David Griffiths

About 23 years ago, I wrote this column for the Sun Journal. Have things got any better these days? You be the judge:

I rolled into Clarksdale, Mississippi, on a steamy Saturday evening in 1996 just as the famous Delta Blues Museum was closing. The young lady turning the key read my frown and told me to go to Smitty’s about 9 o’clock. Local blues man Wesley “Mississippi June Bug” Jefferson was playing. I thanked her and found a motel with a swimming pool.

A few hours later I wandered through downtown Clarksdale. It was bleak and tired with vacant storefronts and trash in the streets and and football-size chunks of  masonry chipping off the sidewalks. Across the weedy railroad tracks, on Yazoo Street, I found Smitty’s on a block crammed with unpainted plantation-style shacks no wider than a single-car garage.

Through the twilight of late June came shouts and laughter from darkening porches. On the street, kids with dust-caked eyebrows and hair grinned at me and yelled, “Hi, mister.” Across from Smitty’s was a cold black and gray scar that used to be a house. It was down to cinders and a few stubby, charred uprights. My guess is the fire department just let it burn.

Smitty’s itself was a cinderblock structure with a faded, crumbling sign that said “Tip Top.” Windowless, it looked vacant, but I took it for Smitty’s because nothing else on that block could have been a bar. I put my wallet in the front pocket of my shorts. You probably would have done the same. It was that kind of neighborhood, or so I thought.

Not much bigger than a classroom, Smitty’s had a bar down the left side and a floor-level bandstand in back. The only light came from neon beer signs, a tiny lamp over the old-fashioned cash register behind the bar, and a naked yellow bulb hanging over the sleepy old gent who asked for a $2 cover. At long, church-style picnic tables with metal folding chairs a few couples poured drinks out of brown paper bags and kissed each other. The place was air-conditioned, but barely.

Being the only white in the place, I drew a few cursory glances and a greeting from a slightly built man who stuck his hand out and identified himself as “James, the owner.” He told me I’d like the music and motioned the young bartender over. I went for the $2 beer, a 16-ounce Blatz that she produced out of an ancient refrigerator.

Before long, Wesley Jefferson showed up with his band. They started slowly, going through some ragged rhythm and blues while the joint filled up. Almost from the start, one old drunk with a gray beard and filthy shirt and a towel around his neck danced up and down between the bar and the tables. No one paid him any mind. When he spilled a few drops of beer on the Formica, the bartender mopped it up pronto, leaving a strong ammonia smell that lingered.

Eventually, three or four other whites drifted in. The way they melted into the crowd at the tables, they must have been local blues fans. One of them, a tall middle-aged woman with thick, bouncy yellow hair, got up and danced to “Mustang Sally” with the band’s harmonica man, who wore a T-shirt that said “Jesus Jones” on the front and had a big-eyed comical black and yellow painting of what appeared to be an African mask on the front.

The crowd and the band warmed up and jumped into James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” then some stomping get-up-and-move-your-damn-feet blues I didn’t recognize. The owner, James, appeared at my elbow with a copy of the band’s CD. On the front were these words from “Mississippi June Bug” Jefferson: “We know where we come from. We don’t where we’re goin’.”

At the first break, Jefferson strolled by and I thanked him for his music. He grinned and nodded. A couple guys tried to buy me a beer, but James had already ordered another tall Blatz. He wouldn’t take my money. Next week, he told me, “Mississippi Morris,” a blind Black man with white sidemen, would be here. I lied and told him I’d be back, knowing that my copy editor’s job at the Tulsa World newspaper was a good eight hours away. I’ve often wished I’d gone back the following weekend.

Back when country music tunes were actually distinguishable one from another, my wife and I frequented raucous dances at VFW clubs and Elk clubs and the like in rural Maryland. Would a traveling Black man have been welcome in such venues in many sections of America?

I still have my doubts.

David Griffiths, a retired journalist, was an Army artillery officer in West Germany and Vietnam. He lives in Mechanic Falls.