kudzurunner
4894 posts
Aug 24, 2014
2:15 PM
|
Ty Pennington brings his gravel-voiced hipster thing to Clarksdale in this fast-moving 20 minute documentary on contemporary Clarksdale. Good overview of the place. I know many of the characters he speaks to:
|
Thievin' Heathen
383 posts
Aug 24, 2014
3:25 PM
|
The Blues is still a niche market. I hope a 2nd and 3rd economic lifeline can be developed.
|
mastercaster
61 posts
Aug 24, 2014
8:24 PM
|
Very interesting .. Thanx to Adam for posting it !
|
Goldbrick
639 posts
Aug 25, 2014
6:27 AM
|
On one hand its terrific that the blues are getting exposure and Super Chiken and Young Burnside have some sweet grooves.
Civil rights tours and sleeping in a sharecropper shack ( i bet it aint cheap ) is a little creepy
I wonder if folks would stay there if they had to pick cotton all day first and get turned away at a nice hotel?
I remember being 12 years old and worried about where I might be bussed to school. That part of our country's history aint that long ago
edit to add video
Last Edited by Goldbrick on Aug 25, 2014 6:36 AM
|
Little roger
14 posts
Aug 26, 2014
6:15 AM
|
I enjoyed the documentary. I'm not sure about how comfortable I am with the setup, however. Cedric Burnside sitting on a porch being watches by white tourists? Mmmh. I was pretty much the only white face in the juke joint the Burnsides played in way back when. Strange.
On the other hand, the last time I was in Clarksdale was in the early 90s and it was very different. The museum and a haircut by Wade Walter was about it in those days. So good to see the town picking up. Good luck to them.
R
|
atty1chgo
1086 posts
Aug 26, 2014
7:26 AM
|
Bizarre Foods America went on "The Blues Trail" and hit Clarksdale. The full show was on this week on cable:
|
groyster1
2657 posts
Aug 26, 2014
12:24 PM
|
went to juke joint festival in 2013....loved it
|
Moon Cat
449 posts
Aug 27, 2014
1:41 AM
|
Little Roger: Which Juke was that? RL'S Palace or Junior's or Sue's? What year? Have we met? Look forward to hearing from you off list. jasonricci1@gmail.com
----------
www.mooncat.org
|
kudzurunner
4900 posts
Aug 27, 2014
3:36 AM
|
Unfortunately, the "Bizarre Foods" documentary offers up the same tired and cliched idea that Clarksdale/Mississippi/Southern life is suspended between the old black masters, who cook and make music in an irreplaceable way but are about to die off, and the young white inheritors, who lack the True Grit but are nevertheless all that we've got to bet on.
What gets left out of that picture is of course a younger generation of black Delta folk--both blues people and hip-hop people. They are the significant inheritors, and they're alive and well and exercising their creativity. They're invisible here.
If you'd like to know more about them, I'll highly recommend a book by anthropologist Ali Colleen Neff entitled LET THE WORLD LISTEN RIGHT: THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA HIP-HOP STORY. She lived and worked in Clarksdale for several years and she shines her light on a world of blues-creativity that the narrator of Bizarre Foods doesn't know about. She convinced me that the story of the Delta blues being a "dying art" is terribly problematic. She also convinced me that TopNotch the Villain, the rapper who takes her on a journey into the sources of his homegrown creativity, is an extraordinary artist--and a thoughtful, highly reflective one.
|
atty1chgo
1090 posts
Aug 27, 2014
5:18 AM
|
@ kudzurunner - Although I do agree with the proposition that there is a "cliched" idea about old black masters dying off and the young white inheritors taking over which circulates in force within our cultural interpretations, I do not believe that in the case of the Bizarre Foods segment that I posted above that such an idea was being promoted with an underlying racial thread.
It's a TV show, the guy who runs it happens to be a white guy, and they have a filming schedule. Should they have delayed doing what they were doing so they could find a black guy somewhere around Clarksdale to haul up there at Red's to sing and play guitar instead of the white guy that was there? I think that we are getting a tad politically correct and knee-jerk sensitive IF we think that this was intentional. Besides, their focus was food. There did not seem to be such an interpretation with regard to carrying on the tradition of food preparation in the old tradition with one racial/ethnic culture taking over from another.
What was intentional is what I saw on CBS News the other night: a segment about I-Phone texting with symbols and shortened language, and CBS hauled out three girls to demonstrate the trend, of course making sure that the PC rainbow of white, Latino/Asian, and black races were present. I find that to be MORE of a cliche in what we see on a daily basis, the idea that we have to include every ethnicity in the mix, in every set of images, so that we can all "relate" to the concept being presented (as if unless we see our own race up there on the screen, we will tune out because it doesn't connect our experiences to the subject presented). Quite the contrary, and I would maintain that the latest experience with the Little League baseball team from Chicago in the World Series showed us that it is the human being behind the ethnicity that moves the soul. I don't know anyone that wasn't moved by the young men and the way they lived the experience. It was, I believe, a breakthrough moment in America that transcended race.
Or should the show's historical researchers and advance people have done a better job in determining what is an accurate depiction of life in Clarksdale? Just asking.
Last Edited by atty1chgo on Aug 27, 2014 7:02 AM
|
kudzurunner
4904 posts
Aug 27, 2014
5:01 PM
|
atty1chgo, I certainly don't think that the Bizarre Foods guy intentionally misrepresented contemporary Clarksdale. Quite the reverse: I think he thought he was giving us the down-low truth and has absolutely no idea how one-sided his picture was. He could, if he wanted to, easily have chosen to focus on the youthful black blues inheritors who play gigs for the white folks--guys like Kingfish Ingram, Anthony "Big A" Sherrod. He wouldn't even have had to go into the black neighborhood. Again, I'll suggest that you read Ali Neff's book.
You should know by now that I am anything but knee-jerk, politically correct. Quite the reverse: I'm a centrist, a man of no party. I do my best to point out what is not being represented. I enjoyed the piece. It was amusing. I know most of the musicians and have played with some. Mark "Muleman" Massey, the white guitarist in the juke joint, is somebody I paid out of pocket to visit with my blues lit class a couple of years ago.
There are two standard scripts when white people tell blues stories these days that involve black people, especially in the Delta. One is, "The great old black bluesmen are dying off, but their young white inheritors have absorbed the tradition and are doing their best to carry it on." The other is, "The great old black bluesmen are dying off, but luckily we've managed to find some black kids who can play exactly the same music, so the real stuff is being kept alive."
Neither of those scripts makes much of any place for women, especially black female blues singers--although occasionally a young black woman who plays guitar, like Vanessia Young from Clarksdale, will be given a little shelf space. Both of these scripts write both soul-blues and hip-hop out of the script entirely. Yet those two musics are where the blues live in the contemporary black South. "Bizarre Foods" deploys the first of those two myths and it engages--without the slightest knowledge that it's doing so--in the erasure of soul-blues and hip hop. Neff's book shows precisely what is being erased, and it is the soul of contemporary Clarksdale.
I enjoyed the piece, even though I was able to think critically about it. Thanks for posting it.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Aug 27, 2014 5:03 PM
|
mastercaster
70 posts
Aug 28, 2014
2:55 AM
|
mm mm .. had to go get a rack of baby backs after watching : )
|
Goldbrick
651 posts
Aug 28, 2014
4:43 AM
|
Follow up from Kudzu's reference
LET THE WORLD LISTEN video posted in Modern Clarksdale topic
|
kudzurunner
4905 posts
Aug 28, 2014
9:23 AM
|
Goldbrick: That's a great find and I'm going to post it here. Although it begins by focusing on a young hip-hop guy--the figure at the center of Ali Neff's book--it move at the 7:30 point into a consideration of contemporary Clarksdale blues, beginning with Mr. Tater and Terry "Big T" Williams. A lot of people, including some on this forum, define their allegiance to blues by dissing hip-hop, as though the latter is somehow a sacrilege committed on the former by thugginsh young black people who refuse to embrace "their culture." The point of Neff's book and the documentary you've found is that that rift isn't intrinsic to the blues and hip-hop, both of which are expressions of the same group of people, broadly conceived: working-class black southerners who feel disenfranchised. The rift is an invention of white blues aficionados.
I may not be a fan of hip-hop--it's just not my music; I have no interest in playing it or attending shows where it's played--but if I love the blues, which I do, and I want to honor the people who make the music, I'm forced to pay attention to this strain of dirty-south hip hop. I can't just say, "Ugh! I hate the stuff!" and think that I can continue to claim that I undertand what the blues are about.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Aug 28, 2014 9:24 AM
|
JInx
865 posts
Aug 28, 2014
11:55 AM
|
good luck to them in clarksdale, soon to be the disneyland of blues.
----------
|
