During late September and early October 2012 along with friends, I visited the Mississippi Delta in search of the blues and the birth of rock and roll. But our trip started off in the most unlikely place, South Beach Miami. I very quickly came to the conclusion that if anyone stayed too long in South Beach they would feel old, overweight and that all their clothes were way, way out of fashion.
On Sunday the beach is full of beautiful people, with beautiful swimsuits and even beautiful towels. Those that were not sunbathing with a whole lot of style, were playing beach volleyball, cycling, rollerblading or jogging wearing skimpy, beautiful sportswear. Just down the road from our hotel was the house once owned by the high priest of fashion, Gianni Versace. Over a long leisurely breakfast in a restaurant on a veranda overlooking Ocean Drive, you could see a constant parade of what can only be described as supermodel types wearing the latest intricately designed material which pass for dresses here and which really amount to next to nothing and gay couples walking hand in hand, all heading to pay homage to Gianni on the steps to his former house, where on the 15th July 1997 Andrew Cunanan shot and killed him. Cunanan was an American of Philippine extraction and like Gianni was gay, but unlike Gianni, he was what the FBI called a spree killer. Before shooting Gianni he had killed at least four other people, but having killed the fashionista he shot himself days later in a boathouse in Miami docks.
By day then South Beach and the Art Deco area around Ocean Drive is a tall, slim fashion model with perfect makeup and every hair perfectly placed with perfectly tanned silky smooth skin draped in a loose, cool, flowing short dress. But just after sunrise it is a very different type of person altogether. If you happen to be up and able to walk about at this time in the morning you will catch South Beach before she has had time to put on her makeup before the perfect outfit for the day has been selected.
Doorways which by day are the entrance's to swanky shops or cafe's have by night provided a bed for old women who have long stopped applying lip gloss. They are wrapped up against the night, clutching everything they own. The beach although officially closed from midnight to 0500hrs supports whole communities, using sunbeds as beds, hotel towels as blankets and beach umbrellas laid on their sides for privacy and protection from the weather. The sea provides an early morning wash and the bins breakfast. None of these people have beautiful things, none of them have perfect skin or hair, they have matted hair, dirty nails, wrinkled faces that have been out in the sun too long without protection, their clothes are not loose, or flowing, or intricately designed, they are not even theirs but have been collected from bins, they are sadly mostly black or Hispanic.
So South Beach is not one person, it's two. Its yin and yang, its chalk and cheese, its Naomi Campbell and Worzel Gummage. But here is the strange bit, they are two people who never quite meet and for me the big question is how does this happen? No one seems to herd the Gummage's up so the Campbell's can come out and play. There isn't a bus that collects up the people from the beach every morning and drops them out of sight, there isn't a day centre that keeps them under cover all day. So where do they go? You can search as much as you like, but by day you will not see anything but beauty and perfection.
From Miami, we flew to New Orleans, collected our Harley Davidson's and headed north into Mississippi, the Delta and blues history. The first thing that hit us all was that this was a bit of America most tourists don't see. The roads were good and often empty and once you pull off the highway you very quickly find yourself in another world. Poverty is alive and well in the Delta and to be honest came as a shock. Even coming from South Africa where townships are common, this was a shock and the reason is that this is the richest country in the world, the one country most other countries look up to and yet here was real poverty.
Cotton that once made a few people rich, now makes a lot more people poor. Cotton is grown everywhere, yet now a machine has replaced hundreds of workers. The result, high unemployment and no room to start something new. South of Jackson we pulled off the highway to find the Blue Fronted Cafe, a famous and original Juke Joint. What we found was a blues legend, not just a historic Juke Joint, but its owner Jimmy "Duck" Holmes who is credited with originating a particular type of country blues. Jimmy was as old as the hills and had just come back from singing in Zurich and Paris, he explained that now was cotton picking time, but the cotton has to be dry or the machine will not pick it properly and will leave much behind. Makes you think that the old ways may be the best, cotton pickers pick cotton in all weather and they would be paid for their labour. That seems to tick a few boxes.
North of Jackson its just cotton field after cotton field and with them came a feeling of a more hand to mouth existence. The locals, however, were friendly, very friendly. Soon we were in Indianola, which is just one of a few epicentres when it comes to the history of the blues. Many years ago a youngster worked in a cotton gin in the town, in his spare time he would sing and people liked what he sang. So he moved to Memphis to make it as a singer, where he gained the nickname of Blues Boy, which over time got shortened to BB and there and then a true King of the electric guitar blues was born.
The town of Indianola is pretty much taken over with all things to do with BB, which is not a bad thing. There is a very good museum part of which is the original cotton gin that BB worked in. The museum tells the story of not just BB and the blues but of black American life in the early 1900's. In the museum is a poster which must sum up life during those times, it said. "People would work from sun up when they can see to work and would work until sundown when they can't see to work", it became know as "Can to Can't".
BB to this day owns one of the original juke joints in Indianola called Club Ebony. It goes without saying that it's on the wrong side of the railway tracks, quite literally we had to cross the railway line to get to it. From the outside it didn't look much, even quite small, but once inside it was almost the size of an aircraft hanger. I should think the only thing they have done to the place since the times when BB would play here every week and where Ike Turner, Ray Charles and the great James Brown had full houses rocking, was to install large coolers behind the bar to keep the beer chilled. Some may look and say its grubby and it is, grubby with years of music, dancing, laughing, drinking, romancing and no doubt fighting. This was very much the real deal.
We chatted with the locals many remembered the days when BB would not only get everyone inside the club dancing but also outside in the packed street. They felt that in the 80's he was at his best, one lady told me that he sits down too much now. To anyone who thought the blues was about being sad all the time, this place would be a revelation, in the words of BB himself, the blues is about the three L's, life, love and if you are lucky laughter.