me that I was promised when it appears 60 years I'm going to see the blues, where he was born. In my career I have always distinguished between pop music and rock and I have always preferred the latter, so I like best the Rolling Stones the Beatles. The rock music is popular in the sense that comes from the basic languages \u200b\u200bof the blues, country and R & B, pop is not necessarily bound to use popular idioms of popular music. Lady GaGa is pop, Madonna is pop, even though the Beatles are pop on a different level, cultured, articulate, sophisticated and intelligent. The Rolling Stones are not pop, because they are rock derived from blues and R & B and the Beatles have had only a marginal relationship with '50s rock 'n' roll with folk and European. So, with the 'friend Roberto Blacks, Blues Festival organizer dell'Amenano I went to the source, or rather to my roots to the roots of the music I love. I went to the blues, I went in the Mississippi Delta that is not a delta such as the Po (p) or many streams of water flowing from the main river, what happens lower down in Louisiana to New Orleans where there are bayou and wetlands in the Mississippi instead it is a region consisting of a flood plain where the soil is made fertile by water and where a continuous succession of cotton fields and crops. A flat landscape and a huge space (only 2.5 million inhabitants in an area six times the Massacchusetts) crossed by straight roads like the wake of a plane bounded by the numbers on the sides of the Interstate, from an incredible number of dead raccoons and from crooked poles and dotted with desolate and haunted towns in practice is reduced to a crossroad with a few around the house and at best a drugstore. Every now and then, in some village history meets a blues juke joint with survivor insignia peeling and falling axes, further in the countryside next to some white Methodist or Baptist church is the grave of some bluesman Robert Johnson and here there is more than one. Not all slums seem juke joint as the Blue Front Cafe in Benton and not all the record stores are like the Aike's Pro Shop Records at Holly Springs in reality a junk shop that assembles in a chaotic all the hardware used in the region of detectable North Hills, someone is still vigorous and constant music program such as Ground Zero in Clarksdale, a town that has no place in his soul and spirit. The city is not big but has a history alone would fill a book blues. It has a beautiful and eloquent Delta Blues Museum, a railway station called into the framework and a library-record store, the Cat Head is the dream of many that led up to it and want to buy records of local musicians and photo books. But the atmosphere of Clarksdale to bewitch, a sleepy atmosphere, absolutely silent in the heat of the afternoon, with empty streets, a few American cars of the 50s / 60 that stops at the traffic light and one can see that the driver is carrying a vintage amplifier (it happened to me too), a film that does so much last show closed with a sign that warns of a film about the Piranha, many shops are closed, several others finally maybe because it's Saturday afternoon, a store of musical instruments with a red Fender hanging and buildings that were once warehouses or offices, and now they look like modern art urban archeology. Clarksdale, as I've seen it looks like a city suspended in time and shooting, a relic of the fifties if someone had turned off the color and black and white had enveloped the whole. Of things to see there are still many and I will not list them here but to sue the Riverside Hotel is right because after the initial bewilderment in front of a crumbling facade so as to believe there is an uninhabitable ruin the surprise of finding the lanky and nice Mr.Rat who welcome you to its romantic rooms and tells you about all that has passed in that hotel by the death of Beasts Smith up the assets of a concern that (he says) Bill Wyman who put him and the hotel's history in the book Blues Odyssey, Journey To Music's Heart and Soul published in England. A Clarksdale life comes when the sun and above the weekend because there are many, college kids and people of every type and color to fill the Ground Zero and sweat and have fun at the sound of the blues because there is still history, passion , friendship, heart rate, sex and alcohol.
The Ground Zero is owned by actor Morgan Freeman who gave him a nice thrust. E 'in a building equipped with a large wooden veranda where they placed a rusty old stove, and four or five old sofas that are besieged by those who want to smoke (but you can smoke everywhere in the Delta), or just chat or dispose the hangover when the beers are too many. Inside the ceiling is high, there is the kitchen, the counter for t-shirts, tables and long bar to drink, all surrounded by a swarm of posters, writings, photographs and a stage that it becomes just seething Super Chickan and her three Fightin 'Cocks and start to climb a rugged and exciting roll Delta electric blues that goes on for more than three hours involving girls, women and men in a sfrenata danza del sabato sera. Ci si riempie con hamburger e soul food, si beve birra e tequila ma quello che fa la differenza è l’attitudine delle persone che in barba alla crisi ballano, ridono, scherzano, cantano, fraternizzano in modo spontaneo come da noi è orami impossibile vedere. Persone di tutti i colori, di tutte le età e di tutti i ceti sociali (c’era anche Morgan Freeman il 9 ottobre) in virtù di trasversalismo che fa la differenza e non erige barriere.
La crisi negli Stati Uniti è molto più evidente che da noi (senza ammortizzatori sociali e con la carta di credito sempre in mano i danni sono enormi) e non dico solo nella zona del Delta dove la povertà è sempre esistita ed i neri hanno spat blood ever since. Even at the initial stage of my trip to Memphis on the contrary that the rock n 'roll to blues and not vice versa as history shows, even see the crisis in the city center, downtown, a few meters away from Beale Street, once infamous black neighborhood and now tourist route (but there were only Americans) where you go to drink and listen to the blues and rock n 'roll played by small and local bands that fill local stalwart as the Blues Hall, BB King Blues Club, Blues City Café and other juke joint scattered along its sidewalks. Just turn the corner and the neon lights disappear, the downtown becomes almost deserted during the day, few people walking, lots of shops staring or sale, the center looked bleak invests even if there are feelings of danger, rather it seems that the population has declined dramatically and also the lack of traffic. You only see people in the cafeterias for employees and in some nearby restaurant to hotels in Val-Mart or a reduced size that sell everything from socks to medicines. Between downtown and midtown, where there are residential quarters of the whites, the situation is even more sad, non-places side by side with buildings and skyscrapers of steel and glass style hi-tech are occupied by serving a bleak gravel parking lot or brownfield sites that in a prosperous future could accommodate other buildings. In this borderland no one except some homeless walk that walk staring at the ground without the strength to ask for something even when the cars stop at traffic lights. Urban traffic is negligible compared to that of our cities, we turn in the car could look around with ease and changing the radio station, a real pleasure of going over in the car because the community radio broadcasting in AM at certain times of the day fantastic blues are the FM divided by decades (from the music of the nineties up to forty) Elvis as well as 24 and 24 hours on the E-Street Radio with Bruce to live and study.
oasis of life are the many museums dedicated to music, a splendid one of Stax in a neighborhood that is better to get there in the car and during the day, Sun Studios on Union which is one of the arteries that cut the city from east to west, the Rock and Soul Museum and the store near the factory of Gibson that are close to Beale St. and the moving and edited the Civil Rights Museum in St. Mulberry cut into the Lorraine Motel, where on April 4, 1968 in Room 306 Martin Luther King was assassinated. Lorraine is located near one of the most trendy (but take this word for what it is worth in Memphis, nothing to do with the fashionable areas of Milan and italiote) or the South Main Arts District populated by cafes, some library clothing shops and restaurants to the 'Arcade, a folk food Hot authentically vintage survived 50 years where he was filmed by Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train.
residential neighborhoods in Memphis are in midtown, beautiful white middle-class family homes with attached green and lush gardens without fences and station wagon parked and parks (including the Overton sung by Lucero) in the vicinity of health centers and universities. Poplar Avenue is another of the long streets that cut horizontally in Memphis, the number 1931 is the Hi-Tone, a rock-club frequented by students who drink beer in industrial quantities and enthusiasts of all ages (opposite of 'Italy in the places where you listen to music there is often a result cross that makes you feel like the last of the Mohicans), where I happened to see a sparkling show of JJ Grey and Mofro introduced by a group of Texan psychedelic rock-soul named Jonathan Tyler and The Northern Lights very surprised to find in Italian that place. Outside, I understand the hierarchy of the band: from the Texans who were supporters had a small van, JJ Grey a real bus complete with TV and toilet.
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