On the Greyhound to Memphis. He can see my lips moving as I read, W. says. It's not a good sign in a scholar. Our hosts lent us a book each, one on country blues, and the other on the history of Mississippi. – 'Have you learnt something, fat boy?', says W.
He's been reading about the freed slaves who cleared the cane breaks and the forests of the Mississippi Delta, raising levees against the flooding river. W.'s been reading about the black labourers who rebuilt destroyed railroads and repaired the levees, and took new jobs in the mines and docks. He's been reading about sharecroppers who tied themselves into a system of permanent debt by renting land, mules and supplies from white owners, and the new kind of slavery which came with the Jim Crow laws that segregated and disenfranchised them.
'This country!', he says. 'This country!' It's as bad as Britain with all its colonies. Am I the colonist or the colonised?, he wonders. Of course, I haven't got a drop of British blood in my veins. That's probably what saves me.
I tell him I've been reading about the dispersal of plantation orchestras after the Emancipation; of wandering balladeers and country string bands. I've been reading about the juke joints where freed slaves could drink and dance, and of the field hollers and work songs of the black labourers who ploughed with mules, picked cotton and pulled corn. I've breen reading of makeshift instruments – of baling wire become diddley bow, of jugs and washtubs that become percussive, of a pocketknife used to play slide guitar.
I've been reading of the deep blues of the Delta, of a music of outcasts and outsiders, which came from the poorest part of the poorest state of America, from plantations, prisons and hamlets too small to appear on the map. I've been reading of its toughness and simplicity, of pulsating grooves, barely songs, with no distinct beginning or end, and of verses that speak of turbulence and dislocation, of rootlessness and broken relationships, of the great flood of '27 and the great drought of '29.
It's the music of life, I tell him. Of still being alive. But of being alive and torn apart. Of being the insulted and the injured. But still alive, still alive in the one chord vamp, in a rhythm that precedes melody, that breaks and fragments it, dissolving melody in the waters of its own flood.
W.'s moved, he says. He's never heard me speak so coherently, so sweepingly. What would my blues name be?, he wonders. Hindu Fats, he says. Hindu Fat Boy.
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