The blues is a mythic aspect of Southern culture. While this important music was created in African-American communities in the South, it has since crossed many boundaries and become part of a wider national narrative. In this essay, we follow one writer’s experience in Mississippi as he attempts to explore what is perhaps the most famous blues narrative of all: the death of Robert Johnson.

Till Death Do Us Part in the Delta:
A Mississippi Odyssey
By Peter Wortsman

The Delta isn’t pretty by picture postcard standards. Desolation and despair lick every stick and brick of human habitation. Creeping vines choke abandoned shacks, the tendrils of nature reclaiming the detritus of culture. The suffocating flatness stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s a lonesome lick of land that looks like it was lifted whole out of a parched African plain and dropped in Mississippi by mistake.

But the swamps wear a haunting iridescent coat of green, and even in late November, unpicked cotton balls dangle in the fields like orphaned slow flakes. Churned up by the foaming mouths of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, this soggy triangle effused the Blues, that bittersweet blend of half-remembered griot chants and plantation field hollers filtered through the parched throats and plucked on the broken heartstrings of the sons and daughters of the enslaved. A moaned anthem of survival, whetted with whiskey, lust, anger, anguish and longing, the Blues are the half brother of Jazz and granddaddy of Rock ‘n Roll, and, arguably, America’s greatest homegrown musical gift to the world.

In 2000, driving through Morgan City — an abbreviated urban sprawl of bare cinder-block dwellings and immobilized mobile homes that never quite got started — I pulled into a combination gas station-convenience store. Two bone-thin, old black men sat out front gently rocking on straw settees not originally meant for motion. They suddenly stopped rocking and turned their heads as one as I climbed out of the car, wary of my white face like an invading chess piece from the far side of the board.

“Pardon me,” I said, pained to be the cause of their distress, “I’m looking for the grave of Robert Johnson.”

They stared back in stony silence, two black knights holding the fort.

“Ro-bert John-son,” I enunciated clearly, lest my Yankee accent be the problem, “I heard he’s buried hereabouts.”

They looked me over hard and long. “You done come too late, Mister,” the one with a tick in his right eye finally spoke up, “the hearse rolled by ‘bout ‘n hour ago.”

I couldn’t tell if I was being ribbed, riled or just plain misunderstood.

“You c’n try’n catch up with ‘em at the graveyard if they ain’t done diggin’ yet,” the other man tried to console me.

“I don’t believe we’re talking about the same man,” I said, choking back an involuntary chuckle.

“Ain’t but one Robert Johnson in Morgan City,” my first informant fired back, his right eye ticking up a storm, “’n he be bound for Kingdom Come by now!”

“I beg your pardon,” I replied, “I mean the Bluesman who’s been dead and gone for decades!”

At this point, a third man, who’d been listening in from behind a torn screen door, hollered: — “I’ll tell ya where he laid to rest, Mister, if you buy me a beer.”

I was thirsty myself and happy to oblige with beers all around.

“He a legend after his life!” the third man nodded.

I raised my can in a proposed toast: “To the King of the Delta Blues!”

“It be white man music now.” He flashed me a canny cross between a chuckle and a smirk. “They done bleached out the black ‘n milked out the blue.” Laughter leaked through the gaps in his teeth. “But my man, he hoodwinked the Grim Reaper, split his self in two so nobody’d never track him down. They had to go ‘n bury him twice.”

The sun was sinking in the sky and Robert Johnsons were multiplying by the minute.

Finally fathoming whom I meant, the two men on the straw settees had a difference of opinion. The one with the tick in his right eye insisted he was buried “out by Mount Zion just up the road, not the first turn-off, but the second, betwixt the three-wheeled trailer and the tar-topped barn.”

“As God is my witness,” the second man solemnly shook his head and continued, “his bones be laid to rest at the Payne Chapel Missionary Church in Quito.”

Now the third man grinned triumphant: “Ain’t none o’ you knows the truth! He ‘as poisoned back o’ Three Forks to Quito, ‘n funeralized at Payne Chapel alright, but his sistah, she had him dug up again ‘n laid in at Mt. Zion, closer to home.”

Reticent as I was to take sides, I only had time for one tomb.

Chasing the setting sun down Highway 7, as directed, turning right onto a nameless dirt road between the three-wheeled trailer and the tar-topped barn, I soon enough found Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, a little white clapboard chapel that rose suddenly out of the swamp. It was a peaceful last resting place for a man who had, according to legend, learned his guitar licks from the Devil himself, in exchange for his soul.

I sat in the car, with a CD in the slot and a ghost growling, groaning, crooning and clowning, laughing at fortune and moaning at fate, mercilessly tickling guitar strings to a stride, strut, syncopated counterpoint or bottleneck stride, as needed, more like a composite choir and band than a lonesome solo, singing:

“The blue-u-u-u-ues
is a low-down shakin’ chill
You ain’t never had ‘em, I
hope you never will…”

I listened hard, trying to conjure up the face of that black Rimbaud, narrating his own protracted season in hell:

“Umm mmm mmm mmm
blues fallin’ down like hail
blues fallin’ down like hail
And the days keeps on worryin’ me
there’s a hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail…”

Lost in musical reverie, I didn’t notice a car that pulled up alongside.

“You in any kind of trouble?” The young black man at the wheel, his wife beside him and two little boys in the back seat, all eyed me with a mix of curiosity and suspicion.

“I’ve come to pay my respects to the memory of a great man,” I said to set their minds at rest, remembering the unsolved rash of black church burnings several summers ago.

“It’s alright, Mister, you can go on in!” the driver nodded and drove off.

A gray granite obelisk, oddly Egyptian looking for a cenotaph plunked in Mississippi mud, immediately stood out among the tombstones. Graced on one side with a grinning five-and-dime store snapshot, “You may bury my body/down by the highway side,” it said on the second side; and the third was covered with the titles of songs listed in bold capital letters like great victories on a war memorial, which in a way they were, victories of the spirit: LOVE IN VAIN, LITTLE QUEEN OF SPADES, HELLHOUND ON MY TRAIL, ME AND THE DEVIL BLUES, et al.

I don’t remember what it said on the fourth side. But behind the obelisk, a little off to the left, I noticed a freshly dug grave. Leaning in for a look, the somberness of the locale notwithstanding, I had to laugh. A hand-scrawled card on a pike identified the final resting place of Robert Johnson, the other Robert Johnson.

 

A former editor of Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, Peter Wortsman is the author of works of fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. A Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2010), his writing has been honored with the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award (1985) and an Independent Publishers Book Award (2013).

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“Till Death Do Us Part in the Delta: A Mississippi Odyssey” originally appeared on the now-defunct website “Shaking Like a Mountain,” July 2007.

Lesson Plan: NH-MSF-Lesson-Plan The Outsider