Blue Highway: Photographs by Edward Keating

4 minute read

If there were no Mississippi Delta, there would be no blues. The music welled up from the cotton fields and sharecropper shacks of the late 19th century as an eerie and elemental force. Bandleader W.C. Handy didn’t mind being called the father of the blues a generation later—it was good for business—but he acknowledged that the music was already full grown when he encountered it in 1903. Sleeping on a bench in the “colored” section of a Deep South train station, Handy woke to the sound of a man playing a guitar, bending and sliding the notes by pressing a knife over the strings.

But if the blues had’nt left the Delta, the music would not have changed the world. It moved with the great migration of American blacks out of the Jim Crow South. The blues crept upriver to Memphis and St. Louis and overland to Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit and New York. Everywhere it went, the blues grabbed people just as it had grabbed Handy in that train station. It took hold of a leather-lunged horn player named Louis Armstrong who turned the blues into jazz. It seized a Jewish songwriter in New York, George Gershwin, who wrote a classical rhapsody and painted it blue. The blues got into the hollows of Appalachia and spawned bluegrass. Elvis wasn’t Elvis until he got the blues. The blues swam an ocean in search of young artists with names like Lennon, McCartney, Richards, Jagger, Clapton, Beck and Morrison.

Now it’s the musical equivalent of oxygen—everywhere and nowhere. Photographer Ed Keating set out a couple of years ago to follow the blues path back toward the origins. He began in Chicago, the stormy, brawling city that once drew Delta bluesmen northward like a mighty magnet. From that mecca—home to Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Blind Lemon Jefferson and on and on—Keating headed south, retracing the steps, taking pictures in the appropriate hues of black and white.

For a New York kid who grew up on the blues, blowing a mean mouth-harp from age 14, this was a trip home—the home of the spirit. Keating wound up Clarksdale, Miss., which is as close to the birthplace as you can get. And there, something almost mystical happened.

You see, Clarksdale is the town nearest to the little shack where a fellow named Eddie “Son” House was born around 1902. Son House played the blues with otherworldly genius; of all the musicians bending and sliding their notes in the Delta, he was the one favored by Charlie Patton. And Patton takes us even farther back, to a plantation house in the Delta circa 1890. This is the place and time where the music really got started. If Charlie Patton wasn’t the father of the blues, he surely sat on a porch with the man who was.

In the mid-’20s, when Charlie Patton played the blues with Son House, a kid named Robert Johnson was in the audience. He had a guitar and tried to join in; no one heard much promise there. But not long afterward, House and the bluesman Willie Brown heard Johnson play again. Suddenly the kid was so scary good that a legend was born, saying that Johnson, at a lonely crossroads on Highway 61 near Clarksdale, traded his soul to the devil for the gift of the blues.

Now, 80 years later, Ed Keating pulled into a Clarksdale parking lot. As he opened his car door to get out, he noticed an elderly man getting into a nearby car. He came that close to missing the old man, who turned out to be Honeyboy Edwards, the last living musician known to have played with Robert Johnson. (Edwards died last month at 96.)

In that moment, everything converged. A human path connected Keating to Edwards, then to Johnson, to House, and finally to Patton in a chain of living art. Meanwhile, a physical path had been retraced connecting the cotton fields to the cosmopolitan city. These tied into the spiritual path that transformed the music of scorned fieldworkers into music for the whole wide world. Keating’s journey—and these very bluesy pictures he made to document the trip—remind us that art is universal precisely because it is specific. It speaks to what we share.

John Primer, a blues singer and guitarist performs at Chicago B.L.U.E.S., in Chicago, Ill.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A late night patron at Moma Rosa’s Blue’s Bar in Chicago, Ill.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Ladies dressed in their finest on the street in Chicago, Ill.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A crowd gathers in front of a blue's bar in Memphis, Tenn.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A roadside sign for Route 61 along the route between Memphis, Tenn. and Clarksdale, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Listening to music at the B.B. King Blues Club in Memphis, Tenn.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Girl at the bar at B.B. Kings in Memphis, Tennessee
A girl enjoys a smoke in the bar at the B.B. King Blues Club in Memphis, Tenn.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Shoe shine man looking for business along Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Delta Avenue in Clarksdale, Miss., a town that has been historically described as “Ground Zero” for blues aficionados.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A teenage girl waits for her boyfriend at Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Patrons at Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Schekter Lee, Doug Newcomb and Chuck Tannert playing pool at Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
David "Honeyboy" Edwards, one of the first Mississippi Delta blues musicians who recently died August 29th at age 96
David "Honeyboy" Edwards, one of the first Mississippi Delta blues musicians who died last month at age 96, on the street in Clarksdale, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
The Church of Christ and hand painted signs, in Vicksburg, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A Southern couple sit on the front porch of the Walnut Hills Restaurant in Vicksburg, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A young waiter working at Walnut Hills Restaurant, Vicksburg, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press iMage
Executive men on the street in Memphis, Tenn.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Abe Lincoln graces the walls above a booth at a roadside diner in Illinois.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
On the road traveling from Chicago to Memphis passing the arch in St. Louis, Mo.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Krayzie Bone and Layzie Bone, members from the group Bones Thugs-n-Harmony at a hotel bar in St. Louis, Mo.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A passenger steps on to a bus heading for Clayton Station in St. Louis, Mo.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Po’ Monkey’s lounge located near Merigold, Miss. is considered to be one of the last original juke joints in the south. Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Singers in polka dot dresses attend the Greenville Blues Festival, the second oldest continuously operating blues festival in the United States held in Greenville, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
A father with sleeping child relax to the blues at the Greenville Blues Festival in Greenville, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
Spectators take in the blues at the Greenville Blues Festival in Greenville, Miss.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images
In New Orleans two years after the hurricane, still suffering the Katrina Blues.Edward Keating—Contact Press Images

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