Fate? Karma? Purgatory? Help me put a good spin on this.

@djones:

I showed my wife the video and she thought it was a spoof on pop country......I had to explain to her that it was _actual_ pop country. 

@dweller : Agreed. It is generous and thoughtful of our friends to invite us and I will try to be gracious about it and have a good time. Getting a glimpse into that world might be interesting.....in a side show sort of way.

@whart : "Take 'em down to the crossroads."

That is exactly where we will be taking them for the Juke Joint Festival. The legendary crossroads is on highway 61 right there in Clarksdale.

My connection to Clarksdale was that I lived there for 5 years as a child. My father was a 'revenuer' and busted moonshiners. He loved it.

We like going to the delta. It is a different world for sure. Our favorite thing to do is to drive down highway 61 from Memphis to New Orleans stopping along the way to enjoy good food, listen to blues and visit friends. We do not have time to make that trip this year.

@mclain, agree with you about the Vicksburg National Military Park, especially the huge gunboat they pulled out of the river and reconstructed. Vicksburg is a neat little town altogether. A bit depressed like much of Mississippi but doing okay. There is a casual rooftop restaurant on one of the taller buildings there with great views of the river. The old court house up on the bluff is also really cool and has a real throwback of a museum in it.

@thepigdog : I've lived my entire life in the deep south and the comic book, Tobacco Road, Dukes of Hazard images that pop country loves are such worn out and stupid cliche's. The musical heritage here is among the richest on the planet. It is a shame what the pop industry has done to much of it.

@orpheus10 The dinner with the 'country' musician is different from the Juke Joint Festival which is almost entirely local blues musicians a fair number of whom are relatives of Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside which is cool. Some of it is hard core delta blues as in one old guy with a guitar and that is what I like the most. 

@blindjim : Mississippi is a treasure chest of great musicians and writers. Sam Cooke was from Clarksdale. BB King was from nearby Indianola. The friends we are visiting helped do some engineering work for the BB King museum and got to meet him several times before he died. Of course most of the famous blues musicians were from Mississippi or Arkansas.

Elvis was from Mississippi.

Jimmy Buffett

Ike Turner

A slew of country and jazz music singers.

Leontyne Price (opera).

For a state so small, so poor and so backwards its contribution to literature and music is unparalleled. Rock and roll started in Mississippi.

@jbrrp1 I'll have a flask.

@whart : One of my hobbies is southern literature and criticism. I visit Faulkner's home in Oxford whenever we go. Eudora Welty's also but her home isn't all that interesting. Flannery O'Connors place in Georgia is run down but well preserved.

When you look at a lot of the web sites from these young local blues acts you will see that they frequently tour Europe, especially Scandinavia where they are greatly appreciated. At this Juke Joint Festival there are always lots of Europeans. Our friends own a B&B in a big old southern mansion and their primary customers are Europeans coming here for the blues.

@tuberist : If that video/song is a parody I'd give the guy some credit for hitting pop country right on the nose. I'd like to ask him at this event but would never do that. As much as I hate that kind of music I have no desire to put anyone down or hurt their feelings. Of course, there is a good chance he knows what sells and is just playing the market. I've seen some video of just him playing the guitar and that stuff seems a little more genuine. I hope we get more of that.

@u
Agreed. Hard to have a bad time with good old friends. 

@tomic601 : I’ve read The Sound and the Fury probably three or four times. It is difficult, disturbing and sad.....but brilliant. Not my favorite though. I’d more likely quote from Go Down, Moses or Absalom, Absalom! which is also dense and difficult but in my opinion the best novel of the post modern era, maybe the best novel in U. S. literature. Of course, not many happy quotes from any of those. 

Fortunately the deeper I get into a flask the quieter I get. 

Anyway, the country event is this coming Wednesday night and the festival is the following Saturday. I’ll report back here afterwards. 

I think I’ve confused everyone. 

My my wife and I are going to a blues festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi. We’ve been before. It is awesome. 

We have some old friends who live near there. They have invited us to stay with them in Leland Mississippi which is near Clarksdale. Every couple of months there is a dinner event usually featuring a country music singer/songwriter. They go to this event every time. Since we were going to be there when the event was happening they invited us to go. They did not even know who the musical guest would be when they bought the tickets. I doubt they’re wild about this guy either unless he has other stuff I don’t know about. Anyway, it will be a good five days of music, whiskey and southern food. Can’t complain. 

Glupson, Clarksdale is actually dead/dying except for during various blues festivals. It was much more vibrant in the late 60s. During the festival it comes alive. We were there in February 3 years ago and it was a ghost town.... I got some great B&W photographs during that trip. Maybe I’ll post them here sometime since they are more or less music related. 

It was strange but there were stencils of Robert Plant spray painted all over town. 

@slaw : "If I had this opportunity, I surely wouldn't go public. In addition, I wouldn't ask others how I should conduct myself. Another wasted thread,"

I've actually enjoyed most of the responses, including this one:

"I'd look at this as opportunity to expand my musical horizons. You just might find much to like. Hope you have a great time!"

:-)

@glupson, the guy you met was probably Bill Luckett, a prominent attorney in Clarksdale and I think he has been the mayor too.

Interesting tidbit: Morgan Freeman's son Alfonzo, lives in the same city I do and lives next door to my father-in-law and frequently comes to holiday meals with our family. A really nice guy. He's been in a number of movies and also writes gospel music.

@orpheus10 : I've never been in an actual juke joint. I've been in plenty of bars and dives but all of them mostly white. I don't think genuine juke joints exist much these days as the few that do exist have been 'recreated' for a very different 'clientele'.

@allowedsound: Agree about that video and song. It almost exactly what I would have imagined as the worst aspects of pop country put together in one song/video.

@bdp24 : Speaking of thick fingered guitar playing, we saw this young man at the 2017 Juke Joint Festival. He was about 17 then. He was mesmerizing. We watched him play in an old bank building for close to two hours. He's played at the White House and been written up in Rolling Stone. Hard to believe those big fat hands can do what he does. Scroll forward to about 2:30 to see him let loose:

https://youtu.be/FLQbQidC-Ks

@glupson and @orpheus10 : Ground Zero is like a Disney version of a juke joint and that's most of what you find in that area now. I'm sure there are modern versions of juke joints out there now....there are some where I live. But they don't play blues. Mostly 'DJs' 'playing' hip hop etc.

Anyway, I suspect if I had been an adult and was into the blues in the mid 1960s I would not have had the nerve to go into a typical juke joint. It would have been my loss of course. But things were very different back then.

My mother was a school teacher in 1966 or so and she had a black girl in her class who was one of the first black children to go to a white public school in Mississippi, or at least in Coahoma County anyway. She said it all went smoothly, which was not always the case of course.

@frogman : "To be honest, if you’re going to go into this so predisposed to hate this guy, I would find an excuse to not attend the performance; not fair to the singer."

First off, it was too late to get out of it, but second, I can behave graciously whether I like him or not.

Anyway, we are back home from Mississippi and we enjoyed the event. It was just him and his guitar so even the cheesier songs were much more palatable that way. He did quite a few songs that were decent and enjoyable. He was an excellent guitar player. In addition to that he had three other things going for him. The first was that he has written hit songs for a long list of country music superstars. The second is that between songs he told stories about his life, his songs and those big stars. The third was that he had a great sense of humor so most of the stories were witty and funny. For a writer he was very entertaining.

There was a good crowd and the food was fantastic especially the ribs and brisket. And even though it was on a Wednesday night it was a BYOB event (one cocktail provided with the meal) and the folks in the delta do some serious drinking. They can hold it too; it was never rowdy. You should have seen all the alcohol carried into that old building (old grocery converted into meat market and restaurant).

As several of you mentioned it is true that there is almost always some value to live music. That aspect of it also made the evening enjoyable. All-in-all we had a very good time.

Sadly, the blues festival was hampered by really bad weather with torrential rain, flooding and high winds. All of the outdoor events were canceled and this lead to the indoor events being extremely crowded and the rain made it hard to go from one venue to another. The mini blues festival Sunday morning fared better and we got to several good acts that we had missed the night before.