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


My wife and I are heading out to Clarksdale, Mississippi for the Juke Joint Festival which is primarily a blues festival for local delta and hill country blues acts. It is a ton of fun.

We are staying with some old friends in a nearby town. They have graciously invited us to a music series hosted by local country music singer and songwriter Steve Azar. The event occurs every couple of months and features a meal by a prominent local chef (featured in Southern Living, Garden and Gun, etc) as well as cocktails and a casual performance and interview with other songwriters and musicians. It is a small group and the guests interact with the guest musicians. The tickets are fairly pricey and our friends have insisted on buying our tickets.

Other than their love of country music our musical tastes are similar to our friend's. They are going with us to the blues festival. They are also into Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, etc.

The guest musician/songwriter is named Anthony Smith. I'd never heard of him. Apparently he has written songs for some big names in the country music world as has the host, Steve Azar.

Now, I don't hate country music per se. But I have a hard time with contemporary pop country. Here is a video of Anthony Smith's:

https://youtu.be/sbNVTh2QA7k

It is going to be a long night. Fortunately the music will be acoustic. Just the guest with his guitar. I suspect the food will be great and there will be plenty of booze. And I guess it will be interesting to get some insight into the singer/songwriter world even if it is pop country.

I just think it is funny that the one type of music I can hardly stand is what is being featured. I'd prefer hip-hop or rap to pop country ;-)
n80

Albert King played every juke joint between St. Louis and where he was from in Mississippi. When he was in St. Louis, he lived in Eagle Park Acres, a place where at night, it was so dark that your headlights had a hard time penetrating it, just like in Mississippi; he was my favorite, I saw him a lot, I was a "juke joint" specialist.
I am lucky enough to have seen and heard Albert King live, but it wasn't in a juke joint. Bill Graham put together great bills at the Fillmore Auditorium (the original, in the Fillmore district---a "negro" neighborhood of San Francisco), and that is where I saw him (as well as Cream, and many others). You would not believe how much Albert sweated! He played his Gibson Flying V, and hearing him I realized immediately from whom Clapton copped a lot of his guitar style.
Woah. Pop Country songwriting can occasionally be really good, on a craft level, but that video is SO much worse than I was expecting.
@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.

n80, there were a lot of juke joints in E. St. Louis, Ill, and while Black, a lot of White people went to them; oddly enough, they were treated as guests, and had fewer problems than other Black people; this was in the late 50's and 60's.

Since girls was my one track mission, I never paid a lot of attention to the music, and even then I was into jazz; but I remember the music and think about it more now. The music was a blues "Gumbo", and NOLA music was deep in the mix.

All of the Blues artists of that era, who are now famous, played the juke joints, and there were a few white musicians (all on guitar) who played them as well. As good as they were, I don't know if any became famous; this was long before SRV.