Clarksdale’s Roger Stolle on the blues: “It’s the feeling of it, the truth of it, the humanness of it.”

Roger Stolle runs the Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art store in Clarksdale, Mississippi, which he opened in 2002, after moving from St. Louis with a mission to “organize and promote the blues from within.” Since then he’s started a record label, written a book on the history of the blues in Mississippi, produced several documentaries about the blues and been behind several blues festivals now flourishing in the town.

The Cat Head store is a treasure trove of blues related stuff – CDs, DVDs, posters, books, memorabilia – and Roger says, “I basically tried to build the store I wanted to walk into but could never find!” Of Mississippi he says that when he moved there he found some of the nicest, most open people he’d ever met.

Roger’s is a remarkable story of one man’s love for the blues, for the Mississippi Delta and the people of Clarksdale, which, in many ways is the home of the blues. Roger told Down at the Crossroads his story –

DATC: Roger, how does a guy from Ohio, a successful corporate marketing executive end up in the Mississippi Delta, with his life revolved around the blues?

Roger: It’s crazy! But let me back up a little and tell you how I got into blues. It’s August 17, 1977, I’m ten years old, I’m in Trotwood, Ohio and Elvis Presley just died. “The King is dead at 42,” said the newspapers, and I’m, like, “what is that?!” My parents didn’t listen to music, and to me, this looks interesting.  And then you turn on the TV, the radio, you go to the mall and hear the PA, everything is Elvis. It was crazy, he was on the front page of our papers in Ohio every single day for the whole week. It was huge.

So, I’m exposed to this music and, to be honest, not all of it hit me in the same way – I didn’t know what I was hearing, but what I now know is that I was into his blues and R&B stuff. I was into the Tupelo-Memphis Elvis, not the Hollywood-Las Vegas Elvis.

So that’s the music I kept trying to seek out. I’d buy these little 45s at Sears – and the reason I know what I liked is I still have that stuff – they’re all blues and R&B covers. Anyway, I’m getting into it without knowing it. You move forward a little, I’m getting older – I won’t say that I was necessarily an Eric Clapton fan at the time, but I knew that he was a big blues fan and in interviews he loved to mention Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Robert Johnson, Freddie King and so on. And I would just jot those names down, and I’d go to all the little malls and record stores in our area, looking – ‘cos there’s no Internet, there’s no Google, you can’t look this stuff up, even to know what ones to buy. And a lot of the time, I would just buy the cheapest used LP or new cassette tape – and sometimes you got a good one and sometimes you got, like, the one bad Lightnin’ Hopkins album! So I tried to self -educate.

Keep moving forward in time and after college I stumbled into advertising. I worked my way up pretty quickly into management and moved into a great job in St Louis in February 1995.

So I move there, but I’m a blues fan at that point. I’ve been educating myself, I’ve seen whatever blues artists have come through the crossroads of I70 and I75 in Dayton Ohio. Oddly enough, the first time I ever saw R L Burnside was in 1998 at a jazz club in Dayton – and the next time I saw him was in a juke joint in 1996 in Mississippi.

So anyway, I come down here around 1996 and do what I call for my customers the Dead Man’s Blues Tour. I really thought it was all gone, but I thought I’d come down and see where my heroes came from. And there weren’t that many headstones at that time – most of them are modern, paid for by fans – and there’s no Mississippi Blues Trail or history markers. The State was not recognizing blues as being important yet. There were no guide books, and you just showed up and tried to talk to people. And it was really cool, because you got to meet blues folk who I always found to be fabulous – they’d invite you to their homes and stuff. If you were here on a weekend, there might be some live blues somewhere in the Delta, but it wasn’t a guaranteed thing, certainly not in Clarksdale.

There were three main blues festivals in the region, two in Mississippi, one in Arkansas, that I’d come down for.  The Sunflower Blues festival in Clarksdale, the Delta Blues and Heritage festival in Greenville and then the King Biscuit festival in Helena, Arkansas, which was particularly good during those years. But that was really it. Now of course we have a whole bunch of festivals.

So I just kept visiting and I’d go hang out with T-Model Ford – he became a buddy so I’d come down and hang out with him and his family. And he’d get the guitar out, and I had a great job, so I’d always pay him like it was a little house party.

After six and a half years of visiting, I just felt like it was all slipping away. And these little towns like Clarksdale that I had fallen in love with were dying. The downtown was dying, people were moving out of the neighbourhood…

And so I moved here with a mission to organize and promote the blues from within. That was my mission statement on my business plan – it wasn’t just about opening a store, it was about the mission. I moved here, trying to work with musicians, juke joint owners, club owners or potential club owners.

DATC: That was quite a vision, Roger.

Roger: Well, it’s funny to look back. I forget sometimes how crazy it actually looks! Now it seems like it’s brilliant! But it was pretty crazy, I have to admit. I mean the job I had was the sort of job people dream of getting. It was awesome, I was going to Hong Kong and Taipei and Europe and New York all the time, I had 14 people working for me, the pay and benefits were crazy, but I kept on coming down here and I realized, this is where I was supposed to be.

DATC: How did your family feel about this crazy move?

Roger: Well, I went and saw my Dad and stepmother in Florida and his comment was, “Well, we know you wouldn’t do anything stupid son.” And I was like, I wouldn’t give me that much credit! But my mother was so upset – she’d been bragging to her friends about what I’d been doing in my career – but she just stood up off her sofa, didn’t say a word, and walked out the front door! She wouldn’t talk to me that night, she was so upset. But now she’s come around because I’ve sent her my book and magazine writings and documentaries and CDs and so on. She understands now why I’ve done it, even if it’s not her dream.

DATC: Leaving the corporate world to start up a small business, always seems like a big risk to people who don’t do it.

Roger: When I resigned my boss, who was new in position and suddenly had me who is responsible for this whole department of people, resigning – first he tried to bribe me and then to guilt me out of it. They tried to not let me quit. It was the craziest thing.

Anyway, I land here in Clarksdale, and of course I knew a lot of people I’d met over the years. But it’s one thing to be visiting and another to say, hey I’ve moved here! I needed a two-wheel dolly and there’s a local company here in Clarksdale that makes them. So, I thought, cool, I’ll buy local, and I go out there and there’s this older white lady at the front counter who says, OK, follow me, I’ll show you what we got. We start walking back towards the warehouse, and I said, I just moved here from St. Louis and I’m opening a store, and before I could even get the statement out, she stops and turns around and says, “Boy, why’d you move to hell?”

DATC: Wow! And that’s your first day?

Roger: Yeah, in her mind the town was done, and she was just stuck here.

DATC; Did that unsettle you Roger?

Roger: Not at all! The glass is always half full for me. I remember going on one of those first weeks to the Mayor and board of commissioner meetings at City Hall to get in tune with what is going on in town. And I remember this old man – there use to be this public comments section which they did away with – this old white guy standing up and he just ranted about blues ain’t gonna save our town and I’m tired of hearing about people spending time and money on this. And of course my argument was – yes you’re exactly right, blues will not save the town – alone. But – I don’t see anything else to work with, so that’s the first piece on the table, work with that, start building on to it and you get somewhere. One thing alone isn’t going to do it unless Nissan moves a car plant here or something.

So that’s what we’ve been doing for 16 years, slowly building this community of people working on this.

DATC: Did you find, Roger, people at the beginning were resistant to this guy coming in from the outside with his vision for their town. Did you get any naysayers, apart from the woman who thought you’d moved to hell?

Roger: Well, I’m no brain surgeon or rocket scientist and I can prove it any day of the week! One of the things I bring to a situation though is that I’ve always been able to work with almost anybody. So coming here my whole thing was, I’m not going to be telling people what they should be doing or how they should be doing it, and I sure wasn’t going telling people why they should think blues is important. I’m going to show them, let them discover things in their own way for themselves.

So for example, one of the major ways we were able to do that, is I partnered with Bubba O’Keefe, a local Clarksdale guy – super energetic, very intelligent, a local businessman who loves this town. And we started a juke joint festival. It’s now our town’s biggest event, coming up to its fifteenth anniversary. The secret of that is that it’s not just another blues festival – it’s half blues festival, half small town fair, and all about the Delta. So this year we have 110 blues acts, but also monkeys riding dogs herding sheep! Also we have racing pigs, and a petting zoo and things for kids. Those kind of things everybody wants to see – we may not think it’s right, but we wanna see it!

And you know, Southern hospitality is a real thing. People are going to ask you where you’re from and be hospitable if you can put them in the same room as these tourists from around the world.

We polled people in 2016 and we found people from at least 28 countries. I think that’s insane! So those people are all here. And locals are, like, hey, where are y’all from? And the overseas folks start talking about how much they love the town. Not just the music, but the town. And those are the type of situations, umbrellas if you like, that we’ve been trying to open around here

DATC: So what do you particularly like about living in Clarksdale?

James “T-Model” Ford

Roger: When I first moved here, people would say to me, hey, you must really love the blues to have moved here. Well, I do, but that alone wouldn’t have done it. It’s the music that brought me, but the people that made me want to stay. You know, being friends with someone like Red Paden who owns Red’s Juke Joint – awesome. And having been friends with and taking guys overseas who aren’t with us any more like Robert Belfour and T-Model Ford – having those experiences – priceless. Those are the kind of things that made it all worthwhile, honestly.

And it’s a cool little town. It’s become kinda artsy, very musical. We’ve had people who have moved here in the past 13 years from at least 4 or 5 foreign countries, a couple of couples from Australia for example, others from over a dozen US states. So you have that interesting mix of people, but everybody brings some kind of quirky thing from where they came from and people who come here know it’s not a place you come to “do it your way.” You come here and you get in where you fit in.

DATC:  What are your hopes for the town in the future?

Roger: More of the same. Continuing to develop downtown, sell more buildings, get more tourists here. But it would be nice to see a more consistent traffic all year round, because it is a real challenge to do business here. In the bigger picture, what Clarksdale really needs is to attract a decent sized manufacturing plant, somebody who can add a few hundred jobs. And like many small communities, our schools continue to need work. Those are the kinds of things that blues and cultural tourism literally can’t fix – but it can attract people who are able to fix those things.

DATC: Roger, you own and manage the Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art store; but you do other things as well…?

Roger: So the films that I’ve worked on – Hard Times, M for Mississippi, We Juke Up in Here, and then Moonshine & Mojo Hands is our newest project, which is a web series that going to go to DVD shortly. And my partner on those film projects and some of the recording stuff too is Jeff Konkel, who still lives in St Louis. He came down to my store and saw I’d started a record label, and he said, “If that idiot can do it, I’m sure I could do it,” so he started his own. Frankly, he’s probably done better with his than I did with mine!

Then we started working on bigger projects together. I also wrote a book called the Hidden History of Mississippi Blues. I’m hoping to write a new one, due out next year on juke joints. I did three albums on Big George Brock, and then there’s the festivals.

DATC: What is it about the blues that appeals to you, speaks to you? What is it that still draws people to the blues, to artists whose music has been around for a long time?

Roger: It’s a great question, and I think language fails us trying to describe it. When you hear it for the first time, it’s the feeling of it, the truth of it, the humanness of it. But when you sort of analyse it, in the long term, especially nowadays – there’s a word, authenticity, that gets overused and misused. And when we’re talking about music that came from here, it’s just that authentic musical experience, it’s the voice of a culture. To me, you feel that, it’s real. It’s not this process-created, marketed kind of thing.

Now of course blues as a genre has become huge, in terms of the breadth of it. But for me, when you come to the guys who came from the culture, that is why they sound the way they do. That’s the kind of stuff that gets to the heart of things, for me. It’s hard not to be touched by it.

DATC: And you’ve spoken to a lot of local blues artists, some now passed on, like David Honeyboy Edwards, and recorded that in your columns in Blues Revue and in your book; What are some of the broad impressions about the blues and the history of the blues you’ve gathered as you look back on those interviews?

Roger: The biggest eye-opener for me, once I was here for a while, when I would do an interview with someone like Bilbo Walker or L.C. Ulmer or Big George Brock, people of that generation – you know these guys grew up the exact same way, almost without exception, as Charlie Patton, or Son House, or Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters. The plantation system here, sharecropping, segregation, these things were all in place during that huge swathe of time. Like those forefathers of the music, none of the guys I mentioned got to go to school, they were all illiterate. All these factors – it’s like having a bee trapped in amber – which suddenly you’re able to let out. When you asked them questions, you got answers like you would have got from these bluesmen of antiquity. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a right thing, it’s just how it was.

DATC: It really shows you how the context of the blues is really what gave rise to it. The situation of African Americans in the early decades of the 20^th century and what they went through is what gave rise to the music.

Roger: Absolutely. Big George Brock, for example, told stories of this mule he worked – owned by the plantation of course – named Ida. He would sing to that mule to make her work – but he was ploughing with a mule before they had a tractor. And I’m talking to a guy about this, who is 85 years old and who experienced that. It’s fascinating, and that’s why the music – it may have been updated in terms of electricity, for example – but it still feels the same way.

DATC: Thank you Roger!

Paul Thorn in Conversation: paying tribute to his gospel roots

Paul Thorn has just released his 13^th album, Don’t Let the Devil Ride. It’s an unabashed album of gospel music, with Paul and his band, and a group of top notch collaborators including the Blind Boys of Alabama, the McCrary Sisters, Bonnie Bishop and New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Horns in scintillating form. It’s heady stuff, rockin’ gospel music with a wonderful, upbeat spirit. “This is the culmination of my whole life in music, coming back to my gospel roots,” Paul says, “I want to help lighten your load and make you smile.”

He goes on: “One of things that I take a lot of pride in is that I love everybody, and what I learned in church paid dividends. When I’m up there entertaining it’s also a glimpse of what my life has been and how gospel music has molded me into who I am.”

Who he is, is a class Americana act – great singer, guitar player and song writer with a quick sense of humour, who has shared a stage with Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt, Sting, Jeff Beck and Huey Lewis, to name a few. But he’s also a thoroughly nice guy who’s happy to sign autographs and pose for photos with fans at his shows and who feels he owes a debt of gratitude to his mom and dad.

Down at the Crossroads was able to catch up with Paul in Savannah, Georgia, before his gig that night with the Blind Boys of Alabama.

DATC: Hi Paul. Thanks for talking to us today. We were very excited to listen to the new album – it’s been on constant play in my car over the past few days. So, congratulations on that – it really is outstanding. And it’s basically a gospel album – tell us why you wanted to make a record like this.

Paul: Well I grew up the son of a Pentecostal minister and I grew up singing to this type of music. My family are white people, but we always went to the black churches a lot and we worshipped with them, and I just love the black style of gospel music. That’s what I was drawn to and I always had it in my mind that some day I wanted to do a gospel record, and I just thought that this was the right time to pay tribute to my roots – and that’s what I did.

DATC: That’s interesting – going back to your boyhood, what was it like for white people going to a black church in Mississippi back then?

Paul: Truth be told, there were two types of churches growing up. The black people had their own church and the white people had theirs, and we each had a different style of worship. But my family would go visit the black churches and we’d worship with them, and that’s where the music got me, man. White churches did more of a country and western style – which I do like too! – but the black music really got into me, I just loved it.

DATC: There’s always been a bluesy, gospel feel to your music, Paul, hasn’t there?

Paul: That’s exactly right. I live in Tupelo Mississippi which is the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and people always ask me what my influences were and they expect me to say somebody famous. But it’s really not – my biggest influences were people nobody’s heard of, people who sang in church. You know there was a spirit to what they did; it didn’t bother me that they weren’t famous, I was being touched in my heart by the sounds I was hearing.

DATC: So, how did you go about choosing this collection of songs? They’re all old gospel songs, spirituals and others from the African American tradition. How did you pick these songs?

Paul: Well, one thing I did not want to do; I didn’t want to sing gospel songs that had been done a lot. There are a lot of great gospel songs like Amazing Grace or I’ll Fly Away – but too many people have done them, so we just dug around – listed to old records, searched the Internet, we tried to find songs that were good gospel songs, but more obscure. Some of the songs were so obscure we weren’t even able to find out who wrote them. They’re songs that have been forgotten. So that’s how we chose them, we wanted songs that weren’t as familiar.

DATC: You know, one of the songs I was listening to today, The Half Has Never Been Told – your version is terrific – but I remember as a boy singing the original 19^th century Philip Bliss hymn. I haven’t heard that song for 40 odd years, so it took me back!

Paul: Yeah, I wanted these songs to be fresh for a new generation of listeners who’ve never heard these songs.

DATC: And I love the version of You Gotta Move which you’ve changed from Mississippi Fred McDowell’s slow blues into a fantastic upbeat celebration. What’s that song about and why did you give it this sort of treatment?

Paul: Well that’s a good question. I think that song can be what you want it to mean. You got to move could mean get up and dance and rejoice and feel good. It could mean stop being lazy and get up and do some work! It could mean anything. It could mean you’re fixing to die. When you say, when the Lord get ready, it could mean the grim reaper’s coming to take you out. It could mean anything – that’s what I like about it; I want the listener to make it mean what it means to them. It’s got multiple meanings and it’s a good song for that reason.

DATC: I’ve always thought of that song as a resurrection song. You know, the policeman, the woman on the street – everybody’s in the same boat, but in the last day when God moves them bones, everybody’s the same.

Paul: Yeah, exactly right, That’s a strong message. We’ll all the same – whoever you look up to the most in life, your hero, whoever that may be, you have to understand, that person is very flawed. We’re all flawed. Nobody is all good and nobody is all bad. That’s the thing I think this record also says – we’re all in it together.

DATC: That’s interesting. Because the last song, the title track Don’t Let the Devil Ride taps into that old struggle between good and evil, often played out on an individual level. Which you see in a lot of the old blues songs and in the lives of some of the old blues artists.  But that’s a struggle I guess we all face.

Paul: You know the hardest thing in life is doing the right thing. It’s easy doing the wrong thing. Doing the wrong thing is fun! When I think of Don’t Let the Devil Ride I think of temptation. In my world, I guess the strongest temptation for me, and for any man, is women. Know what I mean? My grandfather used to say, when the birds of temptation fly around your head, don’t let them build a nest.

DATC: Wise advice! Well, let me ask you this, Paul – your early history in the church, as I understand it, resulted in you getting thrown out. But here you are all these years later with a lovely dedication to your father and mother on the album sleeve, and saying what you learned in church paid dividends. Tell us how that works.

Paul: Well, you know, my mom and dad, when they got married they were very young, and they started singing gospel music and pastoring churches. They spent their entire lives serving God and serving others. And one of the things I learned from my Dad that has really served me well in life – there’s a lot of people you meet in life that are only nice to certain people, they pick and choose who they’re nice to benefit themselves, but my dad wasn’t like that, he was always a champion for the underdog. And…that’s what I wanna be.

DATC: That’s a great example to have in your life, for sure. Now you recorded the album at Sam Phillips Studio and FAME studio Muscle Shoals and Preservation Hall– 3 very historic locations. Tell us about that experience.

Paul: Well we just wanted to record this authentic music in authentic studios and there’s nothing more authentic than Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis and Rick Hall’s Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals. That’s as authentic as it gets. We recorded half the album at Sam Phillips and half at Fame, and PBS filmed the making of the album, they followed us to both studios. So it’s coming out as a documentary on PBS in May. It’s gonna be a great promotional tool for the record. But we wanted to record the record somewhere that had the spirit to match the music.

DATC: Yeah. It sounds great, And the production and the sound quality on the album is excellent. And you have some wonderful collaborators on the album – the Blind Boys of Alabama, the McCrary Sisters, Bonnie Bishop and the horns. What was it like working with those guys?

Paul: Oh man, it was awesome. The Blind Boys – I love those guys, they’re pros and they know more about gospel music than I’ll ever know, because they’ve been doing it longer than I have. And I like it, because they’re old enough to call me boy! I like that!

DATC: So, they are going to join you, and the McCrary Sisters as well, on some of the dates on your tour?

Paul: Yeah, I’m doing a show with the Blind Boys tonight. We’re going to take this gospel thing as far as we can take it. It’s off to a good start. I just found out yesterday that it debuted on the Americana chart at number 12 and next week it’s gonna be in the Top 100 Billboard chart in the United States. So we’re off to a really good start.

DATC: That’s great, Paul. How does this material go down with your audience, some of whom may have no interest in gospel music faith?

Paul: Well so far it’s gone over great. ‘Cause all of my fans that know me know that I grew up singing gospel music. And believe it or not, for years my fans have been asking me to cut a gospel record. You know, whether you’re a believer or not, the music is great. And when I go on stage, I’m not a preacher – I’m an entertainer. But I am sincere when I sing this music. And the fans love it! I haven’t heard one person say, why’d you do a gospel record? Actually they’ve all said, man, this is what we’ve been waiting on. So everybody wins!

DATC: The album is great, you’ve done a fantastic job. I wish you well for tonight and for all the rest of the tour. Paul, thanks very much.

Visit Paul Thorn here.

 

Easter Sunday and the Rolling Stones?

So, what have the Rolling Stones to do with Easter? Well, actually, the link is a bit tenuous – on their 1971 album Sticky Fingers, they recorded and brought to everybody’s attention a Mississippi Fred McDowell song, You Gotta Move.

You may be high, you may be low

You may be rich, child, you may be poor

But when the Lord get ready

You gotta move.

Mick, Keef and the boys may or may not have realized, but this is a song about Christian hope – it’s about resurrection. No matter who you are – man, woman, black or white, rich or poor – when the Lord’s good and ready – them bones gotta move! It’s Gary Davis Jr’s “great gettin’ up morning” when he “heard the angels singing.”

Now Jesus – we’re fine with him as great teacher – depending on your preference or politics you can have “the poor you always have with you,” “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” or “my kingdom is not of this world” or, if you’re game for being a bit more challenged, you can focus on the golden rule, “love your enemies”, “blessed are the peace makers.” So long as he’s an de-historicized prophet or philosopher, he’s pretty safe – maybe a bit profound here and there, like Aristotle or some other religious guru and worth knowing about – but once we start putting resurrection into the mix, that starts to get a bit rich for us.

Early Jesus follower Paul realized this pretty much from the get-go. “If the Messiah isn’t raised from the dead,” he wrote in his letter to a group of Jesus followers in Corinth, then “our faith is worthless.” Might as well “eat and drink,” he said, “for tomorrow we die.”

Paul tells us he knew a load of people who’d seen the risen Jesus, apart from himself, and everything stood or fell one this fact. Paul and other people in the first century may not have shared our scientific worldview. But they knew dead when they saw it. Dead men didn’t get up. Dead was dead.

But Paul and his friends had seen Jesus raised from the dead and their Jewish theology led them to the conclusion that this fact meant that Jesus followers – those in-the-Messiah, as Paul puts it – could hope for a similar outcome at the last. Christian faith revolves around resurrection – the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus followers. Nowhere does the New Testament encourage a hope for a disembodied existence after death in a heavenly city in the sky. Christian hope is much more earthy, tangible – it’s about the hope for a new world, a transformation of the here and now and a share in that through resurrection. This sort of hope is the impetus for Jesus followers to live as if that day had already arrived, focusing their lives on the justice, peace and love that Jesus taught about.

This is why Christians celebrate Easter Sunday – God raising Jesus from the dead means everything has changed; something fundamental in the universe has shifted and each of us can be a part of it. No matter who we are – as Fred McDowell said – rich or poor, a women or a policeman, whoever – we can have a share in God’s future. When the Lord get ready – you gotta MOVE!