talent that came out of the Delta. One interesting
item: the battered sign from the Three Forks juke joint, where Robert
Johnson was playing when a jealous man poisoned him with strychnine in 1938.
The centerpiece is Muddy Waters' reconstructed cabin with a life-size wax
figure of Muddy that's kind of creepy in a Talkin' Vincent Price Blues way.
(662) 627-6820, www.deltabluesmuseum.org.
. Live blues. Juke joints have been closing across the Delta, but the
tourist traffic has kept several of them going in Clarksdale. Visitors enjoy
Red's, Sarah's Kitchen, Smitty's Red Top and the Hopson Commissary (next to
the Shack Up Inn, same Web site). Morgan Freeman is a partner in the newest
club, Ground Zero. (662) 621-9009, www.groundzerobluesclub.com.
. River excursions. The Quapaw Canoe Co. offers guided trips on the
Mississippi and Sunflower rivers starting at $55 a day. (662) 627-4070,
www.island63.com.
. Casinos. An unlikely gambling mecca has sprung up between Clarksdale and
Memphis in Tunica County. The cotton fields have been transformed by 10
major casinos and hotels. 1-888-488-6422, www.tunicamiss.org.
Coming attractions
It's blues festival season in the Delta. The Mississippi Delta Blues and
Heritage Festival is down the road in Greenville on Sept. 16.
1-888-812-5837, www.deltablues.org. The King Biscuit Blues Festival takes
place across the river in Helena, Ark., Oct. 4-6. 1-870-338-8798.
www.kingbiscuitfest.org. Clarksdale has the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel
Festival, but you'll have to wait till next August. (662) 627-6820,
www.sunflowerfest.org.
The virtual tour
This is the site to visit for the widest selection of tourist information
about Clarksdale, with links to hotels, restaurants, museums and casinos. Or
call 1-800-626-3764.
For an eclectic selection of Delta merchandise, from folk art to barbecue
sauce, check out the Sunflower River Trading Co.'s site. Or call (662)
624-9389.