Country Blues Classics

Tony Hollins:Vocals & Guitar

Other musicians unknown

Recorded in Chicago, IL. Tuesday, June 3, 1941

Originally issued on the 1941 single (OKeh 06351) (78 RPM)

A post shared by Clark Stooksbury (@clarkstooksbury) on Feb 17, 2017 at 6:32pm PST

The Military Marker of Burl "Jaybird" Coleman

The Military Marker of Burl "Jaybird" Coleman

Produced by the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund

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The Unmarked Grave of Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith, whose incredible renditions of the blues still echo through the annals of music in the ears and voices of living artists, died in a car accident on Highway 61 outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. She was buried Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at Mount Lawn Cemetery in October 1937. Though 30,000 people attended her massive funeral, only blades of grass marked her grave for thirty-three years, because her family didn't have enough money to buy a tombstone.

In July 1970, a local woman, Barbara Muldrow, called The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Action Line after reading a couple of articles about the blues singer in the newspaper. “I knew she never had a gravestone,” Muldrow informed, and “I was disturbed at a person of her status going unnoticed.” Action Line subsequently solicited donations for the tombstone from rock singer Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, a registered nurse who met Bessie at the old Lincoln Theater at Broad and Lombard streets in the 1930s. Each of the donors covered half of the costs. Now a leader in the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, Green had once performed at the theater in a talent show, after which Bessie Smith advised that she stay in school, "because you can't carry a note.” Green considered the recording artist "an expert [and] the type you didn't get angry with, you just listened to." She took her advice and stayed in school.

An estimated fifty people turned out at the cemetery for an unveiling of a grey-black stone on Grave No. 3, Range 12, Lot 20, Section C. The stone's inscription contained the words, "The Greatest American Blues Singer Will Never Stop Singing," which was composed by jazz historian John Hammond, who, as a young recording engineer with Columbia Studios, did a record session with Bessie Smith. Hammond and Green both attended the service, as did John T. Brown Jr., her accompanist during the last five years of her life.

She was a big talent—but not so big when she started singing in a minstrel show in Chattanooga, Tenn., at age 13. Her first big break in show business came in 1917 when she played the Paradise Club in Atlantic City, afterward hitting Philadelphia for the first time in a club known as the Madhouse at 11th and Poplar. She settled here in 1918. On Feb. 27, 1923, she cut her first recording, “Down-hearted Blues,” and it was a smash hit. By the end of the first year as a recording artist, Bessie had sold more than 2 million records. Her career skyrocketed in the 20s when she reportedly was earning $2500 a week and recording such songs as "Gimme a Pigfoot," "Nobody Knows You" and "Money Blues."

Robert Johnson's Cenotaph in Morgan City Saved a Church, Memorialized a Musician, and Never Claimed to Mark a Grave

In 1991, a bank in Greenwood, Mississippi had a lien against the Mt. Zion MB Church in Morgan City, because some deacons used the deed to get a loan to purchase several ornate benches, or pews. At the same time, Mt. Zion Memorial Fund founder Skip Henderson was trying to locate the grave of Robert Johnson, and he learned that it very well might have been at Mt. Zion MB Church in Morgan City. He managed to get Columbia Records to donate $17,000 to save the church from foreclosure, and get Hartley Peavey to donate brand new PA systems to 3 churches, Mt. Zion, another potential grave location at Payne Chapel, and New Jerusalem Church in Holly Ridge, where the grave of Charley Patton was located. He knew that Johnson's remains probably weren't at the gravesite, so he erected a cenotaph (memorial to someone buried elsewhere) instead of a headstone. It contains no birth/death dates, but the stone obelisk was a nice memorial. (Click her to view it)

Greenwood Commonwealth, Jan 1991. 

Despite all the gifts showering down on the black churches, Steve LaVere urged Skip to abandon this endeavor and not memorialize Johnson in case some future evidence came up that pinpointed his exact gravesite of Johnson. He did not abandon the cenotaph or the churches, however. LaVere then then sued him so he changed our name from Mt. Zion/Robert Johnson Memorial Fund to simply the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. The lawsuit, therefore, was moot and abandoned. Skip erected nine more memorials and saved several; abandoned cemeteries over the next ten years.

Evidence did arise a decade later that Johnson was most likely buried in a cemetery north of Greenwood. A marker was erected at the church despite the protests of several members of the congregation, which received no maintenance fees, a standard practice on almost all cemeteries.. Our namesake church , however, did not fall into the hands of the bank, and it still sits at the corner of a massive cotton field outside Morgan City. Rev. Ratliff, who worked with Skip on the project, recently celebrated his 33rd year at the church in November. 

Yet, folks tell me all the time how the cenotaph in Morgan City is wrong. A cenotaph (memorial to someone buried elsewhere) can't be wrong. Considering all the good it did for the historic church and its congregation, erecting that monument is indeed one of the most clever and "rightest" campaigns all-time in blues commemoration. Robert Johnson never had three headstones. But, hey, some folks will keep telling us we're wrong. We will continue to do what's right.

Greenwood Commonwealth, Sep 2005, p.1 of 3.