“Fattening Frogs For Snakes” for Dennis Formento & Arthur 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 jukehouse 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 & tenements of the cities of the North where peoples could make a living outside the cotton fields & be paid in cash dollars at the end 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, transforming 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 descendents 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 the 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 about— “fattening frogs for snakes” & watching the mother fucking snakes slither off with the very thing you have made —New Orleans March 7, 1998 > August 31, 1999 > September 12-14, 1999 Ferndale, MI October 22-24, 1999/ New Orleans November 13-16 > December 18, 1999