More than 50 musical acts are scheduled to play at the three-day event that starts Thursday in the Mississippi Delta city that was hometown to blues icons Son House, Junior Parker and John Lee Hooker and childhood home of playwright Tennessee Williams.
Fans will hear most of the daytime music outdoors and not in a juke joint - the kind of black-owned, quasi-legal liquor and gambling houses that once peppered the Jim Crow South. About half of the 16 nighttime venues, however, are in authentic, surviving juke joints, including Anniebelle's Lounge and Red's Lounge in downtown Clarksdale, across the track from Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero Blues Club.
David “Honeyboy" Edwards recalls his career as the last living Blues artist to play with the legendary Robert Johnson in Jackson, Miss. More than 50 musical acts are scheduled to play at the three-day Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Miss., that starts Thursday.
The city, once surrounded by a sea of cotton plantations, is also home to the myth- drenched crossroads of U.S. highways 49 and 61, where legend has it the great bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar-playing dexterity.
Roger Stolle, festival co-founder and a columnist for the “Blues Revue" magazine, likes to make the argument that Clarksdale is central to the origins of the blues and rock 'n' roll. W.C. Handy was living there when he first took note of blues music, and most early Delta bluesmen have some connection to Clarksdale, he said.
Ike Turner was living at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale when he and his band drove up to Memphis to record “Rocket 88" for Sun Records in 1951, said Stolle. Many musicologists consider that the first rock 'n' roll song.
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