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TRAIN HOOTER BLARES | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
This is the great state of Mississippi, | 0:00:15 | 0:00:19 | |
the most fertile place in America but conversely one of the poorest, too. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:24 | |
I'm here because I love the blues | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
but as someone who's interested in food, I've been fascinated by | 0:00:27 | 0:00:31 | |
the much-loved southern dishes ingrained in those lyrics - | 0:00:31 | 0:00:35 | |
cornbread and butter beans, black eyed peas, fried chicken and turnip greens. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:41 | |
They call it "soul food" here, and it's one of those | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
vital things people miss when they escape the Delta. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:49 | |
This is a journey into the land of the Delta Blues, guided by the tunes | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
and the words I've enjoyed for the best part of 50 years. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:58 | |
It's also about the myths surrounding this powerful music. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:02 | |
A journey to find out what's real and what ain't. | 0:01:02 | 0:01:06 | |
# I'm a blues man | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
# I'm a blues man | 0:01:24 | 0:01:26 | |
# All over Mississippi... # | 0:01:26 | 0:01:28 | |
This is Terry Harmonica Bean, famous on the Delta Blues circuit. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:45 | |
A real blues man. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:47 | |
# I was raised up | 0:01:48 | 0:01:49 | |
# On guinea weed | 0:01:50 | 0:01:51 | |
# Cornbread | 0:01:53 | 0:01:54 | |
# Collared greens | 0:01:54 | 0:01:56 | |
# Black-eyed beans | 0:01:56 | 0:01:58 | |
# Turnips in my mouth | 0:01:58 | 0:02:00 | |
# And Muddy Waters | 0:02:00 | 0:02:02 | |
# All you people | 0:02:03 | 0:02:05 | |
# Better get ready for the blues | 0:02:05 | 0:02:08 | |
# I'm a blues man | 0:02:08 | 0:02:10 | |
# I'm a blues man | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
# Yes, I am | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
# Yeah | 0:02:20 | 0:02:22 | |
# Whoa. # | 0:02:22 | 0:02:23 | |
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE | 0:02:34 | 0:02:38 | |
Ah-hey! | 0:02:38 | 0:02:40 | |
Blues in the house! Terry "Harmonica" Bean. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:44 | |
You know the blues, I mean, it means a lot to you, | 0:02:46 | 0:02:49 | |
but does it mean a lot to black, young black people any more? | 0:02:49 | 0:02:53 | |
The young whites! The young whites is into the blues. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:56 | |
-Right. -The young blacks think it's depressing - they don't understand it. | 0:02:56 | 0:03:01 | |
You got to study it. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:03 | |
And they'll say, "Well if you're a black person you can play the blues." | 0:03:04 | 0:03:08 | |
Just cos you're black don't mean you can play the blues. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:11 | |
There's a lot of peoples don't like the blues. Black peoples. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:16 | |
-Don't like it. -Don't like it! | 0:03:16 | 0:03:17 | |
If it ain't nothing there, you can't get nothing out! | 0:03:17 | 0:03:21 | |
What did the blues do to me when I first heard it? | 0:03:25 | 0:03:29 | |
It grabbed me. | 0:03:29 | 0:03:30 | |
I can actually recall the precise time when I got turned on to the blues. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
It must have been about 1962, 1963 and I was at boarding school. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:53 | |
This friend of mine said, "Come and listen to this." | 0:03:53 | 0:03:56 | |
I went into his... We had studies then | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
and he had a Danset player, but an automatic Danset and I can remember the label - | 0:03:59 | 0:04:04 | |
it was blue and cream, Chess Records. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
And it was Howlin' Wolf, Smoke Stack Lightning. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:11 | |
A-WOO-OOH! Like that and to me, | 0:04:11 | 0:04:15 | |
it went straight through me because I'd never heard anything like it, I'd never heard anything | 0:04:15 | 0:04:19 | |
with such sort of balls, I suppose. Such a sort of howl, such a sort of naked human howl and I was hooked. | 0:04:19 | 0:04:27 | |
# Oh, oh | 0:04:28 | 0:04:29 | |
# Smoke stack lightning | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
# Shining | 0:04:33 | 0:04:35 | |
# Just like gold | 0:04:35 | 0:04:36 | |
# Don't you hear me crying? | 0:04:36 | 0:04:40 | |
# Ooh, ooh... # | 0:04:40 | 0:04:41 | |
I was brought up with people like Cliff Richard and other rather sort of wimpish English groups. | 0:04:41 | 0:04:47 | |
I was into Elvis but by then Elvis was | 0:04:47 | 0:04:50 | |
doing things like GI Blues and had gone a bit sort wimpish himself. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:54 | |
So this was just, like, I HAD to know more about it. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
And of course at the same time there were lots of young, urban English boys who had turned on to it too. | 0:04:57 | 0:05:04 | |
I mean, the Rolling Stones, of course, Eric Clapton and The Yardbirds. | 0:05:04 | 0:05:09 | |
I think, for all of us - I'm obviously not a rock band, | 0:05:09 | 0:05:13 | |
a rock musician - it was just that sort of earthiness, that extreme | 0:05:13 | 0:05:17 | |
sort of power that came through and we had to have more of it! | 0:05:17 | 0:05:21 | |
Just driving along, I can't help thinking this whole landscape is so familiar. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:29 | |
It's all those album covers from the '60s and '70s. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:33 | |
# I am the little red rooster... # | 0:05:33 | 0:05:36 | |
Blues lovers who've been here before told me to stay at the Shack Up Inn. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
It was an old cotton gin where they used to clean and chop up the cotton | 0:05:40 | 0:05:44 | |
and pack it into huge bales. And it's set on a plantation just outside of Clarksdale, | 0:05:44 | 0:05:50 | |
the epicentre of the Delta Blues. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:53 | |
What better place to put you in the mood. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:57 | |
I really like the fact that nobody's heard of me here! | 0:05:57 | 0:06:01 | |
I'm just another blues fan from England struggling | 0:06:01 | 0:06:04 | |
with the 102 degrees, but what a lovely place to start a journey. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:10 | |
No fancy reception and lifts, just lots of rusty corrugated iron and lots of old, carefully chosen junk. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:19 | |
Good Lord! | 0:06:20 | 0:06:22 | |
Wow! | 0:06:23 | 0:06:25 | |
I mean, I had thought it was going to be rickety | 0:06:25 | 0:06:27 | |
but I didn't really have any idea it was going to be like this! | 0:06:27 | 0:06:30 | |
Look at the ceiling, rusty old corrugated iron on the ceiling | 0:06:30 | 0:06:35 | |
and old planks, look like old floorboards or something there. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:39 | |
My God. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:41 | |
It's fabulous! I can think of a lot of people that would really, really not like this, but I love it. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:47 | |
Look at that. "Listed on the national register of rickety old places." Ah! | 0:06:47 | 0:06:54 | |
The Fullilove Shack. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:57 | |
"Bring your wife or your girlfriend. Heck! Bring both of them." | 0:06:57 | 0:07:02 | |
I don't think so. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:04 | |
Farming cotton was done by sharecroppers, families who were responsible for a parcel | 0:07:10 | 0:07:15 | |
of land on which they had to grow a yield of cotton, and then share it with the landowner. | 0:07:15 | 0:07:21 | |
Slavery, according to the history books, had finished in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. | 0:07:21 | 0:07:28 | |
Share-cropping was a way to put the emancipated black people | 0:07:28 | 0:07:33 | |
and poor whites back to work on the land. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
Slavery was dead, | 0:07:36 | 0:07:38 | |
but many thought at the time it was in name only. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:43 | |
If there was no Mississippi, there'd be no blues. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:52 | |
The mighty Mississippi, nearly 2,500 miles long, flowing from Minnesota in the north | 0:07:52 | 0:07:59 | |
of the country and then meandering south, draining the water from the Rockies, Appalachian Mountains | 0:07:59 | 0:08:06 | |
and half the states in America, and then fanning out into the Delta, so rich and fertile - | 0:08:06 | 0:08:13 | |
a vast area where anything can grow. | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
And what grew best was cotton. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:20 | |
The rest, as they say, is history. | 0:08:20 | 0:08:23 | |
I wanted to see the river close up shortly after the massive floods | 0:08:27 | 0:08:31 | |
and I went with John Ruskey, a consummate river man straight out of Daniel Boone. | 0:08:31 | 0:08:38 | |
This is so peaceful. I was just thinking it was like going through a cathedral, in a funny sort of way. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:45 | |
The canopy spreads makes such big open spaces that you can't help but | 0:08:45 | 0:08:50 | |
feeling lifted upwards into Heaven or into a higher place. | 0:08:50 | 0:08:56 | |
It opens your imagination. | 0:08:56 | 0:08:59 | |
You know we're doing this programme about the blues - how do you see the river fitting into all that? | 0:08:59 | 0:09:04 | |
The river created this very fertile, rich landscape the blues was born in. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:11 | |
The first plantation owners knew they could make gold out of the mud. And that was through cotton, you know. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:19 | |
It used to be a jungle, you know, this was the Amazon of North America. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:25 | |
And the top soils | 0:09:25 | 0:09:26 | |
that averaged 32 and sometimes as deep as 350 feet. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:33 | |
Wow, that is enormously deep. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:36 | |
And you can feel that, that fertility and power in blues music. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:42 | |
The river created the landscape that created the blues. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:46 | |
Can we get out on the main channel? | 0:09:47 | 0:09:49 | |
It's not dangerous today, is it? | 0:09:49 | 0:09:52 | |
It's always dangerous but we'll go in a safe place. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:54 | |
OK. Let's go. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:57 | |
-There we are. Now we have our work cut out for us. -Oh, right! | 0:10:02 | 0:10:05 | |
If we gotta turn over this would be a good place to do it! | 0:10:08 | 0:10:13 | |
I've never seen such massive barges! | 0:10:13 | 0:10:16 | |
When I think of the Mississippi, I think of those beautiful | 0:10:16 | 0:10:19 | |
paddle steamers, mint juleps and Mark Twain. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
This is river boating on quite a different scale. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
We're paddling against the current, | 0:10:29 | 0:10:32 | |
which John was saying is about five miles an hour, so it's hard. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:38 | |
-Now look at that beautiful beach awaiting us right there. -That's great. With a log to sit on. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:44 | |
-Rick, cup of coffee? -Don't think I've seen a pot like that since Blazing Saddles. | 0:10:47 | 0:10:52 | |
That's good. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:56 | |
We're going to cook some lamb chops over a wood fire and smoke them | 0:10:56 | 0:11:01 | |
with these green willow branches. I'm really looking forward to that. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:04 | |
What's that? | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
-Tamari soy sauce. -I'm sort of like thinking of Tom Sawyer here. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:12 | |
Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn, they'd always be - certainly in Tom Sawyer - sitting down | 0:11:12 | 0:11:17 | |
cooking some fish like this saying, "Hey, that's the greatest thing I've ever tasted!" | 0:11:17 | 0:11:21 | |
It's something quite special. | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
-Yeah. That look OK? -Yeah. Looks really good. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:27 | |
That looks really good, too. | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
Oh, I love that smoky taste. It's actually... | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
Smoky meat is the taste of the Delta to me, really. | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
Thank you very much, it's been a wonderful experience for me. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:43 | |
-I hope we see you again. You've made the river happy today. -Thank you. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:48 | |
And now, after a smoked meal on the base of the Mississippi River, | 0:11:53 | 0:11:57 | |
Rick Stein meets the blues, in the muddy waters of the Mississippi River. | 0:11:57 | 0:12:01 | |
I'm really looking forward to a swim in this river. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
Of course, I didn't come here empty handed. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:30 | |
I've had plenty of tips of where to eat the authentic soul food of the Delta. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:35 | |
This is called the Senator's Place because it's run by a Mississippi politician, Senator Simmons. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:41 | |
Rick, we fry chicken every day. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:50 | |
Is there any bit of it which is secret, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:52 | |
-that you don't want people to know? -Yeah. | 0:12:52 | 0:12:55 | |
Fair enough. So it's basically flour... | 0:12:55 | 0:12:58 | |
-But the rest of it is a secret. -Is a secret. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:01 | |
And you gonna say when you taste it, | 0:13:01 | 0:13:03 | |
"Where have I been? Why haven't I had this chicken?" | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
Why is it so popular locally? | 0:13:06 | 0:13:09 | |
-It's a staple. -A staple? -Fried chicken is something that's been around for a long time. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:13 | |
As a matter of fact when my older brothers, um... | 0:13:13 | 0:13:16 | |
moved into Chicago and Detroit, | 0:13:16 | 0:13:19 | |
when they were getting ready to leave home, driving back or on a bus or getting on a train, | 0:13:19 | 0:13:24 | |
my mother would prepare pound cake and some fried chicken | 0:13:24 | 0:13:28 | |
and put it in a shoebox. And that's the kind of way a lot of individuals | 0:13:28 | 0:13:32 | |
travelled because they couldn't go to public restaurants and eat, so they had to have the food in their cars. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:37 | |
Why couldn't they go to public restaurants, then? | 0:13:37 | 0:13:40 | |
Discrimination. Blacks were not allowed to go to | 0:13:40 | 0:13:43 | |
public restaurants, so even when they could go, they weren't allowed to come in. | 0:13:43 | 0:13:48 | |
They were just being served outside of a window, and a lot of time they were being harassed. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:52 | |
So, as a result of that, to keep from having those types of situations occur, | 0:13:52 | 0:13:56 | |
you get everything and put it in the trunk of your car and five or six of you get in the car and head north. | 0:13:56 | 0:14:01 | |
When you get hungry, pop out the shoe box - there's the chicken and there's the pound cake. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:06 | |
When we look at the blues and the food, and we | 0:14:06 | 0:14:09 | |
refer to it as Southern soul food and the blues is a perfect match. | 0:14:09 | 0:14:14 | |
That is it! That's why the blues is so powerful, and the food, cos the songs | 0:14:14 | 0:14:19 | |
are filled with that sort of pent-up emotion for the hard times | 0:14:19 | 0:14:24 | |
and the love of the food and all that - we can get it. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:28 | |
That's why we want to come to Mississippi. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:30 | |
That's why you should stop here. The food is like you can see. | 0:14:30 | 0:14:34 | |
So the food, like rice and gravy and black-eyed peas, have a real part in this story. | 0:14:34 | 0:14:40 | |
Corn on the cob and ice tea, okra and tomatoes with turnip greens... | 0:14:40 | 0:14:45 | |
This is stuff worth coming home to. | 0:14:45 | 0:14:48 | |
And let's not forget the chicken-fried steak, | 0:14:49 | 0:14:52 | |
which isn't chicken but is a taste of home | 0:14:52 | 0:14:55 | |
and a taste of the blues. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:59 | |
the blues and food always go together. Yeah. Definitely. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:03 | |
Good food, good blues. There's a definite match. | 0:15:03 | 0:15:07 | |
What are you looking for to eat today? I love the look of those turnip greens. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:12 | |
I'm going to eat turnip greens, French fries and I'm going to eat some catfish. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:16 | |
I'm having some baked and fried catfish. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
Fantastic. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
Catfish is considered a scavenger. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:23 | |
It ate all of the nasty things in the water | 0:15:23 | 0:15:28 | |
so didn't nobody would eat it but black folk. And now it's a delicacy! | 0:15:28 | 0:15:32 | |
This is Maurice F Lucas. I got talking to him over lunch. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:35 | |
So you were mayor of like a small town? | 0:15:35 | 0:15:39 | |
A mile north of here, a local town called Renova. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
What's special about Renova? | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
Aretha Franklin was born there. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:47 | |
My goodness! | 0:15:47 | 0:15:50 | |
OK! | 0:15:50 | 0:15:52 | |
I left in 1962. | 0:15:52 | 0:15:56 | |
I went in the Army | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
and I swore I wasn't never gonna come back. | 0:15:59 | 0:16:02 | |
But after Vietnam got hot, | 0:16:02 | 0:16:04 | |
I came home. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:05 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
-So why wouldn't you have wanted to come back? -I don't like being a farmer. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:12 | |
I got up at five o'clock in the morning, | 0:16:12 | 0:16:16 | |
fed the chickens, | 0:16:16 | 0:16:18 | |
slopped the hogs, milked the cow and went to the field. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:22 | |
So I read somewhere that's why all the blues musicians left. They wanted to get away from that. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:28 | |
That's what I got away from. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:31 | |
And I didn't want no part of that. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:34 | |
# Bright lights | 0:16:36 | 0:16:37 | |
# Big city... # | 0:16:38 | 0:16:40 | |
This is Leland, once an important cotton town, and this is one of | 0:16:40 | 0:16:45 | |
my favourite tracks - Bright Lights, Big City by Jimmy Reid, | 0:16:45 | 0:16:49 | |
one of Leland's greatest sons. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:51 | |
# Gone to my baby's head | 0:16:51 | 0:16:55 | |
# I tried to tell the woman... # | 0:16:56 | 0:16:59 | |
I met up with Billy Johnson, who set up a museum in the town | 0:16:59 | 0:17:03 | |
simply because so many bluesmen came from here. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:07 | |
People think that the Delta, | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
the Mississippi Delta, is a mystical place. | 0:17:10 | 0:17:14 | |
How could all these people - Muddy Water, Howling Wolf, BB King, Jimmy Reed... | 0:17:14 | 0:17:18 | |
How could all of these people... | 0:17:18 | 0:17:20 | |
..who sing the blues so many different ways come from just this small place? | 0:17:21 | 0:17:26 | |
The Delta wasn't really... | 0:17:26 | 0:17:28 | |
It was the last part of Mississippi to be settled. | 0:17:28 | 0:17:31 | |
Where's everybody gone? | 0:17:31 | 0:17:34 | |
Well, farming became less labour intensive and all the people left... | 0:17:34 | 0:17:39 | |
you know, in the '50s. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:40 | |
20,000 people lived on the plantations around here. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:45 | |
You know, 50 years ago. It's not 300 people out there now! | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
But I suppose, also, you get all these blues centres | 0:17:48 | 0:17:52 | |
like Chicago and they're singing songs about the life in the Delta | 0:17:52 | 0:17:57 | |
and the food they knew as well, really. | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
the blues had a smell to it, people would come | 0:17:59 | 0:18:03 | |
to town and the blues guys would be playing on the corners and these food vendors would be there. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:10 | |
They had these little two-wheel pushcarts and they were selling hot tamales and fish. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:15 | |
As a kid, I always associated the music | 0:18:15 | 0:18:20 | |
-with the smells of all this food. -Fantastic. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:25 | |
Smells are my speciality - and it's the smell of barbecues | 0:18:25 | 0:18:30 | |
that dominate these blues towns. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:32 | |
Sweet, woody, smoky smells that go so well with the blues. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:40 | |
This is Mr Edwards' Rib Shack. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:43 | |
Fresh off the grill! | 0:18:43 | 0:18:45 | |
-So that's your ribs? -That's my ribs and they're ready. -They look great! | 0:18:49 | 0:18:53 | |
My seasoning is garlic salt, regular salt. I put a little black pepper in there... | 0:18:53 | 0:18:58 | |
I taste and season and I mix it all together and that's my rub. | 0:18:58 | 0:19:03 | |
So it's just a dry rub, then. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:04 | |
It's a dry rub. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:06 | |
But you gotta have a good cook. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:08 | |
I depend on my cookers. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
Not the secret... but the cookers that I got. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:12 | |
All of my cookers are very good. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:14 | |
-Simple and easy. -Did you know it was going to be a success? | 0:19:16 | 0:19:19 | |
No, but I didn't have anything else to do, I had to make some money. | 0:19:19 | 0:19:22 | |
I got a wife and four kids and we had to make it. | 0:19:22 | 0:19:25 | |
But that's really enterprising of you. Presumably, you had very little money to set that up. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:30 | |
I didn't have any money. I only had an idea. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:32 | |
So are you familiar with Mr Edwards' ribs, then? | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
-What's special about them, then? -Good, man, they're good. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:43 | |
People come from everywhere to get them. You ever tasted them? | 0:19:43 | 0:19:47 | |
No, I haven't tasted them yet, I'm looking forward to it. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:49 | |
What am I tasting? | 0:19:51 | 0:19:53 | |
I'm tasting pecan wood, or as they say here "pe-carn" wood, I can taste that smoke. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:59 | |
I'm tasting pepper, I'm tasting garlic, I'm tasting onion. Good, good soul food. | 0:19:59 | 0:20:06 | |
So, what do you think about it? | 0:20:06 | 0:20:08 | |
Mr Edwards, you're a genius! | 0:20:08 | 0:20:10 | |
You are seriously a genius. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:12 | |
I love it! Absolutely. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:15 | |
What about the potato salad and baked beans? | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
Why can't they make baked beans like that at home? | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
-They do! -Not in England they don't! | 0:20:26 | 0:20:28 | |
Oh, no! That's Mississippi Delta. | 0:20:28 | 0:20:30 | |
Mmm. That's the way we do it down here! | 0:20:32 | 0:20:34 | |
If there was a gastronomic symbol that defined the Delta, a good choice would be the catfish. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:48 | |
This is Cadi Thompson, the daughter of the owner of Pluto Plantation, Louie Thompson. | 0:20:48 | 0:20:54 | |
His family bought the land here in the bad old days of the 1920s and they grew cotton. They still do. | 0:20:54 | 0:21:00 | |
But Louie says that catfish farming is good business and it's growing. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:05 | |
Catfish has been a staple for this part of the world since people lived here. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:14 | |
From the Indians on up through the 1850s, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:20 | |
when this area was settled, and on through the slavery period and civil war | 0:21:20 | 0:21:25 | |
up until now. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:27 | |
Catfish is near and dear to us. I'm glad it turned out that way. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:32 | |
What do you, as a plantation owner, think about the blues? As that's what we're here to... | 0:21:32 | 0:21:38 | |
I grew up listening to the tractor drivers play it on the place | 0:21:38 | 0:21:42 | |
and people would sit on the front porch on Sunday afternoon just strumming away. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:47 | |
It's great! I grew up with it. I don't know how to describe it, | 0:21:47 | 0:21:53 | |
I feel like it's in my blood a little bit. | 0:21:53 | 0:21:55 | |
Maybe I'm a little part of it. | 0:21:55 | 0:21:59 | |
We're making this programme, sort of trying to connect in some way the food of the Delta with the music, | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
with the blues. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:05 | |
Do you think there is any... Does one go with the other? | 0:22:05 | 0:22:09 | |
It seems to me that it does. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:11 | |
the blues originated here and so did catfish and it just seems to go together. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:17 | |
There must be a song. I've got to think of a song! | 0:22:17 | 0:22:22 | |
# Well, I wished I | 0:22:22 | 0:22:24 | |
# Was a catfish | 0:22:24 | 0:22:26 | |
# Swelling deep down deep blue sea... # | 0:22:26 | 0:22:30 | |
Louie's cousin is Martha Foose. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:33 | |
She's one of America's top food writers and writes with | 0:22:33 | 0:22:36 | |
great passion and humour about life and food in the Mississippi Delta. | 0:22:36 | 0:22:42 | |
Great, I think we've got enough lemon there! | 0:22:42 | 0:22:44 | |
She's cooking catfish with fennel, melted butter, orange and lemon, | 0:22:44 | 0:22:49 | |
baked in a paper bag. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:52 | |
We are so tied to the land here. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:54 | |
It's 17 miles to get a gallon of milk from here and so people | 0:22:54 | 0:22:59 | |
mostly eat things that are grown on their farm, at farm stands or little trucks on the side of the road. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:05 | |
We have a lot of time on our hands so we do a lot of slow cooking here. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:09 | |
We're a very nap-orientated culture. | 0:23:09 | 0:23:11 | |
So you have siestas like they do in Spain? | 0:23:11 | 0:23:14 | |
We do. Don't call, don't drive down the road between one and three, | 0:23:14 | 0:23:18 | |
and we'll remain friends. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:20 | |
I'm going to put these in a hot oven, for about 15 minutes, | 0:23:23 | 0:23:26 | |
and they'll steam inside their little sacks. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:28 | |
You have such good ovens in the States. | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
See how you like it? | 0:23:38 | 0:23:39 | |
That's a really good fish, it's really... Sorry, I sound surprised. | 0:23:40 | 0:23:44 | |
Well, I know where it came from. They've been swimming in the alluvial aquifers of the Delta. | 0:23:44 | 0:23:50 | |
I know where they have come from, how well they've been cared for, and you can tell in the taste. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:55 | |
You're a pretty accomplished cook, really. Did you just get this from the Delta? | 0:23:55 | 0:23:59 | |
Um, I got the better part of it from the Delta, but... | 0:23:59 | 0:24:03 | |
I did go to a school in France, mostly for baking and pastry. | 0:24:03 | 0:24:06 | |
I went to Ecole Lenotre. I had a big time while I was in Paris. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:11 | |
Big time meaning? | 0:24:11 | 0:24:13 | |
When I got home, my grandma asked me if I'd learned to do anything in France other than drink and smoke. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:18 | |
I told her I could have learnt that in the Delta. But I can make one heck of a pie crust now. | 0:24:18 | 0:24:22 | |
# So cloudy, so cloudy | 0:24:32 | 0:24:35 | |
# I believe it's gonna rain... # | 0:24:37 | 0:24:40 | |
This is one of the most famous voices of the Delta, Muddy Waters. | 0:24:41 | 0:24:45 | |
They say he was the father of the Chicago blues but he came from the Delta. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:51 | |
# I believe it's going to rain... # | 0:24:52 | 0:24:56 | |
I've come to the blues Museum in Clarksdale to get a feel for where he grew up. | 0:24:56 | 0:25:02 | |
# I don't believe my woman love me | 0:25:04 | 0:25:08 | |
# She in love with another man... # | 0:25:08 | 0:25:11 | |
I'm just thinking about that saying in the Bible, "A prophet is not without honour saving his own land". | 0:25:11 | 0:25:17 | |
I was reading somewhere that when The Beatles first arrived in the States, | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
a reporter asked Paul McCartney what would he most like to see? | 0:25:21 | 0:25:25 | |
He replied, "Well, I'd really like to see Muddy Waters." | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
And the reporter said, "What's that?" | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
And so Paul McCartney said, "Do you not even know who your own famous people are?" | 0:25:31 | 0:25:38 | |
# The snapping of her fingers would make a dog wag its tail | 0:25:38 | 0:25:42 | |
|# The whisper from her voice would make a train jump the rail | 0:25:42 | 0:25:46 | |
# You take her to the race track and show her a face | 0:25:46 | 0:25:50 | |
# A horse ain't win in years come in first place | 0:25:50 | 0:25:53 | |
# You know she's into something | 0:25:53 | 0:25:57 | |
# Yeah, she's into something | 0:25:57 | 0:25:59 | |
# You know she's... # | 0:25:59 | 0:26:02 | |
the blues began life in the cotton fields, mostly in wooden huts away from the towns. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:07 | |
The sharecroppers would come and drink and play their music when their back-breaking work was done. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:13 | |
These places were called juke joints. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:16 | |
Muddy Waters ran one of these in the 1940s. | 0:26:16 | 0:26:19 | |
They usually had gambling and sold moonshine whisky and people would dance the night away to the blues. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:26 | |
# Yeah, that little girl's into something... # | 0:26:28 | 0:26:30 | |
Years ago people referred to them as joog joints, | 0:26:30 | 0:26:32 | |
a Creole word for "rowdy" | 0:26:32 | 0:26:34 | |
or "a little bit abandoned". | 0:26:34 | 0:26:36 | |
But whatever the pronunciation, | 0:26:36 | 0:26:38 | |
joog or juke, they spawned the blues. | 0:26:38 | 0:26:42 | |
This is a juke joint. There used to be hundreds of them - sadly, there's only one or two left now. | 0:26:42 | 0:26:47 | |
Originally, they were built often by the plantation owners | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
as a way of somewhere for the black people to socialise - that was during segregation, of course. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:56 | |
But often they'd be just a sharecropper's house that | 0:26:56 | 0:26:59 | |
they'd clear all the furniture out on a Friday and Saturday night. | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
It's a bit like the food, you know when you look at it, it might not | 0:27:02 | 0:27:05 | |
look like haute cuisine but to me it really speaks of the soul. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:11 | |
That's why they call it soul food, I guess. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:13 | |
Originally, there was a bit of a circuit around all of these juke joints | 0:27:14 | 0:27:18 | |
and people like Robert Johnson Charlie Patton and Sunhouse used to do a circuit of the juke joints. | 0:27:18 | 0:27:24 | |
But gradually, as records came in, they were replaced with, you've got it, juke boxes from the juke joints. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:31 | |
MAN SINGS IN HOLLERIN' STYLE | 0:27:33 | 0:27:38 | |
This is a recording of a musical phenomenon called hollerin', | 0:27:46 | 0:27:50 | |
recorded by Alan Lomax, who went out into the cotton fields in the late 1930s to capture the songs | 0:27:50 | 0:27:55 | |
of the Deep South for the Library of Congress. | 0:27:55 | 0:27:59 | |
It's said that the blues came here from Africa wearing chains. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:03 | |
This sound was the birth of the blues. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:05 | |
MAN SINGS IN HOLLERIN' STYLE | 0:28:05 | 0:28:09 | |
METALLIC TWANG REVERBERATES | 0:28:14 | 0:28:16 | |
METALLIC TWANG REVERBERATES | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
METALLIC TWANGS INTENSIFY | 0:28:26 | 0:28:30 | |
I read about this before I came on this trip. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:35 | |
A way of making music using what was available because there was no money for instruments. | 0:28:35 | 0:28:40 | |
To me, this raw sound epitomises the essence of the Delta Blues. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:45 | |
Bill Abel, a bluesman, explains. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
Amazing! I mean, that sounds like | 0:28:54 | 0:28:57 | |
the heart of the blues, really. | 0:28:57 | 0:28:59 | |
What exactly is this, then? | 0:28:59 | 0:29:01 | |
This is called a diddley bow. | 0:29:01 | 0:29:04 | |
The kids used to play them. | 0:29:04 | 0:29:06 | |
They didn't have money to buy an instrument. So they made their own instrument at home. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:11 | |
They would take any kind of a wire they could get and put it to the side of the house. | 0:29:11 | 0:29:16 | |
This is an original sharecropper's shack. | 0:29:16 | 0:29:21 | |
It's 100 years old at least. | 0:29:21 | 0:29:23 | |
It's made out of cypress, | 0:29:23 | 0:29:26 | |
so it's got a nice resonation, so it's like a giant guitar. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
The diddley bow helped give birth to the Delta Blues, | 0:29:29 | 0:29:34 | |
the sound, if you walk up to a wire and you play a riff... | 0:29:34 | 0:29:38 | |
PLAYS RIFF | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
You just do that, and that is an actual Delta Blues riff. | 0:29:41 | 0:29:45 | |
I can hear that sound right through the present day. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:48 | |
with something like Led Zeppelin When The Levee Breaks. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
You can hear that sort of slightly doomy sort of like slide... | 0:29:51 | 0:29:55 | |
There's almost... | 0:29:55 | 0:29:56 | |
You can feel the sultry heat and maybe a storm coming in. | 0:29:56 | 0:30:00 | |
It's just straight there. | 0:30:00 | 0:30:02 | |
Just tell me about the early blues musicians then. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:06 | |
Uh, well, uh, the music, the Delta Blues | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
is based on poly rhythms instead of melody | 0:30:09 | 0:30:13 | |
and music that was called blues | 0:30:13 | 0:30:15 | |
that was played in the rest of this United States | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
was more influenced by European melody. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:21 | |
But the blues here, the slaves were brought here in the 1850s | 0:30:21 | 0:30:25 | |
to clear the land along the rivers for cotton | 0:30:25 | 0:30:27 | |
and right before the Civil War, you know. | 0:30:27 | 0:30:30 | |
So they brought the drums to the Delta in the 1850s | 0:30:30 | 0:30:34 | |
and that rhythm is what gave birth to the Delta Blues. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:38 | |
This is quite an important question for me. | 0:30:38 | 0:30:41 | |
OK, these, these, the young black people | 0:30:41 | 0:30:44 | |
are not interested in the blues any more, | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
and I can understand it, | 0:30:47 | 0:30:49 | |
it's about their grandparents and it's old stuff, | 0:30:49 | 0:30:52 | |
but why were those English boys in the '60s so taken with it? | 0:30:52 | 0:30:56 | |
Well, I think they were allowed to... | 0:30:56 | 0:30:59 | |
Here, the mainstream popular culture in the white community | 0:30:59 | 0:31:03 | |
was not embracing black music back in that time. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:08 | |
But I mean, it all boils down to when you are young | 0:31:08 | 0:31:11 | |
and you hear that sound of the Delta Blues, | 0:31:11 | 0:31:15 | |
it's so deep that it brings out... | 0:31:15 | 0:31:17 | |
say like the Daniel Boone in a kid, you know, | 0:31:17 | 0:31:20 | |
it's just like as tough as it gets, you know, | 0:31:20 | 0:31:24 | |
so that's what gave birth to a lot of rock and roll, was that toughness. | 0:31:24 | 0:31:28 | |
You got it, you've got it. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:32 | |
'Bill, who makes his guitars from | 0:31:32 | 0:31:34 | |
'driftwood washed up by the Mississippi and cigar boxes, | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
'is good friends with a legendary bluesman round here | 0:31:38 | 0:31:42 | |
'called Cadillac John. He's in his 80s | 0:31:42 | 0:31:44 | |
'and he never saw the bright lights like his contemporary BB King.' | 0:31:44 | 0:31:50 | |
Cadillac John, how did you come to start playing the blues? | 0:31:50 | 0:31:54 | |
Well, that's a, that's a good point. | 0:31:54 | 0:31:58 | |
My old lady left me, | 0:31:58 | 0:32:00 | |
she left me and that put it, I couldn't play it enough. | 0:32:00 | 0:32:04 | |
You know what I mean? Well, I will tell you. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:07 | |
When a, when a lady love you, you love it, | 0:32:07 | 0:32:11 | |
and she leave you, you gotta hurt. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:14 | |
You gon' do something, walk over in the river, you gotta hurt. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:18 | |
the blues come from... | 0:32:18 | 0:32:20 | |
When your friend leave you, your wife leave you, | 0:32:21 | 0:32:25 | |
that's where it all starts breakin' loose. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
# My baby, my baby, my baby | 0:32:54 | 0:33:01 | |
# That little girl don't love me no more | 0:33:07 | 0:33:12 | |
# My baby, my baby, my baby | 0:33:16 | 0:33:22 | |
# That little girl don't love me no more | 0:33:28 | 0:33:32 | |
# My baby, my baby, my baby | 0:33:38 | 0:33:43 | |
# She way up yonder | 0:33:50 | 0:33:55 | |
# She ain't coming back down again | 0:33:55 | 0:33:58 | |
# No I'm not. # | 0:33:58 | 0:34:00 | |
Yeah. | 0:34:07 | 0:34:09 | |
Fantastic! | 0:34:11 | 0:34:14 | |
'What a testimony to the power of the blues | 0:34:14 | 0:34:16 | |
'to keep past emotion alive. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:19 | |
'He told me his wife even took the curtains!' | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
'You know, they tell me the blues can never die out | 0:34:30 | 0:34:33 | |
'when there are still a few cheating women and a few lying men. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:38 | |
'Terry Bean explains.' | 0:34:38 | 0:34:40 | |
People say the blues make you sad, with depression. Uh-uh. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:45 | |
You got it all wrong. | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
It's an upper. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:50 | |
Make you feel good. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:51 | |
But you got to understand that. | 0:34:51 | 0:34:53 | |
-Yeah. -Don't let blues people fool you | 0:34:53 | 0:34:56 | |
when they go talk about baby this and baby that. | 0:34:56 | 0:34:58 | |
They ain't talking bout their women. They can be talking about money, | 0:34:58 | 0:35:02 | |
they can be talking about they ain't got no more whiskey to drink, | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
but they call it baby. | 0:35:06 | 0:35:07 | |
See what I'm saying? That's their baby. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
The guitar may be a baby, see what I'm saying? | 0:35:09 | 0:35:12 | |
They ain't talking about a woman. | 0:35:12 | 0:35:13 | |
Most of the bluesmen can't stand one women anyway. | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:35:16 | 0:35:18 | |
# Oh, some trouble in mind | 0:35:20 | 0:35:24 | |
# You know I'm blue | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
# But I won't be blue always | 0:35:27 | 0:35:35 | |
# Yeah, the sun gon' shine | 0:35:35 | 0:35:40 | |
# In my back door some day... # | 0:35:40 | 0:35:44 | |
They look really good. | 0:35:46 | 0:35:47 | |
They don't like you to grab them, really. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
-I don't blame them. -No, not at all. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:51 | |
Well, can we, can we cook some? | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
-Oh, yes, please. -OK. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:55 | |
# ..On some southern railroad line... # | 0:35:57 | 0:36:01 | |
'I've always associated crawfish, | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
'or craw daddies as they're known over in these parts, | 0:36:04 | 0:36:08 | |
'with Louisiana, along with Filet Gumbo. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:10 | |
'But they eat lots of these little critters all over the Delta. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:14 | |
'The cook here is Ryan Moore.' | 0:36:14 | 0:36:18 | |
So Rick, we're going to put a little more seasoning on these before we... | 0:36:18 | 0:36:21 | |
-Oh, so you put some in as well as in the boil. -Right, | 0:36:21 | 0:36:24 | |
so it's in your fingers, in your mouth when you're eating it | 0:36:24 | 0:36:27 | |
and then yellow mustard across the top. | 0:36:27 | 0:36:29 | |
That's just a little secret touch that we do, it's something about... | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
Oh, well, we won't, we won't tell anybody about that. | 0:36:32 | 0:36:34 | |
We'll mix them all up. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:39 | |
-All right. -Cheers. -Cheers to you, Rick. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:49 | |
-Good health. -Good health. -This looks really good. -So everything's ready? | 0:36:49 | 0:36:51 | |
-Yeah, yeah. -So you've never eaten one of these before? | 0:36:51 | 0:36:54 | |
I have, but I want to see how you do it. | 0:36:54 | 0:36:56 | |
The first thing you do there is you squeeze in the head a little bit.. | 0:36:56 | 0:37:00 | |
-and pinch in the tail. -And pinch in the tail. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:02 | |
-Right here, yes. And then you just wriggle the tail, wriggle it out. -OK. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:07 | |
Head, you can either throw it away or you can suck the head out. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
-No, I'd like to suck the head. -Suck the head, is that all right? | 0:37:10 | 0:37:14 | |
SUCKING | 0:37:14 | 0:37:15 | |
Oh, that's really good, Ryan. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:17 | |
And then...you eat the tail. | 0:37:17 | 0:37:22 | |
So you pinch the tail. You suck the head and you pinch the tail. | 0:37:22 | 0:37:25 | |
Suck the head. They call it making love Louisiana-style. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:29 | |
I don't think we'd better go into that one. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
Yeah, well, you know. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:34 | |
-I got it, I got it. -Pinch the head, suck the tail. So there we are. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:37 | |
Everywhere I've been here it's been, people really want to welcome you. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:41 | |
Yeah, you don't have your own plate here. | 0:37:41 | 0:37:43 | |
You see all this food here and it's kind of a melting pot. | 0:37:43 | 0:37:45 | |
And the Delta itself is a melting pot of different races and cultures | 0:37:45 | 0:37:51 | |
and a lot of history with the blues music. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:54 | |
What else more could you ask for? | 0:37:54 | 0:37:55 | |
-I agree. -Maybe it could be a little bit cooler. | 0:37:55 | 0:37:58 | |
It could be a little bit cooler for us English, I must say, yeah. | 0:37:58 | 0:38:02 | |
# Some people say a man is made outta mud | 0:38:12 | 0:38:17 | |
# A poor man's made outta muscle and blood | 0:38:17 | 0:38:22 | |
# Muscle and blood and skin and bones | 0:38:22 | 0:38:25 | |
# A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong | 0:38:25 | 0:38:28 | |
# You load sixteen tonnes What do you get? | 0:38:28 | 0:38:32 | |
# Another day older And deeper in debt | 0:38:32 | 0:38:34 | |
# St Peter don't you call me Cos I can't go | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
# I owe my soul to the company store... # | 0:38:38 | 0:38:42 | |
These places were called commissaries. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:44 | |
They were the financial heart of the plantations | 0:38:44 | 0:38:47 | |
and the bane of the sharecroppers' life. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
Where they could buy now and pay later, | 0:38:50 | 0:38:53 | |
tying the farm workers to the land much in the same way feudalism did. | 0:38:53 | 0:38:57 | |
The sharecropper would come here to the commissary for his seeds, | 0:38:57 | 0:39:02 | |
his fertiliser, his tools, clothes. Everything. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
It reminds me of that song Sixteen Tonnes, | 0:39:06 | 0:39:09 | |
"Sixteen tonnes and what do you get? | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
"Another day older and deeper in debt." | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
Cos whether the harvest was good or whether it was bad, | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
you owed your soul to the company store. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:21 | |
# ..To the company store. # | 0:39:21 | 0:39:29 | |
You know when you live in a city, | 0:39:30 | 0:39:32 | |
inadvertently you walk by and you hear people talking, you hear something on the radio, | 0:39:32 | 0:39:37 | |
you see a sign on a bus and all that influences you. | 0:39:37 | 0:39:41 | |
But with the blues, | 0:39:41 | 0:39:43 | |
people living on the plantations didn't have anything - | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
no communication, no transportation. | 0:39:46 | 0:39:48 | |
The biggest influence was theirselves | 0:39:48 | 0:39:51 | |
because other than their family, that's all they had. | 0:39:51 | 0:39:55 | |
You know when you go out there to work from daylight to dark | 0:39:55 | 0:39:57 | |
and you come in on Saturday and you open the door | 0:39:57 | 0:40:00 | |
and your wife's gone with your kids and ain't gonna be back no more, | 0:40:00 | 0:40:04 | |
you know, I mean, and you get your couple of drinks of moonshine, | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
pick your guitar up, there ain't no filter between what you're feeling | 0:40:08 | 0:40:12 | |
and what you're playing. And I mean, it's the real deal, | 0:40:12 | 0:40:15 | |
so that's what the blues is and that's how you get them. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:20 | |
MAN SINGS BLUES | 0:40:23 | 0:40:27 | |
Blues-wise, they say Dockery Farms | 0:40:33 | 0:40:35 | |
is the most potent place in the whole of the Delta. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:39 | |
BB King said, "It all started right here." | 0:40:39 | 0:40:43 | |
Thousands worked the cotton fields, including Charley Patton, | 0:40:45 | 0:40:49 | |
the father of the Delta Blues, and so did the famous Tommy Johnson. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:54 | |
Dockery was home to so many famous bluesmen | 0:40:54 | 0:40:58 | |
and inspired many others from around the Delta | 0:40:58 | 0:41:00 | |
to come and play with the likes of Robert Johnson, | 0:41:00 | 0:41:03 | |
Elmore James and of course, my favourite, Howlin' Wolf. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:09 | |
# It could fill spoon full of diamond | 0:41:09 | 0:41:14 | |
# Could fill spoon full of gold | 0:41:14 | 0:41:17 | |
# Just a little spoon of your precious love | 0:41:17 | 0:41:22 | |
# Satisfy my soul... # | 0:41:22 | 0:41:25 | |
'Just down the road is the resting place of the great Charley Patton. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:30 | |
'He wrote songs about the people and things around him. | 0:41:30 | 0:41:33 | |
'He's immortalised a couple of local sheriffs, | 0:41:33 | 0:41:37 | |
'a plantation boss, | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
'pimps and whores. | 0:41:39 | 0:41:40 | |
'They all became the subjects of his songs.' | 0:41:40 | 0:41:43 | |
This is it. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:45 | |
I can tell, there's all this money left on the top. | 0:41:45 | 0:41:47 | |
Yeah, Charley Patton, somebody's left a cigarette there, | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
a whole cigarette for him cos he loved his smoking, | 0:41:50 | 0:41:54 | |
he loved his booze, he loved his women. | 0:41:54 | 0:41:57 | |
"The voice of the Delta," yeah, | 0:41:57 | 0:41:59 | |
I think he was arguably the father of Delta Blues music, | 0:41:59 | 0:42:03 | |
influenced people like John Lee Hooker | 0:42:03 | 0:42:06 | |
and of course my own favourite Howlin' Wolf. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:09 | |
He had this really gravelly voice | 0:42:09 | 0:42:12 | |
and of course it was before amplification. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:14 | |
It could travel about 500 yards, people say. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:17 | |
CRACKLY RECORDING PLAYS | 0:42:17 | 0:42:21 | |
Apparently, it's a sort of tradition here | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
to leave a libation to the dead, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:32 | |
so I've actually bought a little libation for Charley. | 0:42:32 | 0:42:37 | |
If it's as hot down there as it is up here, in the grave, | 0:42:37 | 0:42:42 | |
I think he needs it. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:44 | |
Maybe a bit for me. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:49 | |
I think he'd approve. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:52 | |
CRACKLY RECORDING CONTINUES | 0:42:58 | 0:43:02 | |
The record companies and radio stations | 0:43:07 | 0:43:09 | |
wanted their music to be a bit zappy. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
MUSIC PLAYS | 0:43:12 | 0:43:15 | |
'All the Delta Blues musicians had really loud voices | 0:43:19 | 0:43:23 | |
'and a rural repertoire, but it was | 0:43:23 | 0:43:25 | |
'the legendary Robert Johnson who had a real gift for showmanship | 0:43:25 | 0:43:29 | |
'and an ear for the latest sounds.' | 0:43:29 | 0:43:33 | |
ROBERT JOHNSON SINGS | 0:43:33 | 0:43:37 | |
'He could hear a song just once on the radio | 0:43:37 | 0:43:40 | |
'and a few minutes later he'd be playing it on a street corner, | 0:43:40 | 0:43:44 | |
'receiving handsome tips. He was a man of his time.' | 0:43:44 | 0:43:47 | |
Eric Clapton called Robert Johnson | 0:43:50 | 0:43:52 | |
the greatest blues musician there ever was. | 0:43:52 | 0:43:56 | |
I think the image for most people of a blues musician | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
is somebody in blue overalls playing a guitar | 0:43:59 | 0:44:01 | |
sitting on a porch somewhere, but not for Robert Johnson. | 0:44:01 | 0:44:04 | |
He really liked sharp suits, good ties, tie pins, hats, | 0:44:04 | 0:44:10 | |
and he really loved women. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
And a contemporary of his, Johnny Shines, | 0:44:12 | 0:44:16 | |
said, "Robert treated women like motel and hotel rooms, | 0:44:16 | 0:44:20 | |
"he used them and then he left them behind." | 0:44:20 | 0:44:24 | |
MUSIC: "Crossroads" by Robert Johnson | 0:44:24 | 0:44:29 | |
# I went down to the crossroads Fell down on my knees... # | 0:44:29 | 0:44:35 | |
This song, Crossroads, | 0:44:35 | 0:44:37 | |
was Robert's most famous, | 0:44:37 | 0:44:38 | |
and it helped to make him a legend because the crossroads | 0:44:38 | 0:44:42 | |
was the place he was supposed to have made a deal with the devil. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:46 | |
# I went down to the crossroads Fell down on my knees... # | 0:44:46 | 0:44:51 | |
Nobody really knows where the crossroads are, | 0:44:51 | 0:44:53 | |
but this would have a serious claim to be it. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:56 | |
It's where Highway 49 crosses Highway 61. | 0:44:56 | 0:45:01 | |
Robert Johnson, when he was young couldn't play very well - | 0:45:01 | 0:45:04 | |
he kept getting thrown out of juke joints | 0:45:04 | 0:45:07 | |
because he was making such a racket, and he disappeared for a while. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:11 | |
Well, some say he went across to Arkansas, | 0:45:11 | 0:45:13 | |
but others said he came here to the crossroads | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
and he sold his soul to the devil. | 0:45:16 | 0:45:19 | |
He met a black man just before midnight, a big, black man | 0:45:19 | 0:45:23 | |
who took his guitar and re-tuned it and handed it back to him, | 0:45:23 | 0:45:28 | |
and after that he played like drops of mercury. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:32 | |
JOHNSON PLAYS GUITAR | 0:45:32 | 0:45:36 | |
This is Baptist Town in Greenwood. It's pretty run down | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
and probably hasn't changed too much | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
since Robert Johnson lived here and died here | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
at the age of 27. Rumour has it that he drank | 0:45:52 | 0:45:55 | |
poisoned moonshine whiskey - | 0:45:55 | 0:45:58 | |
poisoned, it's said, by a jealous husband. | 0:45:58 | 0:46:02 | |
Sylvester Hoover runs a grocery store here. | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
He's a mine of information, | 0:46:06 | 0:46:07 | |
especially about those troubled times of the 1930s | 0:46:07 | 0:46:11 | |
when black men couldn't walk freely on the streets. | 0:46:11 | 0:46:14 | |
Why was it that black people | 0:46:16 | 0:46:18 | |
couldn't come out on the street during the day? | 0:46:18 | 0:46:22 | |
I mean, that was the Jim Crow law. | 0:46:22 | 0:46:24 | |
That was a white law that the farmers made in this area | 0:46:24 | 0:46:28 | |
and a general Crow law is, blacks don't have any rights. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:32 | |
They couldn't buy a bus ticket, they couldn't buy a train ticket, | 0:46:32 | 0:46:36 | |
couldn't spend a five-dollar bill. You had just ones, you know. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:40 | |
And it was real hard time and that's what made those guys sing the blues. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:46 | |
Though at that time, a white lady, if she walked down the street | 0:46:46 | 0:46:50 | |
and Robert Johnson, Honeyboy Edwards were walking down that street | 0:46:50 | 0:46:54 | |
on a weekend when they all worked, | 0:46:54 | 0:46:55 | |
they had to cross and go to the other side of the street. | 0:46:55 | 0:46:58 | |
And if you meet a white man down the street, | 0:46:58 | 0:47:01 | |
you would have to take your hat off and kneel to him. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:04 | |
But you couldn't pass a white lady down the street, | 0:47:04 | 0:47:08 | |
and the train track separate the peoples. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:11 | |
If you was black you wasn't allowed to cross this track here | 0:47:11 | 0:47:14 | |
because they couldn't go over where white peoples live. | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
The Jim Crow law and blacks didn't have any rights whatsoever, | 0:47:17 | 0:47:21 | |
that's part of what made the blues. | 0:47:21 | 0:47:23 | |
They could leave the Jim Crow law behind when they go Chicago, | 0:47:23 | 0:47:27 | |
they didn't have the same laws they got here. | 0:47:27 | 0:47:29 | |
That's why everyone wanted to go to Chicago. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:32 | |
And that train, when they hear that horn, | 0:47:32 | 0:47:35 | |
it helped them, they know that "I can go north, | 0:47:35 | 0:47:38 | |
"I can get out of this Mississippi Delta." | 0:47:38 | 0:47:40 | |
# Ever since Miss Susie Johnson Lost her jockey Lee | 0:47:42 | 0:47:47 | |
# There has been much excitement And more to be | 0:47:47 | 0:47:53 | |
# You can hear her moanin' Moanin' night and morn... # | 0:47:53 | 0:47:58 | |
The more I understand about the blues, the more I listen to people, | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
I realise that a lot of it was about getting away from the Delta | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
because everybody was so poor. | 0:48:07 | 0:48:09 | |
Really, it's a bit like Wordsworth saying about poetry, | 0:48:09 | 0:48:13 | |
it's emotion recollected in tranquillity. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
It's getting away and thinking about those times, | 0:48:16 | 0:48:18 | |
thinking about the levees, | 0:48:18 | 0:48:20 | |
thinking about losing your girl and all that. | 0:48:20 | 0:48:23 | |
And this is an important place to me | 0:48:23 | 0:48:25 | |
because it's another crossroads. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:27 | |
A crossroads is a really common image in blues music | 0:48:27 | 0:48:30 | |
and it sort of gets to us all. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:33 | |
And WC Handy, who was a very famous early blues musician, | 0:48:33 | 0:48:37 | |
heard this guy singing about where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog, | 0:48:37 | 0:48:43 | |
and it's this intersection. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:44 | |
You can just imagine loads of people here, suitcases, everybody leaving, | 0:48:44 | 0:48:49 | |
and then the wail as the train arrived, and maybe it's getting dusk | 0:48:49 | 0:48:53 | |
and then you see the taillights disappearing in the distance | 0:48:53 | 0:48:57 | |
taking my baby away from me! | 0:48:57 | 0:48:59 | |
# He's gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog... # | 0:48:59 | 0:49:07 | |
People left the Delta in their droves during the '20s and '30s, | 0:49:10 | 0:49:14 | |
and there were a number of reasons. | 0:49:14 | 0:49:16 | |
Mechanisation started to come to the fields, the price of cotton fell, | 0:49:16 | 0:49:20 | |
the floods of 1927 forced thousands off the land | 0:49:20 | 0:49:24 | |
and the pull of jobs in northern cities like Chicago and Detroit | 0:49:24 | 0:49:28 | |
was so powerful. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:29 | |
MAN SINGS BLUES | 0:49:29 | 0:49:32 | |
But for those that chose to stay behind, | 0:49:38 | 0:49:40 | |
an Italian honky tonk joint in Greenville | 0:49:40 | 0:49:43 | |
offered tasty food exclusively to the black community. | 0:49:43 | 0:49:48 | |
It was more like an in-town juke joint, | 0:49:48 | 0:49:51 | |
but it became a place selling down-home cooking for over 60 years. | 0:49:51 | 0:49:55 | |
-How you doing? -Wow, I'm very well. | 0:49:55 | 0:49:58 | |
-Is that for one or for a...? -Ah, usually two people split them. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:01 | |
Ah, thank goodness for that! | 0:50:01 | 0:50:03 | |
Sometimes one person can take it down. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:05 | |
This is what you call a broiler, isn't it? | 0:50:05 | 0:50:07 | |
Yes, sir. It's been in here since the '40s! Yes, sir. | 0:50:07 | 0:50:11 | |
So, it's much loved. | 0:50:11 | 0:50:13 | |
'In the early days, if white folks wanted a part of it, | 0:50:13 | 0:50:17 | |
'they had to use the back door - a sort of segregation in reverse.' | 0:50:17 | 0:50:23 | |
Excuse me, sorry, sorry. | 0:50:23 | 0:50:25 | |
Wow! | 0:50:26 | 0:50:28 | |
It's like walking back in time, | 0:50:28 | 0:50:30 | |
this is definitely not your typical fast food joint and neither is it | 0:50:30 | 0:50:36 | |
themed or skilfully recreated - it's just a family-run joint, it's the real deal. | 0:50:36 | 0:50:43 | |
And even Miss Florence has been making the same salads with the same dressing for over 40 years! | 0:50:43 | 0:50:50 | |
You know, in this restaurant there's no menu - | 0:50:50 | 0:50:53 | |
I mean there's just tamales, shrimp, salad and steak, lots of steak! | 0:50:53 | 0:50:59 | |
I'm sorry but I just love places like this. This is heaven to me. | 0:50:59 | 0:51:06 | |
This is a very special day in Indianola. I love the sound of these | 0:51:14 | 0:51:19 | |
Mississippi towns. Indianola - it sounds like a '50s radiogram | 0:51:19 | 0:51:23 | |
but why today is so special is because this is the homecoming | 0:51:23 | 0:51:28 | |
of its most famous son, the most important and influential living Blues artist, BB King. | 0:51:28 | 0:51:37 | |
# Yes, she's 36 in the bust | 0:51:37 | 0:51:40 | |
# 28 in the waist | 0:51:40 | 0:51:42 | |
# 44 in the hip She got a real crazy leg | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
# You upsets me baby | 0:51:46 | 0:51:48 | |
# Yes, you upsets me baby... # | 0:51:48 | 0:51:51 | |
At the age of 86, he still tours the world over but today he's coming home | 0:51:51 | 0:51:58 | |
and the area's full of expectation | 0:51:58 | 0:52:01 | |
and the sweet smell of barbecue. | 0:52:01 | 0:52:04 | |
Apparently BB's still asleep in his bedroom at the back of the bus. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:18 | |
We could be here a couple of hours. | 0:52:18 | 0:52:20 | |
I was trying to find out what that all was. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:49 | |
It's where they had the big barbecue cook-off yesterday. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:52 | |
You all get some of it? | 0:52:52 | 0:52:54 | |
We didn't get none. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:56 | |
Damn, you should have got some of it, you know I like barbecue! | 0:52:56 | 0:52:59 | |
Gentlemen, how are you? | 0:52:59 | 0:53:01 | |
-Very well! -Good, very good. | 0:53:01 | 0:53:04 | |
Mr King, are you looking forward to coming home to some good local food? | 0:53:04 | 0:53:08 | |
I like that too but I look forward to coming home every year, | 0:53:08 | 0:53:13 | |
I wish I could come every five to six weeks. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:17 | |
This is where... | 0:53:17 | 0:53:19 | |
This is where I grew up. My roots is right here. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:22 | |
-I used to work right there. -And you love the cooking of this area, you love the Delta food? | 0:53:22 | 0:53:26 | |
Of course! You can see that, you don't have to ask. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:29 | |
Sorry(!) | 0:53:29 | 0:53:31 | |
I love it too. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:33 | |
I, well this is... You know, it's home. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:37 | |
Like, if I was in London or someplace... I like London because I have a lot of friends there, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:43 | |
I know a lot of people and this is home, | 0:53:43 | 0:53:45 | |
I don't know as many people these days but I know the roots of the families. | 0:53:45 | 0:53:49 | |
Most of them have died out or moved away. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
But I think a lot of us try to get home every summer if we can. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:57 | |
Alan is begging for me to come in so I have to go. | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
-Very nice to meet you. Thank you very much. -Mr King, we love you! | 0:54:00 | 0:54:02 | |
I was gobsmacked at meeting BB - really nervous. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:07 | |
It was like shaking hands with Elvis! | 0:54:07 | 0:54:10 | |
He may be 86 but he still cuts the mustard at Glastonbury. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:14 | |
# Everybody wanna know | 0:54:14 | 0:54:19 | |
# Walk and singin' the blues | 0:54:19 | 0:54:23 | |
# Everybody wanna know | 0:54:23 | 0:54:26 | |
# Walk and sing the blues | 0:54:28 | 0:54:30 | |
# Been around a long time | 0:54:30 | 0:54:33 | |
# Really paid my dues. # | 0:54:35 | 0:54:38 | |
This is the Blue Biscuit in Indianola, run by Trish Berry and Harlan Malone. | 0:54:43 | 0:54:48 | |
And this is the most famous barbecue dish in these parts. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:52 | |
It's a sandwich made with marinated and barbecued pork | 0:54:52 | 0:54:56 | |
cooked so long in the smoker you don't need to cut it, just pull it. | 0:54:56 | 0:55:00 | |
It starts life as a big rump of hog. | 0:55:00 | 0:55:04 | |
This is called a Boston Butt. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:06 | |
Trish smothers it in garlic oil and then it's stuffed with | 0:55:06 | 0:55:10 | |
jalapeno chillies and spices and smothered with a secret marinade. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:15 | |
Then it's put into a barbecue smoker for about 20 hours. The smell is superb. | 0:55:15 | 0:55:21 | |
You see, Harlan, I'd love this job because I think it's a job for real men. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:29 | |
Not for TV cooks, you know what I mean?! | 0:55:29 | 0:55:33 | |
So what does barbecuing mean to you, then, Harlan? You must be... | 0:55:33 | 0:55:36 | |
-Well, it just means who's got the best butt! -And do you think yours is the best? | 0:55:36 | 0:55:41 | |
-I think so. -Why? | 0:55:41 | 0:55:42 | |
Because it's as tender as my heart, y'know. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:46 | |
That's why love it, it's as tender as my heart. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
People are very passionate about their barbecuing. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:51 | |
And they're very passionate about their music. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:54 | |
And this is something everybody in the Delta does, everybody barbecues. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:57 | |
And it's like the music, it's very simple music but it's good | 0:55:57 | 0:56:01 | |
and it's really passionate and heartfelt. | 0:56:01 | 0:56:04 | |
-Is that for me? -Oh, absolutely. | 0:56:04 | 0:56:07 | |
Seems... That's... Seems very.. | 0:56:07 | 0:56:10 | |
I feel very, very privileged. | 0:56:10 | 0:56:13 | |
To be the first of the TV crew to find it because they'll all be salivating at this stage! | 0:56:13 | 0:56:18 | |
Ummm. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:22 | |
That's so good, the smoke, it tastes really clean. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:26 | |
Well, I must say it seems quite a big portion, is that normal? | 0:56:26 | 0:56:28 | |
Oh, absolutely, that's about a normal sandwich, normal. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:32 | |
Nobody's going hungry on my watch! | 0:56:32 | 0:56:34 | |
BB King said scholars love to praise the pure Blues artists or the ones | 0:56:39 | 0:56:44 | |
like Robert Johnson who died young and who represent tragedy. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:48 | |
He said it angered him how the folklorists associate | 0:56:48 | 0:56:53 | |
the blues with tragedy. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:55 | |
BLUES MUSIC PLAYS | 0:56:55 | 0:56:59 | |
Everywhere I went in Mississippi | 0:57:07 | 0:57:09 | |
I was welcomed with open arms. | 0:57:09 | 0:57:11 | |
I don't think I've been to a more hospitable place | 0:57:11 | 0:57:15 | |
and before I came on this trip, | 0:57:15 | 0:57:17 | |
if someone had asked me to describe the blues | 0:57:17 | 0:57:20 | |
I would have said a form of music born out of despair. | 0:57:20 | 0:57:24 | |
But having spoken to a number of bluesmen here, I'm not so sure. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:29 | |
I think it's that indefinable feeling that comes right from the soul. | 0:57:29 | 0:57:34 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:57:37 | 0:57:39 | |
Terry Bean has the last word. | 0:57:44 | 0:57:47 | |
My grandfather played gospel on Sunday mornings, | 0:57:47 | 0:57:50 | |
with acoustic guitar but it were nothing but the blues, | 0:57:50 | 0:57:55 | |
they just change the levers around | 0:57:55 | 0:57:57 | |
and boy they get to clap and stomp and hallelujah. | 0:57:57 | 0:58:01 | |
Man, I tell ya, | 0:58:01 | 0:58:04 | |
every... All music has got the blues in it, | 0:58:04 | 0:58:07 | |
if you ain't got no blues in it, man, you ain't got no music! | 0:58:07 | 0:58:11 | |
I don't think I want to... That is perfect, that is... | 0:58:14 | 0:58:17 | |
That is the way we finish the whole film, for God's sake! | 0:58:17 | 0:58:21 | |
BLUES MUSIC PLAYS | 0:58:21 | 0:58:25 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:34 | 0:58:38 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:38 | 0:58:41 |