by Christine Ohlman, Cover story: New Haven, Hartford, Fairfield Advocates

I was born in the Bronx with Mississippi in my blood. It was always there. I started covering Muddy Waters when I was 13 and wrote “The Seventh Sons,” a song about him and his musical nemesis Howlin’ Wolf, for The Hard Way, my first CD with Rebel Montez. I read Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Larry Brown. As a guitarist, I worshipped at the feet of Roebuck “Pops” Staples, who learned from Charlie Patton on the Dockery Plantation, and when it came time to make my first record at the age of 17, it turned out to be Staples Singers cover, “Wake Me, Shake Me.”

Yet, I’d never touched the soil of this place that is, as surely as any, my artistic home. Finally, on a bitterly cold morning in late February, I set out to make the Magnolia State my own. Home, they say, is where the heart is. I’d put that to the test, on a backroads journey.

Flying into Jackson, I relax into the sweet, hot rhythm of the South at the Mayflower Café —recommended by Eudora Welty’s niece as “one of Miss Welty’s favorites” —for a “plate lunch” of fried catfish, butter beans, fried okra, sweet tea and peach cobbler while soul singer Freddie Scott’s sixties classic “Are You Lonely For Me” plays on the jukebox. Already, I’m in heaven. Highway 49 calls. By week’s end I’ll have visited the resting place of the King of the blues harmonica, Sonny Boy Williamson, in Tutweiller, and the birthplace of the King of it all, Elvis, in Tupelo; walked the streets of Oxford and been a guest at the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, with its monster house band led by the legendary Jim Dickinson (225 seats, sold out on a Thursday night, inside a book store on the town Square—take notice, New Haven; it can be done); and traveled south, past McComb, the birthplace of both Bo Diddley and Britney Spears, all the way to New Orleans. But it’s the beginning of my journey—to Clarksdale, the cradle of the Delta Blues, via Greenwood, where its King, Robert Johnson, is buried (at least most scholars now agree he is; there are two other disputed burial plots) —that I want to tell.

Music is everywhere, the backdrop to daily life. The blues blares from speakers inside gas stations where catfish is fried and beer is sold behind the counter. It’s a delight to me—Connecticut girl that I am—this place that can claim not just one but several musical styles as birthright, this land where so many ghosts walk, reaching across space and time even today, to Cassandra Wilson, Jack White, Keb’ Mo’, John Mayer, Debbie Davies (another Connecticut girl), the North Mississippi Allstars (the sons of that same Jim Dickinson), and countless others.

I’m searching for a soul connection, tapping the bottomless well of memory. It’s the songwriter’s curse. You want the taste, the feel, the smell…all your senses want it, and need it. There might be a song in there someplace. I’m looking for new memories cloaked in remembrance, if that makes any sense…

Right away, I realize that this isn’t about the blues so much as it is about loneliness (back to Freddie Scott on the jukebox), the kind that swoops down and settles. This is a solitary journey, and the aloneness of the place is palatable immediately. Highway 49 —one half of the famous “Crossroads” that dissects Highway 61 at Clarksdale—winds through hill country to Yazoo City, where it splits into an east and west fork. I follow it past mile after mile of desolate, fallow cotton fields watered, down the years, with buckets of tears unleashed by the ugliest kind of racism. The houses are so few and far between as to be almost invisible. My heart goes out to the land, its mix of economic poverty and artistic richness. “Home” down this lonesome highway would surely be a place of refuge in every way, the bonds to family titanium-strong. So to be born into this vastness, and then to leave it—to seek a new home both artistically and in reality (I think of Muddy and Wolf, two who left the plow behind to head north up Highway 61 to Chicago)—what incredible strength and focus must that have taken?

I cross over the muddy Tallahatchie River in the late afternoon glow. Just outside Greenwood, I pull off a dirt road into the shadow-soaked graveyard next to the diminutive white clapboard Little Zion M. B. Church, and time stands still. There are perhaps only forty graves in all, and many, although far from newly-dug, are banked with mounds of dirt and rainbow-hued artificial flowers. Not those meager cone-shaped holders with a lone fake rose that we’re forced to leave at graves here; no, these are extravagant, funeral-home-style sprays and wreaths, their profusion making every grave seem fresh, every loss new. A warm wind rustles the branches, a few cars pass as folks wend their way home from work, both the light and the silence are pure and golden, and, although I’m not easily spooked, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Robert Johnson’s headstone is under a tree near the back, inscribed in a replica of his own handwriting, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jerusalem. I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He will call me from the Grave.” This most primal man, who lived so hard he’d be dead before his 28th birthday, staked out his home in glory in words every bit as strong as those in his songs.

Being around the dead should be a heartache for me, a reminder of the loss of both a mate and a bandmate in the past two years, yet here I feel solace, and joy. What is it that imbues Johnson’s relatively small recorded output with so much weight that entire artistic lives, Eric Clapton’s certainly not the least, have found their home in it? I asked my friend Rocky Lawrence, a renowned disciple of Johnson’s, and his answer was simple and beautiful: “He covers the human condition in 29 songs; ‘nuff said?” How deep is deep? Very, it turns out, and it’s all around me. I’ve never been a classic blues singer, as such, but I’ve written my own version of the blues, and sung it, and had the good fortune to sing with some who truly work the genre. Now—and I’m so grateful—I’ve touched the bottom of the well, and it feels like home.

The sun is past setting, the sky fuchsia-streaked by the time I arrive in Clarksdale for a two-day stay in the tiny “Cadillac Shack” on the grounds of the Hopson Plantation, just half a mile from the Crossroads. I have no romantic notions about the snug little Shack’s origins. It was home, once, to a sharecropper family, and I enter with respect for the toil and strife that its walls have seen. Those same walls, worn smooth in the soft lamplight, are now covered with souvenirs left by blues fans from all over the world. There’s a shiver-inducing moment as soon as I drop my suitcase on the floor. In a pile of CDs left by past visitors I find, to my wonder (I mean, what are the odds?), a Hannah Cranna disc recorded by that legendary New Haven band at Trod Nossel, my musical home for so many years, founded by the man whose death I am partly here to assuage, Doc Cavalier, and engineered by our dear friend Richard Robinson, now relocated to L.A. Home is where the heart is. Doc, Richard, and the New Haven music scene settle into the Cadillac Shack with me.

A few fellow travelers— lovers of the lonesome highway, all—are gathered around an oil-drum bonfire in front of the Plantation’s main building, sharing drinks and stories. I’m advised there’s a storm on the horizon, and it’ll be bad. Having lived, now, through our own mid-April Connecticut version of that “perfect storm”, I’m nevertheless completely unprepared for, and awed by, the fury of what passes over me later in my tiny dwelling. It’s vicious and intemperate, and comes on so suddenly, rain hammering the Shack’s tin roof relentlessly and wind howling loud enough to wake the dead. Then it’s over, as suddenly as it started, and I sleep and dream, full of new memories in this land of spirits.

Southerners take for granted the existence of ghosts. The land is haunted, and they know it, and are at ease with it. Northerners, I’ve found, have to work at it. They tend to trust the heart less, preferring the mind. Yet we are alike in this, I believe—home is wherever the heart wants, or needs, it to be.

I awake to find the Mississippi light ever-changing, from blue to gold, pink-edged, then back again, then silver as twilight falls, and in the morning, gold again. Car wheels hum on Highway 49, visible from my porch. I set off down it.

COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER REDUX (revisiting New Orleans, one year later)

The road to New Orleans is a straight shot from the East on I-10, over bayous stocked with moss-covered live oaks, fishing shacks on stilts, and long, canoe-like skiffs called pirogues in towns with exotic names like Manchac. And it’s in East New Orleans, including the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where Katrina did her worst. On the drive past the airport, all that’s missing is last year’s profusion of bright blue tarps covering roof after roof. Otherwise, this part of town is still a moonscape of boarded-up homes and businesses, littered with abandoned vehicles.

It’s been thirteen months since my last visit to Skip and Fontaine (“Cupcake”) Henderson, and I only have one night to spend before an early-morning flight. Skip had counseled me against coming for Mardi Gras this year and I’d taken his advice to heart. Helen Hill, the filmmaker shot and killed in the January dawn when she surprised an intruder at her front door, was a friend. She, her husband, and their baby lived just one neighborhood over, and the whole city had become too dangerous, Skip said, e-mailing me—with his usual lack of sentimentality—a photo of himself posed on his front porch, a vintage Fender guitar in one hand and a rifle in the other. Over dinner at Cupcake’s parents’ home, where life has resumed on the second story, the first being still unusable due to the water that stood for six weeks all around the house, the conversation turns naturally to Katrina (still being referred to as “the thing”) and the government’s lack of response and continued bungling. Yet, there are small signs of encouragement in the Hendersons’ world—the kids have had an uninterrupted year of school, and Skip’s older son has moved there from New Jersey permanently to work in social services, following in his father’s footsteps. Skip (Delta expert and founder of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, which has placed markers on Robert Johnson and Elmore James’ graves, among others) is the kind of man who tries to make a difference; in his book, the ultimate sin is inaction. He and I take a late-evening walk on Montegut Street in his Bywater neighborhood, toward a warehouse he and Fontaine owned up until a few months ago. The slogan that he’d spray-painted on its wall after “the thing” was still there, its message to the Bush administration having been filmed by Spike Lee for his Katrina documentary, When The Levees Broke, reading simply: HOPE IS NOT A PLAN.

(Of special note: Both The New Orleans Musicians Clinic and Sweet Home New Orleans, a housing relocation outreach program, continue to do invaluable work for the hard-hit music makers of the Crescent City. To learn more or to make a donation, log on to www.neworleansmusiciansclinic.org and www.sweethomeneworleans.org.)