We Just Change The Beat
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Wednesday, 28 December 2005 09:26 |
The Delta Sound
Ain t too many left that plays the real deep blues . . . ain t too many more left . . .
There ain t too many left sings the type of blues that I sing . . . .
Muddy Waters, to Robert Palmer in Deep Blues
From the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis where the Delta begins
down Highway 61 through Tunica & into Clarksdale, Mississippi
This is where the music was born and bred in miles & miles of cotton fields,
one room shacks, dirt roads stretching across the countryside, standing at the crossroads
where 49 meets 61 or waiting in the dark for the train to make it
down the track & jump on board because anywhere else is better than this place
This is where the music came to be, boogie lightning against the sky,
Tommy Johnson & Charley Patton making their pacts with the devil at the stroke of midnight,
Legba at the crossroads of Africa & America,
black men & women dragged in chains & shippped in chains & whipped
into Mississippi where the music came to life under the whip
& the gun & hours of relentless sun beating down every day on the slave peoples
cutting trees, pulling stumps like mules, plowing the cleared land, planting,
picking cotton dawn to dark, the music deep inside them coming out in grunts
& groans & the moans of the spirits of the ancestors in the train whistles,
in the air, everywhere, the land soaked with their blood,
the night alive with the spirit voices wailing over their crops,
the fruits of their labors, the richness of the land a constant mockery, everything they made
was taken away, everything was stolen from them
but the music made life go on & moved peoples to stay alive
& led them out of the Delta to Chicago or Detroit
but some big city, some other place where no cotton grows & the crackers
wear suits or carry lunch pails & the plants pay that good money
& the music gets harder & louder, lightning electricity leaping from the walls
The Delta Sound brought to bear on the City, deeper than deep, from where all feeling rises
The Delta Sound . . . . Ain t too many left . . . Ain t too many more left . . . Ain t too many left at all . . .
New Orleans May 10, 1982/ Detroit June 3, 1982
3.1.669 |