The Blues - part 2

     In the deep south, the Blues are not "only" music, they are everyday life, the struggle, the heat, the droughts and the resulting poor cotton crop, the scarce land, the joy of life in general, the dancing, the singing, the desperation, and the no way out of the people that life the everyday life. A waitress in Natchez might net be as elegant and sophisticated as in Mahattan, maybe she doesn't know how to pour wine the "right" way. Well, but she will do it from the heart, and with a motherly smile, and she wont be cocky and have no bad attitudes.
     It's most impressive to stand in front of Charley Patton's tombstone, the "Voice of the Delta", who once sang the Blues and sweet talked the women down at Dockery Farms, while their men worked the fields from sun up to sun down. His cemetery is not an nice one, it's rather a piece of dried out land in the middle of the cotton fields. Nothing pretty, but there lies Charley Patton!
     No, not a lot is pretty about Mississippi and the Blues, but you can let yourself go, suck it all up, and who knows, this experience might be a chance to get new points of view on how to look at one's own life.
     To conclude, here's one of Willie Dixon's wise answers to the ever returning question of a journalist, what the Blues were all about:"The Blues are the true facts of life!"
     I let those words ring for a while …

Blues always

Philipp Fankhauser