Echo in the dark

Of sky, dirt, and a night at Sam Carr's

by Ted Drozdowski

The nighttime Delta sky looks like the ceiling of a planetarium, each star and orb distinctly illuminated, casting a pale glow over the plowed-under October cottonfields. My wife and I are lost, maybe, looking for the home of legendary blues drummer Sam Carr, where Lonnie Shields is rehearsing his band for their upcoming King Biscuit Festival gig in Helena, just a stone's throw across the Mississippi from where we are. Turning back along the dirt and gravel farm road, we drive to a crossing where a few houses are scattered in different directions in the distance. Killing the engine, we roll down the window. The faint strains of a guitar cut the dark, quietly screaming a piercing solo; even at this distance it's obvious the licks are being pinched out two-fingered, electric country-style, and it's obvious they're coming from the house with the silhouettes of a half-dozen or so cars on the lawn.

Over the previous week in Mississippi, we'd met artists and musicians, taken in as many sights, sounds, and smells of the late-cotton-crop season as we could. We'd traveled into the hill country to pay our respect to patriarch Junior Kimbrough as he ruled over his tin-and-plywood juke joint. We'd eaten more ribs than a bear. We'd gambled to the sound of blues in the glitzy casinos that dot the shores of the Big River. We'd seen Natchez and eaten soul food in Port Gibson, a town whose claim to fame is that Civil War hothead W.T. Sherman had found it "too pretty to burn." We'd ripped up and down 61 and 49. We'd seen old-time country stores and chatted with Mike McGregor, the man who made Elvis's leather jumpsuits. We'd gone to Clarksdale to see picturesque Moon Lake and hear more music and stock up on old blues 45s -- and eat Boss Hog's terrific barbecue again. And to laze along the banks of the coffee-colored Sunflower River and watch the fat turtles float.

We'd also been to Vicksburg to explore the remaining strains of the urban Old South and there found Margaret's Grocery. It's been turned into a shrine by the Reverend Dennis, who promised Margaret -- when he proposed to her at age 70 -- that he'd make her shop into a temple to the Lord if she accepted. He's redone the outside with marvelous colored brick, built a 40-foot tower that displays religious signs, turned an old bus into a sculptural Scripture school, and put his artwork -- a gold-painted Arc of the Covenant, with its latticework of multicolored wooden trimming symbolizing the colors of the races of the world -- in every cranny. A welcoming and beautiful couple, Margaret and the Reverend spend time with and dispense advice (especially the Reverend, who's now in his mid 80s) to everyone who stops by. ("Black people don't come to visit me, because they don't want to hear what I have to say, and white people come to visit, but they just laugh at me," he explained minutes after we arrived.)

And yet, few of our experiences seemed as deep as those few minutes in darkened silence in that car at an empty crossroads. It didn't feel we were hearing the strains of Lonnie Shields's guitar so much as the cry of history. An echo back to the day when the strum of an acoustic guitar traveled for miles across those cottonfields, before highways cut the millennium of silence. It was a beautiful and spiritual moment. A reminder that this music comes from the heart of the rich, muddy land and the soul of the poor people who worked it.

Of course, our time at the Carrs' house -- where Sam and his wife, Doris, generously made us strangers as comfortable as if we were friends -- was resonant in itself. We were surrounded by the farmland where Sam, at 74, still works by day - and then sometimes puts in six or more hours of drumming a night. When Carr sat in with Shields and his group, echoes of the heyday of the African-American fife-and-drum picnic bands sprang from his kit, which came to attention like a kitten being petted under his skilled hands. Not only did Sam absorb that music growing up, but his daddy was the legendary guitarist Robert Nighthawk. And both Sam and Doris still absolutely live for music in a way that's so vital and everyday and loving that it's sometimes nearly foreign to a goddamned music critic like me. Musicians like Sam and Lonnie don't "work" people; they play the music that makes them feel right, and they let the rest of the chips fall where they may.

And I guess that's why we love the blues. The real blues: straight outta the dirt and straight outta the heart. It's a music of love and labor and real life. How could anyone with a soul not respond to that? Especially on a starlit, quiet, Mississippi cotton-patch night.