BIG RIVER

in this chapter, James and Bruce head into the Mississippi Delta in search of some of the roots of the music of Johnny Cash. The country elements come later, but here it's all about the blues, the bedrock of the music that spread throughout white America from Memphis in the fifties, and then the rest of the world.

For me, it's a simple journey back in time, generation by generation.

Start with the generation of musicians before Johnny Cash, like Ike Turner, in Clarksdale, the last stopping place out of the Delta before the journey north and into Memphis, and the location for the infamous crossroads, where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar skills. Keep travelling south to Ruleville, to Greasy Street, which bounced with the blues in the forties, and across to Indianola, where BB King would busk on the corner of 2nd Avenue and Church Street.

Head to Moorhead, and to where the Southern crosses the Dog, the two rail lines that were the inspiration for the song that was sung on a small railway station in Tutwiler that led to all that followed, but before you get to Tutwiler, go to Dockery Farms, the plantation where Charley Patton and Son House would sing, the generation before the Clarksdale artists.

Keep going back in time, because Charley Patton and Son House were taught and influenced by Henry Sloan, and perhaps it was indeed Henry Sloan himself singing and making a racket on a guitar late at night on Tutwiler station in the presence of WC Handy, who heard something he'd never heard before. But he liked it. And he took it and spread it, and produced songs like Memphis Blues and began the revolution.