Notes From A Big Moon Night In Mississippi

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”― Daniel J. Boorstin

I have been spending time in Mississippi this week at Zebra Ranch Studio with Luther Dickinson for the second Ethan Daniel Davidson session, recording his new record.  We just finished rough mixes and it is LATE. Luther put together an all-star cast of characters for the session, including the most-recent Robert Plant Band of Joy rhythm second Marco Giovino (on drums…who also recorded and toured with John Cale for years) and Byron House (on bass), North Mississippi All-Star (and Ne-Yo guitarist) Ray Ray Holloman and of course Luther.  I sat deep listening with wizardly engineer Kevin Houston at the studio desk as the band consumed Ethan’s demos and created gorgeous arrangements, song after song, all under the watchful eye of Jim Dickinson, painted portrait hangs watching over the studio he built.

David Kimbrough (RIP) & Duwayne Burnside at Junior’s Juke Joint in the late 90s/early 2000s

We finished work early this past Sunday night so we could drive up to Holly Springs to hit Duwayne Burnside’s juke joint. It has been years since I had been to a proper juke joint…a pop-up quasi-legal nightclub that features local blues musicians, many times operated by such players who use it as a home-base of audio operations, catering to the local friends and fans.  While juke joints have been going for decades, long before I first ventured down to Mississippi, the famous ones of recent years (ha…recent decades…damn I am getting old) included Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint off State Highway 4 in the hill country of northern Mississippi, and Red’s Lounge near the crossroads of Clarksdale deep in the delta, where T-Model Ford would often play. Both Kimbrough and Ford have passed, with Kimbrough’s place falling victim to arson.  And for an outsider yet frequent southern traveler like myself, besides Foxfire Ranch that presents more of an official, legit juke experience, there have not been any notable joints whose lore have made it outside the community they serve.

But when a juke joint is hopping, there really is no better place to bear witness to the primal blues.  The parking lot was packed full around Duwayne’s place, which was located in a fairly innocuous cinder-block one-story building right past the Dollar Store in Holly Springs.  The inside of the club was just as plain as the outside, with one room to the left of the entrance where you could buy cold beers and bad hard liquor, and one room to the right where the musicians were playing tucked into the corner lit up by overhead party-lights that had been drilled into the ceiling.  Opposite the band, was a table offering fried chicken, pickled eggs and various salads and between was a semi-circle of card-table chairs set-up to watch the music.  Duwayne was mid-infinity-set as we walked in, playing ringmaster to the rotating cast of characters who became his band of the moment.

RL Burnside & Junior Kimbrough

There are two incredible blues families in Holly Springs, Mississippi: The Kimbroughs and the Burnsides.  These families came to the national stage from the work of Robert Palmer, with his articles and documentary on the hill country scene (Deep Blues, with Dave Stewart) which dove into this incredible area-focused blues sound, and the records that patriarchs Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside released on Fat Possum over the next decade. Those records defined the modern hill country sound, with its repetitive rhythm and riffs, a simpler more jam-stylin’ blues to its cousin in the delta…perfect for late night parties and yes, juke joints; they created a vocabulary through signature songs like Goin’ Down South, All Night Long, Old Black Mattie and Shake ‘em On Down: songs that most players in the area included in their sets, passed down from generation to generation like stories from the bible. 

Both RL and Junior had a lot of kids who also had kids, many of them taking up the blues family business, often playing together in bands. Cedric Burnside, RL’s grandson who was also his drummer during the bluesman’s most famous later career chapters, is probably the most known of the families, with a recent Grammy-winning album now to his credit and regular national and international touring.  Many Burnsides and Kimbroughs were present at Duwayne’s place this past Sunday night. Junior’s kids have a distinct resemblance to their father, and it was easy to pick out a few walking around. The band that was playing as we entered featured Duwayne on guitar and the mighty Kenny Brown next to him with a slide in hand singing up the neck of his guitar. Brown was the third member of the classic RL Burnside trio (along with Cedric), who recently marked his 70th year by touring the world with the Black Keys.

Duwayne, Kenny Brown, Luther, unidentified singer, unidentified guitarist

Over the course of the few hours we were there, Duwayne rarely left his station as the front and center leader, ushering players in and out of his band…immediately luring in Luther as soon as he spotted him in the crowd.  Duwayne commanded the loudest, thickest guitar sound, a weapon he used to radically change course to a new song as the band was half-way through another.  He would lock eyes with his band, talking with his smiling eyes and fingers on his strings, haphazardly leading them through a flow from the hill country blues to more of a Chicago style blues to a sloppy you-had-to-be-there-to-understand other style of blues. Duwayne took some time to run through the hill country classics, like a stars-on-45 record, interrupting the groove of one song by playing over the band a groove of another—in a totally different key, with the loudest guitar in the room as his gavel—the band picking up where he was going and pressing on.  With every change he talked to his audience, often shaking their hands as they walked by, even letting an older man in a wheelchair strum his guitar while he formed the chords.  He conversed through a muffled microphone to his friends and new friends in his club, ear to ear smiling as he played and talked and swapped out musicians all night long.  When he let the band hang on a classic riff for more than a minute, when they all locked in together chugging out a classic hill country rhythm, it was pure life affirming stuff.  But watch out, Duwayne was not prepared to let it last for long.  He was playing for the home crowd who loved him, sloppy but brilliant on a cold cold big yellow mooned hill country night.

At one point he invited Ray Ray to sit in, and the young truly inspired musician became an instant legend in the space by playing epic guitar leads and tide-breaking riffs that were so impressive, that after Duwayne failed at being able to boost his guitar volume through the amp he was plugged into, instead swapped his orchestra-leading guitar with Ray Ray, as if momentarily passing his crown. For a moment, it really felt like the jam was going to go…as the song says….all night long.

Do you want to know if blues is alive in the hills of Mississippi, which seems to be the eternal question on the quills of the music journalist? Just go down to Holly Springs on a Sunday and see how very much alive it is…and hear a sound you can only hear by going down south.

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New Release: Träd, Gräs och Stenar: A Collective History

Psychedelic journeying Swedish band Träd, Gräs och Stenar went from being that band from Sweden that for collectors and enthusiasts was impossible to find to having multiple reissues, a boxset, a boxset of their earlier incarnation Harvester, and a boxset of their even earlier incarnation, Pärson Sound (my least favorite of the three). This book seems to be the crown for the all of the music, with tons of artwork included…

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New Langston Hughes Exhibition Focuses on Relationships with Black Artists and Writers

Happy Birthday +1 to Langston Hughes. And meanwhile, this new collection looks very intriguing: “Notable additions to the exhibition from the Schomburg’s collections include a watercolor by Joseph Barker of Langston Hughes home on East 127th Street, a letter from Hughes to playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and four LPs of poetry, two featuring Hughes as a collaborator with Harry Belafonte and Margaret Danner.”

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Slow Horses Renewed for Season 5 at Apple TV+; Season 4 Premiere Date TBA

We just watched season 3 of Slow Horses…and it was seat of your pants incredible spy stuff. Best show I have seen on television in a while. Season 4 looks great (but which Slow Horse will die?)….and even though it is not being aired til later this year….it looks like there will be even more!

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The artists are present: Ernst Scheidegger’s images of Dalí, Max Bill and more – in pictures

A great article with many great photographs included: “The Swiss photographer spent his early years shooting children in orphanages and prison – before turning his talents to capturing the 20th century’s greatest painters”

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Psychedelic Mushrooms Existed Millions of Years Before Humans, Largest-Ever Study Reveals

“Dentinger and his team found that psilocybin-making in Psilocybe sprung up in evolutionary history around 65 million years ago. To put that in perspective, the earliest human species appeared on the scene roughly 2 million years ago, with modern Homo sapiens evolving 300,000 years ago…What’s more, they found that the mushrooms evolved two independent ways of making psilocybin, one of which was previously undiscovered.”

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New Library of Congress Magazine available now online

The always great rag from the LOC (available as a free download) features a fascinating look at Margaret Armstrong, the designer who “ushered in an era of brilliant book cover design” as well as a deep dive into “the evolution of 20th-century American style.”

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Poem Of Night

By: Galway Kinnell

I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it's a shock to feel underneath them

The bones smile.

Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.

2

I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand--and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.

3

A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.

4

Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.

5

And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.

I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in a place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave towards the emptiness.

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While in Mississippi, I went by RL Boyce’s place in Como which burned down shortly after he passed away. Here are some pictures of the wreckage…

RL Boyce’s bedroom

“I have no other passion to keep me in breath. What avarice, ambition, quarrels, law suits do for others who, like me, have no particular vocation, love would much more commodiously do; it would restore to me vigilance, sobriety, grace, and the care of my person; it would reassure my countenance, so that the grimaces of old age, those deformed and dismal looks, might not come to disgrace it; would again put me upon sound and wise studies, by which I might render myself more loved and esteemed, clearing my mind of the despair of itself and of its use, and redintegrating it to itself; would divert me from a thousand troublesome thoughts, a thousand melancholic humours that idleness and the ill posture of our health loads us withal at such an age; would warm again, in dreams at least, the blood that nature is abandoning; would hold up the chin, and a little stretch out the nerves, the vigour and gaiety of life of that poor man who is going full drive towards his ruin.”
― Michel de Montaigne