Highway 61 Jazz Journal review

A supportive review for Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway by Dave Jones appears in Jazz Journal Vol 67 No.12. It describes how the author “takes us on a vivid journey down Highway 61 from Chicago in the north to New Orleans in the Deep South, making telling observations along the way, aided by some fine black and white and colour photographs by Richard Brown.”  Jones says that for him, “the book is often about the people who make the music rather than the music itself, and it serves partly as a stark reminder of the horrors of racism that have been endured by these musicians and their contemporaries.” The book, suggests Jones, “is an engaging read on a number of levels, and although Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions (2007) is a very difficult act to follow fro any revisionist orientated blues publication, Bright’s 2014 offering is not trying to achieve the same thing.  What it does, it does very well.”

Jazz Journal Volume 67 No.12 includes review of Highway 61 Crossroads on the Blues Highway

Left turns on the blues highway

This weekend’s edition of the people’s daily the Morning Star, includes a one page article about the history of the blues and African-American’s on-going struggle for civil rights.  The article also includes three of Richard Brown’s superb photographs that feature in the book.

The Morning Star article can be found at the paper’s web-site at http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-0253-Left-turns-on-the-blues-highway#.VMzT4GisWSo

Article on Highway 61 from Morning Star

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Highway 61 recommended by Jefferson Blues magazine

Another positive and appreciative review of the book Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway [History Press] appears in the December 2014 edition of the world’s oldest blues magazine, Swedish based Jefferson.  A copy of Mats Sturesson’s review in Jefferson Blues magazine is reproduced below.

HIGHWAY 61: Crossroads on the Blues Highway Derek Bright ISBN 978-0-7524-8924-7 The Englishman Derek Bright is someone who on a number of occasions traveled along the Mississippi and then gathered his thoughts and impressions into a form of diary. He went by car on Highway 61 (with slight detour) from Chicago to New Orleans. During the trips he visited places in one way or another appear in blues history. Many are the buildings, clubs, streets and tombstones that formed natural stops along the way. Each stop causing Derek to retell events and processes associated with the location. He is well-read and knows his blues history, even if no new facts emerge. Although large parts of the civil rights movement’s history is included in these flashbacks, which to me is one of the books many merits. Derek Bright however, is not satisfied enough to simply retell the blues history in selected parts. He allows himself also to ponder and reflect on the events that made the blues available to us Europeans and eventually for the white US. In its own way this is an interesting process to scrutinize a little closer. Quite unashamedly, we tried as middle-class kids to play the blues (I myself helped with my little insignificant part to this big stack) without really grasping the racism and the major social and economic differences that formed the basis for the music. These thoughts lead Derek further into a fairly recent phenomenon, known as blue tourism. What does this really mean? Deep down. What is the significance of the living blues of today, the clubs around Chicago, in Clarksdale, or a juke joint out among the fields in Mississippi? I myself have been at some of the places and tombs the author visits and can recognize myself in the thinking and reasoning that he writes about. I read these musings with great interest and the final word will probably not be said on that point. In summary, Highway 61 a very good book that works on several levels. First, it is as I said a travel journal with a bit of I’ve been there, done that ourselves. First, it is a retelling of the blues and the civil rights movement’s history, and on that plane the book is probably targeted mainly to new blues lovers.  Last but not least is the observations and thoughts about the blues of today and where it is heading that should interest everyone. A clearly readable book with a fine section of color images that do not detract.   Recommended.

Mats Sturesson

Highway 61 in pictures…

.. captured over twenty one days driving down Highway 61 en route to New Orleans with photographer Richard Brown.  A journey that left me with a ‘deep vein thrombosis’ and a spider bite , lanced in a clinic in Clarksdale Mississippi, not that there’s any place more apposite for a blues traveller to have one’s toe cut open without anaesthetic.

Ruby’s Nite Spot – Leland Mississippi

But all well worth it as nearly a hundred of Richard Brown’s photographs feature in Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway, published by the History Press.  Highway 61 as seen through the lense of photographer Richard Brown can be found at Arjaybeephotography .

 

 

Derek Bright talks to Sarah Ward on Jazz FM about blues pilgrimage on Highway 61

To coincide with the launch of his latest book Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway, author Derek Bright guested on Sarah Ward’s Jazz Travels show on Jazz FM.  The interview can be heard by clicking on the link below.

Derek talks about walking from the North London suburbs as a teenager up to Soho to buy records by British rock bands in the seventies and how he was intrigued by the names like Ida Cox, Howlin Wolf, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters who were credited as composers of some of the songs covered on the albums that caught his young ear.

Expanding on what blues pilgrimage means to many of the people who take the journey south down Highway 61, Derek, describes memories of his own road trip south from Chicago, via Rock Island, and along the banks of the Mississippi River through St Louis, Memphis and Mississippi Delta.  He talks about some of the historic crossroads found on the journey south and the history of African American struggle that emanated from the very same communities that gave birth to the blues.

From the book Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway [History Press]

North St.Louis, a mix of urban decay and renewal…

…confronts visitors seeking out the Greater Ville neighbourhood of North St. Louis, where Chuck Berry grew up.  Photographs of the area’s architecture together with the neighbourhood’s history and reminiscence’s from those that once lived in the Ville can be found at Mark Groth’s excellent St. Louis City Talk site. Just a few miles northeast along Dr Martin Luther King Drive one passes a little south of Ferguson, a suburb of North St. Louis where street protests re-ignited following a Grand Jury decision not to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a young African American in August. Pamela Engel writing for Business Insider just days after the death of unarmed teenage Michael Brown described St. Louis as one of the most segregated cities in America, where racial tensions ‘have been boiling over for years’.  Reading reports as events in Ferguson unfolded did not come as a complete surprise visited many parts of the city that had sites which had been connected with the history of blues music.  On one such day, following a morning’s trip over to East St. Louis in search of the site where the Cosmopolitan Club had stood, the venue where Chuck Berry had started his career with pianist Johnnie Johnson in the Sir John’s Trio, we returned across the Mississippi River from Illinois back to Missouri.

The Ville, North St Louis

The Martin Luther King Bridge took us back over the Mississippi to St. Louis and we made our way along Dr Martin Luther King Drive for a few miles, passing through North St Louis towards the Ville neighbourhood where Chuck berry grew up.  As we drove further through North St Louis and away from the downtown area the deterioration of the brick built properties that lined the avenues either side of Dr Martin Luther King Drive became starker.  Yet it was clear that these avenues had once been impressive and sought-after residential areas.

The shops on the opposite side of Dr Martin Luther King Drive had been boarded up, as had a good many other properties, and as we turned off the main thoroughfare we were met once again by a series of vacant lots with patches of grass where buildings had once stood. A little way along the street a number of brick villas stood, characteristic of the architecture to be found in North St. Louis. Some of the buildings were in good repair but others had missing windows, roofs partially stripped of their tiles, and shuttering nailed over any opening that would allow access.

Berry was born in a three-room brick cottage at 2520 Goode Avenue.  Situated in a nicely kept area in the best of the three black sections of the city, it is from Goode Avenue that the country boy and protagonist in the song takes his name.  Ironically the hero of the song was originally penned as a ‘coloured boy’, but was subsequently change by Berry to ‘country boy’ when he recorded the song, so as not to alienate a white audience. [see Berry, The Autobiography, 1988]  Partly autobiographical, Johnny’s life is a metaphor for the development of blues music (or at least one view of it); rather than being born in St. Louis, Johnny is born in a log cabin near New Orleans.  Berry places Johnny’s log cabin at the beginning of the African American experience, a place that Berry interestingly describes as the ‘gateway from freedom’ that he ‘was led to understand, was somewhere close to New Orleans, where most Africans were sorted through and sold’ [Berry, 1988].

From the book Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway [History Press]

Highway 61 in the press…

“Having read the book cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed it, I wished it was with me when I went.”

Dave Stone, Blues Matters, August/September 2014

“Once again, the author has an eye for detail for those of us who’ve done the drive”

Neil Slaven, Blues & Rhythm magazine, No 294 November 2014

“British writer (and occasional bluesman) Derek Bright’s tale of his journey along the backbone of the  blues, from Chicago down to New Orleans, would be worth the read were it merely a travelogue.  But as Bright gets closer to that fabled crossroads in Mississippi, he finds himself following a second path, one which is inextricably caught up with the first: the story of the civil rights movement, which eerily (and yet perfectly sensibly) mirrors the migration of black Americans from the deep South to the frozen North.  And Bright’s Britishness seems to be a distinct advantage here, just enough isolation from the scene to be able to recount what he saw without falling back on accepted history.  It a beautiful book with evocative photography by Richard Brown, and if you have the slightest interest in the blues and how it got here – and why its still around – your journey should start here”.

Dustbury.com link to full review

The above is taken from the book (History Press, ISBN 978-0-7524-8924-7, IPG Trafalgar distributors in United States)

Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway

Stockyard Blues…

by Floyd Jones is just one of many blues songs that reflect the new urban environment that African Americans found during the Great Migration from the South to Mid-west cities like Chicago…

It is not surprising therefore that reference to the stockyards are to found in the lyrics of a number of blues songs that reflected the experience of urban life, such as work in the slaughter houses and the stockyards. Songs such as Skip James’s ‘Hard Times Killing Floor’. Howlin Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’ and Floyd Jones’s ‘Stockyard Blues’. Jones’s songs reflect the hardship and struggle faced daily by workers in the stockyards: the lyrics of the 1947 ‘Stockyard Blues’ make direct reference to a labour dispute.

Well I left home this morning, boy, y’know about half-past nine

I passed the stockyards y’know, the boys were still on the picket line

Y’know I need to earn a dollar

Y’know I need to earn a dollar

The cost of living have gone so high, now then OI don’t know what to do [Snooky and Moody, ‘Stockyard Blues’, Marvel M-1312]

Floyd Jones was no doubt referring to the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) strike of the previous year.  Rick Halpern’s study of black and white workers claims Jones was an Armour packinghouse worker  (Halpern, R., Down on the Killing Floor, Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-54, 1997,)  Irrespective of Floyd’s packinghouse credentials, he would have seen at close hand the yesterday struggles of those living in the Back of the Yards.

The above is taken from the book (History Press, ISBN 978-0-7524-8924-7, IPG Trafalgar distributors in United States)

Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway

open the passenger door and climb in…

..writes rock’n’roll author and ex-Clash Road Manager, Johnny Green in Highway 61’s foreword.  Johnny should know because when the Clash first toured the States in 1979, Bo Diddley was the band’s support of choice. He describes how on the band’s first night in Chicago, he and Joe Strummer “through good fortune and local guidance”…”ended up in some dodgy joint to celebrate ecstatically the birthday of Sunnyland Slim”.

In the historic Bronzeville District on the South Side, one can still find many of the old haunts that once hosted the best of Chicago blues, from the days of Waters, Walter, Williamson and Wolf, although nearly all of these old clubs now stand derelict, boarded-up, converted to other uses or are signified by their absence as simply vacant lots. Today it’s harder to find “dodgy joints” offering blues but that doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of top notch Chicago blues to be found in the city that self-identifies itself as the “blues capital of the world”. In the eighties many of the clubs moved from the South and West Side neighbourhoods to North Side neighbourhoods, reflecting changing tastes and the newer affluent white audience that had found the blues.

Continued below from the book Highway 61 – Crossroads on the Blues Highway

I was expecting to find in Chicago a history that had been reinvented, reconfigured and eventually transported to safer and more commercially viable spaces. The blues had come to me from the interpretation of a few white males from London and the Home Counties of England, who had themselves been smitten with a sound that originated outside of their own cultural domain. The source of the blues that had moved me was the product of the 1960’s blues revival, yet commentators like Paul Garon, on the founders of Living Blues magazine, warns:

“Had it not been created through the genius of an oppressed people, its language and speech would not have contained the same demands. Before the blues revival of the 1960s, it was taken for granted that blues contained an eloquent protest, but during the blues revival, professional pessimists, hailing themselves as realists, declared that such protest could not be detected in blues lyrics. This after decades of scholarship had uncovered the hidden meanings and the rebelliousness ‘coded’ in spirituals, and decades after the findings were totally accepted.” [Paul Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit, 1996]

I was growing more aware that there were many lenses through which the blues pilgrim perceives the story of the blues. As such, I was conscious that what I found on my journey would not only be based upon my own evaluation, but also to a great extent would be also be pieced together from the historical narratives of others.