Muddy Waters in 1960 - By Paul Oliver

Muddy Waters said to me once: "When I sing the blues, when I'm singing the real blues, I'm singing what I feel. Some people maybe want to laugh; maybe I don't talk so good and they don't understand you know? But when we sing the blues - when I sing the blues it come from the heart. From right here in your soul, an' if you' singing what you really feel it comes out all over. It ain't just what you saying, it pours out of you. Sweat runnin' down your face".

He is not a markedly eloquent man in conversation, but he never wastes words and what he has to say is always directly to the point. In those few sentences he summed up his attitude to the blues, what the blues meant to him and the effect that creating blues had upon him. Anything else is in a way, superfluous. Or perhaps, anything that one has to say about Muddy Waters is an amplification of these observations of his, if it is to have any value at all.

In more than one sense he is the ideal blues singer, for he epitomizes the blues for so many different groups of people. He is eminently sincere in what he does. He has no artifice, though at times he can be puzzling because he is so quiet in manner when he is not working. So his blues have meaning for him and they have depth; depth as great as his own complex personality. For those who live .by the blues his blues are an inspiration, and for those who are blues enthusiasts like ourselves, his blues are satisfying. I make the distinction because there is no real comparison between the significance of the blues within the black community and its significance to us who are so very much outside it. This is not to argue that our interest is in any way invalidated, but that it is of a different order. Most serious blues enthusiasts over here will know more about blues and the lives, work and recordings of the singers than the people who throng the small Chicago clubs, but the latter are there by reason of an inner compulsion and desire to share the music. For them the blues singer of the stature of Muddy Waters is a hero-figure, a "Race Man" as he would have been called a decade ago, who symbolizes achievement and success in his field - that of entertainment rather than just "blues". The blues enthusiast here may deplore the cultivation of the singers by the folknik clubs, the college circuit, the jazz festival. But the black man doesn't for these are significant inroads into a fairly well protected white dominated part of society. For the Mississippi black- who knows and hears every Muddy Waters record and is generally referred to in a matter of minutes - he is the perfect example of the "local boy makes good", the black rags-to-comparative-riches of the Great American Dream.

More than a Memorial to the Voice of the Delta

Charley Patton’s Grave: More than a Memorial in Holly Ridge

Mississippi Folklife

The Grave of Leo "Bud" Welch

Calhoun County Bluesman Leo “Bud” Welch passed away December 19, 2017 at the age of 85. His funeral service was Saturday, Dec. 23 at 11 a.m. at Jackson Chapel MB Church in Bruce.

Welch achieved international success in the last few years of his life and received numerous honors, including a prominent place on the Mississippi Blues Trail marker in Bruce. He played music ever since picking up his first guitar at age 12.

“I love all types of music – country, gospel, rock and of course the blues,” Welch said during a 2015 interview while sitting in his one-room home near the Piggly Wiggly in Bruce.

During his more than 60 years of playing, Welch sat in with blues legends John Lee Hooker, Elmore James and B.B. King.  “I always admired B.B. and the way he plays his guitar,” Welch said. “I love the way he chords the strings.”

Welch never tried to emulate any of the blues legends he admired, instead relying on his own self-taught method.  “I just play like I play,” Welch said. “I’m not trying to be anybody else.”

Born in Sabougla, Welch taught himself to play on his cousin R.C. Welch’s guitar.

“Whenever he would leave, me and his brother Orlando would go over and get his guitar and take turns playing,” Welch said.

The earliest songs he recalled playing were “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Navajo Trail.”

“I remember seeing Roy Rogers playing ‘Navajo Trail’ in a movie so I started playing around with it,” he said.

His first time on stage was for programs at Sabougla Grammar School, but he was truly noticed during a school performance in Pittsboro.

“We were playing up there when those people started going wild over the little boy playing guitar,” Welch said. “They were pointing at me and just going wild.”

He fell in love with the blues at a young age and began playing wherever he could, such as Otis McCain’s 3-day picnic in the Horsepen Community. He played around Grenada and landed a regular appearance on WNAG radio with Alfred Harris and the Joy Jumpers.

Other places he recalled performing were the Cotton Bowl and The Blue Flame in Carroll County.

He moved to Bruce as a teen and played frequently around the local cafes where people would provide him change.

“People would drop nickels, dimes and quarters in my pockets and even in the hole in my guitar,” Welch said. “I’d get home and have to shake all the money out of my guitar.”

He would play in a number of bands over the years including “The Rising Soul Band” with Rev. Tommie Daniel of Bruce; “The Spirituals” with Raymond “Slick” Tillman, Grady Gladney, James Foster and others; and the “Sabougla Voices” with Zoila and Betty Tucker, Marty Conley and Lovie Lipsey.

Welch continued to play most every Sunday in a church somewhere throughout his life. He most often played at his home church in Sabougla on the first and third Sundays of each month and at Double Springs in Webster County on the other Sundays.

He also hosted a show on W7BN each week entitled “Black Gospel Express.”

Up into his 80s, Welch never slowed down, playing as much as ever traveling deep into the Mississippi Delta weekly to play at clubs such as Ground Zero, Hambone’s and Reds.

“I still love playing the blues, and there’s a lot of people interested in the blues now that didn’t used to be,” Welch said. “Lot of the times I play there’s a lot more white people in the audience than black people.”

Welch can also play the harmonica and fiddle, but prefers the sound of his electric guitar for a few reasons. One is because it’s easier for him to hear after suffering some hearing loss from 30 years of cutting timber.

“I love gospel but I really enjoy playing those old blues songs, too,” he said. “People still love them. The blues are just a history of life. They make people feel good.”

Family Values, Roadhouse Blues at Junior's

Larry Nager - The Commercial Appeal - September 1994

It's business as usual at Junior's, a little country roadhouse 10 miles out Miss. 4 near Holly Springs. As Sunday afternoon turns to evening, a few old men sit inside, nursing their Budweisers and comparing various ailments; out in the parking lot, young men drink malt liquor and discuss cars and girls.

But as the sun sets over the dusty, kudzu-covered countryside, talk turns to the blues, and the action moves inside as the proprietor rises out of his duct tape-covered chair and haltingly makes his way across the cement floor to the band area.

The jukebox, which has spent the afternoon pouring hard blues and Southern soul out of its shredded speaker, is silenced, and Junior Kimbrough, 64, picks up his Gibson electric guitar and tunes it to his liking. Two of his sons, David Jr. and Kenny, both in their 20s, dutifully take their places at the bass and drums.

At Junior's there's no such thing as a blues revival. Here, the blues is alive and well and being passed on to a new generation. At 29, David says he's the oldest of Junior's numerous children, many of whom play with their own blues bands or back up their father, who has become something of an international celebrity thanks to his appearance in the Robert Palmer/ Robert Mugge film, Deep Blues.

Despite its unprepossessing appearance, Junior's has become an important stop on the worldwide blues circuit, as fans come from as far away as Japan and England to pay their $2 cover charge and get a dose of the real thing. A recent Sunday night even brought a group of Russian blues lovers to the wood-paneled juke joint lit up by Chinese lanterns, Christmas lights and its namesake's powerful Delta blues.

The center of all that attention seems singularly unimpressed by it all. ``I'm thinkin' about quittin','' Junior says casually as he chain smokes Kools early in the evening. ``I done got too old to play now.''

A stroke in 1976 may have slowed him down, but the popularity of Deep Blues has kept him on the road, playing concerts and festivals throughout the States and Europe. And when he gets going, his hands moving over his guitar strings as he plays the hypnotic, single-chord style of blues that has become his trademark, there's no stopping him.

``Pull your clothes off baby,'' Kimbrough jauntily shouts into the microphone, a cigarette dangling beneath the remnants of his pencil mustache. At his side, David and Kenny pick up the repetitive riff, driving it home as the growing crowd, mostly locals in their 20s and 30, pack the dance floor in front of the band.

"It's a family thing,'' says Kimbrough's son Larry Washington, who runs the club. ``We're all like one big family.'' The extended family includes the Burnsides, the children of Kimbrough's Deep Blues co-star R. L. Burnside.

Gary Burnside, 17, plays with both his father and Kimbrough. "I like rap, but I'm mostly into blues,'' he says with a grin. "I just like playing it. I've been overseas to Italy and everything.'' He also plays with a band that includes John `JoJo' Hermann, keyboardist for the rock band Widespread Panic, when Hermann is off the road and at home in nearby Oxford.

Widespread Panic's members are fans of Kimbrough's; their new album, "Ain't Life Grand,'' includes Junior, based on a Kimbrough riff and credited to the bluesman. Kimbrough appreciates the honor but quickly adds, ``I didn't get nothin' out of it yet.''

When not playing bass with his father, David Kimbrough Jr. can be found fronting his own group as David Malone, so as not to be confused with the better-known Junior.

Kimbrough/Malone has lived the classic Mississippi bluesman's life, having spent seven years in Parchman Farm State Prison on burglary and drug charges. But he says music has helped him straighten out his life.

He has recorded ``I've Got the Dog in Me,'' an album he says his father's record company, Fat Possum, is shopping to the major labels.

In this photo, entertainment attorney Portuondo Zapata
(aka Larry "The Feverdog" Hoffman) poses for his last
known photo before his murder, contracted by the Dixie Mafia.

He's proud to carry on his father's tradition. ``I respect my dad,'' he said solemnly. ``He de man. But I'm the son.

"My father's old, but with him we've got a backbone in the family. If my father passes on, we've got people who can carry it on, my brothers and myself.''

And carry it on they do. As the night wears on and Junior gets tired, he passes his guitar to Duwayne Burnside, while a young white guitarist sporting a shiny new Stratocaster slides in to play rhythm. David Jr. anchors the band on bass as Duwayne plays in a single-string style more modern than Junior's. But the sound is still pure Delta, and the churning, dancing crowd keeps right on moving as the blues continue rolling out into the Mississippi night.

Getting There: Junior's is open on Sunday nights only and the music starts around 9 p.m. From Memphis, take U.S. 78 to the Miss. 7 exit in Holly Springs. Take a right and follow 7 to Miss. 4. Take a right and go 10.2 miles on 4, and you'll see Junior's just off the road on the right. There's no sign, but the parking lot should be full of cars.