How We Go On: A Trip Through the Mississippi Hill Country Blues Justin Gricus

The Mississippi hill country blues can trace its roots back to the polyrhythmic styles of West Africa brought to the United States by slaves prior to the Civil War. The emphasis on these percussive elements combined with fingerpicked guitar grooves; hypnotic, trance-inducing basslines; and vocals that merge both speech and song characterize the music of this region. The blues of the Mississippi Delta was the blues that traveled north to Chicago and became known through famous artists such as Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and B.B. King. While these musicians brought their Delta roots to the rest of the country and world, the hill country blues was the music that remained in Mississippi, the music that stayed home.

During the 1930s and '40s, the hill country blues thrived at picnics and barbecues and in the early juke joints around towns such as Holly Springs and Como, but it remained largely obscure to the outside world. That changed in 1959 when folklorist Alan Lomax returned to northern Mississippi to record local fife and drum musicians, and in the process, discovered a middle-aged cotton farmer and guitar picker named Fred McDowell. Intrigued by McDowell’s groove-based blues, Lomax recorded McDowell and helped expose this genre to a larger audience beyond the confines of hill country. Mississippi Fred McDowell would eventually influence a variety of musicians of the 1960s and '70s, including The Rolling Stones who covered his song “You Got to Move” on their 1971 album, StickyFingers. In Mark Bego’s biography of Bonnie Raitt, Justinthe Nick of Time, Raitt describes how McDowell helped teach her guitar and served musicians who embraced the roots of this music while infusing it with their own styles and interpretations, contributing to the evolution of the hill country sound.

R.L. Burnside (1926—2005) and Junior Kimbrough (1930—1998) are perhaps the two names most associated with this next generation of hill country blues musicians. Like McDowell, their early recordings were done by field researchers, musicologists, and folklorists traveling the dirt roads of the Mississippi backcountry on pilgrimages to discover the next blues icons. Though Burnside did perform at various festivals both in the United States and abroad, he was still primarily a farmer and later a truck driver who was a regular in the local bars and juke joints and backyard cookouts that continued to define and shape the area’s musical culture.

Kimbrough remained even less well known outside of the hill country until the musical critic Robert Palmer and documentary filmmaker Robert Mugge released the documentary DeepBlues:A MusicalPilgrimagetotheCrossroads in 1992. Palmer would later produce Kimbrough’s debut album AllNight Long for the Oxford-based Fat Possum record label, a label primarily started in the early 1990s for the purpose of recording this aging generation of hill country blues musicians who up until that time had only been sparsely recorded. Kimbrough’s AllNightLong received praise from a variety of critics, including a four-star review in RollingStone magazine and would bring national attention to Kimbrough’s hypnotic blues stylings. In the liner notes of the album, Palmer describes Kimbrough’s vocals as “something that sounds like a pre-blues field holler” with a “guitar rhythm like Memphis soul music.” Palmer later writes that “when the bass and drums come in on one of Junior’s riffs, the music might sound like some kind of hillbilly-metalfunk that hasn’t been heard yet.”

Junior was known for his various juke joints in the region, the last one being an abandoned church that burned down prior to Kimbrough’s death. Kimbrough would record two more albums for Fat Possum records before he died of a heart attack in Holly Springs, MS, in 1998, but it was Kimbrough’s relative obscurity and lack of existing recordings that inspired Palmer to say in the Deep Blues documentary, “If you want to hear his music, you have to go out jukin’.”

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It was with the intent of keeping these blues traditions alive that inspired Mississippi blues guitarist Kenny Brown to build a stage on the flatbed of a tractor trailer and haul it out to a pasture in his home town of Potts Camp in the hills of northern Mississippi. He invited some of his local friends and descendents of these aforementioned blues musicians to play a one-day festival celebrating the musical heritage unique to this part of the state. The first Mississippi Hill Country Picnic launched in 2006 and attracted around 1,000 people, hailing from seventeen states and a number of different countries. Brown, who began performing with R.L. Burnside in the early 1970s, wanted to recreate the mood and atmosphere of the blues picnics he recalled from his youth. Growing up, Brown was neighbors with the late Othar Turner, the legendary fife player and bluesman, and recalls attending Turner’s field parties and blues picnics that Turner began hosting in the early 1950s. These were a continuation of the blues picnic traditions from the first half of the century that involved sharecroppers and laborers gathering and communing in backyards and fields before another week of toil.

The North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic has now expanded to a twoday event and has moved a few miles west to Waterford, but it still remains sincere to Brown’s original vision, bringing music fans together to an isolated area in North Mississippi to hear the current generation of musicians reinvent and redefine this style of blues. My first experience with it occurred last summer during a heat wave in June. It was 95 degrees and not yet noon when my Uber driver exited Highway 7 and turned left onto the dirt road that led to the entrance. The driver had never heard of the picnic and was one of many locals I had met while staying in Oxford who were unaware of the concert happening fewer than thirty miles to the north. This remote location combined with the blazing hot temperatures and a musical lineup featuring musicians who could trace their lineage back to the roots of this genre gave this festival a flavor of intimacy that differentiated it from the myriad of music festivals that dot the American musical landscape each summer.

On that first Friday of the picnic, I watched Duwayne Burnside, the eldest son of R.L., play an hour-long set that combined songs of his father with his own original compositions. Duwayne was just one of the many descendents of R.L in a lineup that also featured Kent Burnside (R.L. 's oldest grandson) and Garry Burnside (R.L. 's youngest son), both paying homage to the blues of their forebear.

As darkness settled onto the grounds, cooling the evening air, it was Robert Kimbrough Sr. the son of Junior Kimbrough, who played his own interpretation of his father’s “cotton patch soul blues.” This sound once characterized by Kimbrough’s dense rhythmic layers now continued with his son’s soulful, plaintive vocals that drifted through the grounds all the way past Highway 7 and fanned out over the land where it originated.

While these musicians

Saturday brought more Burnsides and Kimbroughs, including Junior’s grandson, Cameron, a drummer in the band The Memphissippi Sounds.

Otha Turner’s granddaughter Sharde Thomas performed with the Rising Stars Fife and Drum Band, celebrating her grandfather’s legacy and continuing a vanishing American folk tradition that has been a part of North Mississippi since the Civil War. The final night closed with the North Mississippi All-Stars featuring Luther and Cody Dickinson, sons of famed record producer and session musician Luther Dickinson, and an extended jam session with the Hill Country Kings, an all-star collection of many of the performers from the past two days on stage together for one final set to conclude the 2022 edition of the Hill Country Picnic. with an axe/ the model is indeed near at hand.” As I continued thinking about this picnic and reading more about these artists, Synder’s musings on the cultural transmission of heritage from one generation to the next became even more vivid and relevant. The poem concludes with Snyder suddenly understanding that his teachers were axes, and now he too is an axe and his son an axe handle “soon to be shaping again, model and tool, craft of culture, how we go on.”

One of the more well-known poems by the poet Gary Synder entitled “Axe Handles” tells the story of a father teaching his son how to throw a hatchet so that it will consistently lodge into a stump. His son, wanting to make his own hatchet, remembers an old hatchet head stored in his father’s shop. The dad tells his son to retrieve it so they can use it to “shape the [new] handle/by checking the handle/of the axe we cut with.”

In the process of constructing this new hatchet, his father recalls lines from the Chinese poet Lu Ji from the fourth century in his preface to his “Essay on Literature”: “In making the handle/of the ax/by cutting wood

The hill country blues is no longer hidden away in an isolated region of Mississippi known only to the generations of families who have nurtured these traditions for decades. The music is now widely recorded, played, and distributed. You no longer have to go out jukin’ to hear the hill country sound, but it’s still worth the trip to its source during the heat of the summer to listen to the offspring of some of the early pioneers playing guitars and fifes, drums and harps, hill country blues, cotton patch soul, craft of culture, how we go on.

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich.” Wouldn’t that be nice? The opening line of Jane Austen’s Emma presents the title character as a genteel young woman who has floated through life with few hardships. Emma and her charming but delicate father control the social dealings of the village of Highbury like puppet masters from the manor house on Hartfield estate: the Woodhouses “had been settled