In the July 2018 Edition of Stereophile Jim Austin, the columnist for My Backpages, wrote an article titled “Highway 61 Revisited.” In the piece Jim describes his visit to Clarksdale, Mississippi, a small city in which many famous blues musicians were born.
Jim finds Clarksdale today to not be “the rural Deep South I know.” He explores a mix of Southern blues clubs that do not try to hide their authentic grit and natural decay, as well as a club owned by Hollywood and local celebrities that is “juke-joint authentic, real but not infectious.”
Then he writes the insightful and powerful paragraph which prompted me to post this thread:
Jim finds Clarksdale today to not be “the rural Deep South I know.” He explores a mix of Southern blues clubs that do not try to hide their authentic grit and natural decay, as well as a club owned by Hollywood and local celebrities that is “juke-joint authentic, real but not infectious.”
Then he writes the insightful and powerful paragraph which prompted me to post this thread:
You can’t force things back the way they were, and you wouldn’t want to if you could. The blues gestated on the porches of African-American shacks — gritty, impoverished places — in the minds, throats, and fingers of former slaves. The roots of the blues — hence of all America’s music, including jazz and rock ‘n’ roll — are in that suffering and the effort to redeem it through art, or at least to find peace.