That Was the Day RL Shot At Me

Item No. 2 missing from the Oxford American’s Mississippi Music Issue: Hill Country Blues. 

The “hill country” is a different place from the Delta.  Not because it is poorer, because it isn’t; not because the geography is different, with rolling hills and hollers as opposed to flats and rows upon rows of Delta snow; but because the people are simply a different sort.  Alan Lomax described it like this:

“The Hill people, living on poorer land and more old-fashioned in their ways, look with a combination of envy and fear on the restless, pioneering Delta.  As they move into the Delta, the Hill folk fertilize it with their richer, more traditional culture.”

I can’t altogether accept Lomax’s judgment; in my experience, I never saw much envy in any one of the Delta – that is, with the exception of blues-smitten white boys.  But the fear of the outside, of innovation, of change, and the stubbornness are qualities that ring true.

Bob Palmer, in the liner notes to R.L. Burnside’s first real record, Too Bad Jim, described the Hill Country like this:

“The North-Mississippi hill country R.L. Burnside calls home is not at all the same proposition as the Mississippi Delta, with which it is often confused.  The Delta runs along both sides of the Mississippi River and is flat, alluvial cotton land, owned by a small number of white families who long ago divided it up into immense plantation tracts.  There are no big plantations in the hill country of North Mississippi, just small farms, many of them owned by black families for several generations.  Back up in those wooded hills, communities still experience an isolation no longer encountered in the Delta, where many of the black families who worked the plantations long ago were replaced by mechanized agriculture.  In much of the hill country, farming is still a matter of plows and mules.  Localized dialects and vocabulary are still prevalent, often so thick and idiosyncratic that Mississippians from a few counties over can’t catch everything being said.  The hills of northwest Mississippi have their own culture, and of course their own music, both equally individual and resilient.”

This description is more to my taste, and more reflective of my experience.  And if there is one phrase that really sums it up, it’s Palmer’s use of “an isolation.”  Not just any isolation, as the Delta is, in many respects, as isolated as anywhere in the south.  Where else can you stand in the midst of a laser-leveled cotton field – an expensive accomplishment – and see places that exist in song but have yet to find their way onto a map?  But everyone knows about “the Delta Blues.”  Everyone knows about the crossroads, even if no one knows which crossroads, or where.  Everyone knows that W.C. Handy heard those first mournful blue notes while he was waiting on a train in Tutwiler, Mississippi.  Everyone knows about Leadbelly and Parchman Farm and the Midnight Special.

But what of the Hill Country?  Even though it produced perhaps the most single most famous song and dance man in the world, we accept Elvis as being from Tupelo, and not the hills of North Mississippi.  This is the product of not just isolation, but of “an isolation” that persists to this day.  And this isolation persists, as evidenced by the absence of Mississippi Fred McDowell, Junior Kimbrough, and, of course, R.L. Burnside from the CD of Mississippi music that is companion to the Oxford American’s Southern Music Issue.

It is, once again, the Summer of 1999.  I made my pilgrimage from Davis, California to Jackson, Mississippi with three CDs in constant rotation in my big blue truck – Blonde on Blonde, the first Son Volt record, Trace, and A Ass Pocket of Whiskey by R.L. Burnside.  (As the summer progressed, I would add the newly released Mule Variations by Tom Waits to this mix.)

Having been to Parchman Farm, and Clarksdale, and Rolling Fork (only to find that Muddy’s cabin was inexplicably “on tour” with ZZ Top), I resolved that it was time to dispense with the nostalgia.  I believed that blues was a living, breathing music (a belief I continue to hold) and resolved to find me a living, breathing bluesman.  It was time to find R.L.

I planned the trip for a week, though, candidly, little planning was required – a full tank of gas and a trip to the package store for a half-gallon of Jack Daniels.

And on Saturday I turned my big blue truck north to the hill country, to Holly Springs, to find R.L. Burnside. 

Interstate 55 to Senatobia, and then cut across, through Chulaholma (and, unknowingly, past Junior Kimbrough’s juke) and into Holly Springs, where I had read that R.L. lived.  To a service station, the type that is more or less unique to the south – a convenience store plus fryer and hot counter – and a handful of booths and tables.  Not the sort of place where your wife will want to use the facilities.  And a group of older black men, farmers, yellow eyes, smoking, drinking coffee, mesh back caps and overalls.  No time for me.  Take the road north, I was told.  When you see them dogs you arrived.

I still find the precision embodied in these directions remarkable.  But there they were, a pack of mongrel dogs on the right, every bit as effective as a house number.  And these were terrible dogs, mangy and angry and mean and raising a right proper racket.  The product, most certainly, of an isolation.

I killed the engine and left the whiskey in the truck.  Looking back on the misadventure that would very shortly unfold, I judge that, along with my cowardice, as my undoing.

In any event, there was a lot of ground to cover between the gate and the porch, and I’m wondering what to do about the dogs.  But it didn’t matter.  The screen door, dirty white frame and hanging askew, is opening.  R.L. stepping out.  R.L. stepping out holding a rifle.  R.L. letting the screen door slam shut.  R.L. letting two rounds into the air.

And I got the fuck out of there.  

Not long after that I read an interview with R.L. and Jon Spencer.  “R.L.,” the interviewer asked, “do the young white kids ever come visit you?”  “Well, well, well,” R.L. answered, “They do, but they get scared and run away when I shoot off my gun.”