”Fattening Frogs For Snakes” for Dennis Formento & Arturo Pfister Coming out of Mississippi, out of the mouths of the children & grandchildren of slavery right around the turn of the 20th century, calloused fingertips pressed down on the strings of beat up guitars on small town street corners or broken down back woods joints in the darkness of Saturday night, or on a bright Sunday morning in a ramshackle clapboard church, making music to praise the Lord, & give thanks for another back breaking week in the cotton fields of the Delta (for this was music created as much to escape the rigors of share cropping & brutal manual labor as to shape a new form of expression through song) & the Delta blues sounded forth out of Mississippi on crude recordings cut in make shift studios by enterprising white men from the North, & sent out on 78 rpm singles from Paramount & OKeh & Columbia to enter & reshape the lives of people of every description all over the world—the Delta Sound ringing all up & down the line like a National steel guitar frammed in some little juke house in the middle of the woods, or the amplified blast of an electric guitar plugged into the wall in a nasty street corner bar on the South Side of Chicago, the sound of Mississippi carried up from the Delta into the factories & tenement of the cities of the North where peoples could make a living outside the cotton fields & be paid in cash dollars at tehend of every week or two & conduct their lives in the ways that they saw fit & the music sustained them as it had in the south, trans- forming the industrial noise of the urban landscape through amplified harmonicas & pounding pianos & the crashing of drums & the Fender bass—a music of such great power & incredible beauty & depth of emotion, so deeply rooted in the lives of the people that their bitter experience could be shaped into art of the highest possible order that would inform all of popular music for the rest of the century— but their rewards would never come, & the white man would reap the fruits of their artistic labors as if they were bolls of cotton in a 9-foot croaker sack & the music of the Delta would be appropriated & exploited beyond measure by the descendants of the slave holders, & their bank rollers to swell their bulging coffers & nothing would be returned to the people of the Delta & their music would be taken away & they would be left to face the terrible future of life in the ghetto with nothing to sustain them, nothing to carry them through the horrors of modern life, nothing but the watered down sound of what was once their music played back at them by white people on every television set in America, nothing from the billions of dollars of profits to be realized from their creations, nothing to he creators, nothing to the people who created them, not even the dignity of being recognized for the enormity of their contribution to the cultural life of our nation, nothing to the blues men, nothing to the blues people— this is what they mean when they talk about the blues, this is what the blues is all about— “fattening frogs for snakes” & watching the mother fucking snakes slither off with the very thing you have made —New Orleans March 7/August 31/September 12-14, 1999/ Ferndale MI October 22-24, 1999/ New Orleans November 13-16/December 18, 1999

”Don't Start Me To Talking” for Cary Wolfson & Leland Rucker Alex (or “Aleck”) Miller, called “Rice” as a boy, & “Little Boy Blue” as a juvenile performer working the streets of Glendora, Mississippi, & other little Delta towns from the age of 6, starting around 1903 (though his sister claims he was born in 1908) Rice built his reputation as a master of the harmonica & came to local fame in 1941 on “King Biscuit Time” over KFFA Radio— by then he was known (apparently at the instigation of his sponsors) as “Sonny Boy Williamson” & soon had his own brand of groceries, ”Sonny Boy Meal,” with his portrait painted on the sack, milled, bagged & marketed by the Interstate Grocery Company. 2 Yet there was another ”Sonny Boy Williamson,” born John Lee Williamson out of Jackson, Tennessee, just north & east of Memphis, born in 1915 (or either 1914), who had the good fortune to record for BlueBird, the “race label” operated by RCA Victor, as early as 1937, by which time he had established himself in Chicago & was soon to gain national fame as the King of the Blues Harmonica until John Lee Williamson was killed one night in 1948 by some thugs with knives & lead pipes on his way home from a gig on the South Side of Chicago. 3 Three years later, at the age of 54 (or at least 43), Rice Miller made his first recordings down in Jackson, Mississippi & widened his mark with a string of hot singles on Trumpet Records between 1951 & 1954 before he moved to Chicago & signed with Leonard Chess to record for Checker Records on an exclusive basis. His recordings remain today as if carved from stone, immutable, irrefutable, masterpieces of American music that will live long beyond these last days of the 20th century: “Goin' down to Rosie’s, stop at Fannie Mae’s, gonna tell ol’ Fannie what I heard her boyfriend say— Don’t start me to talking, I’ll tell everything I know; Gonna break up this signifyin’ ‘Cuz somebody's got to go!” —Maximus & Company, Birmingham MI June 21, 1984/ New Orleans December 14, 1995

”Shake ’Em On Down” for Bukka White Booker T. Washington White, born in Houston, Mississippi in 1906 (or either 1909) was raised up in West Point, Mississippi & then moved to Grenada in the Delta, where he grew up in his uncle’s household trying to play the guitar until the old man smashed it one night—then he started drifting, playing & singing, over to St. Louis & back to the Delta. He made his first recordings in Memphis, May 1930, from which but one 78 was released. Booker moved to a farm near West Point, in 1933 with his new wife & then in 1935 they moved 20 miles north to Aberdeen (birthplace of the great Chester Burnett, known professionally as Howlin’ Wolf). Booker played on the streets, in juke joints, for backwoods parties, dances & suppers, anywhere there was some money to be made, or some ladies, equally. Booker says: ”All the girls was wild about me, you know, & one of the girls that was really likin’ me— well, her boyfriend wasn’t so used to girlfriends. He was a young boy; I was older than he was. And the woman he was goin’ with— she was older than he was, she was my age. So, I think I was just a little too famous with the girls . . . . 2 ”When I came back from Aberdeen that evenin’ I was goin’ back west to play for my cousin, a dance that night. A cousin named Buck Davidson. See, my mother was a Davidson before she married a White. When I got to Prarie a friend of mine said, ’Booker,’ he say, ’you feel just as close to me as a brother of mine ’cause you don’t bother nobody. Nobody can’t say nothin’ about you, but they tellin’ a lie.’ Said, ’But don’t you play your guitar on the street today. They’re layin’ here for you.’ I said, ’layin’ here for me? For what?’ He said, ‘I done told you a long time ago all these women goin’ for you. They want to get you out the way.’ 3 ”But they didnıt know I had that .38 Colt Automatic with the holste r right there in my pocket. I said, ’Well, I don’t bother them, but if they get ready I’m just as ready to go to their funeral as they are to go to mine.’ So, that’s what happened. Just like you see that store right there, there’s about 15 of them linin’ up & down there. I’m goin’ to get on old man Curly Allen’s log truck, goin’ back west. Me & my friend Russ Quinn, we goin’ to that dance over there. But they didn’t let me get to the truck. They sent this girl’s little boy friend out to start it. Well, he made a slow start. . . .” & Booker White ended up doing 2 years on Parchman Farm for assault on that boy. —Detroit March 25, 1982/ New Orleans November 20, 1995