A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to New Orleans

Some years ago I was driving from Tupelo to New Orleans with a musician friend and his wife and very young child. We travelled towards Greenwood where there was a train station. We planned on staying the night before my travelling companions were taking the train the rest of the way south. I was due to meet them in New Orleans in a couple of days as I had things I wanted to see which weren’t of interest to them. Anyway, aside from the experience of driving through Mississippi my musician buddy and I knew that Robert Johnson was buried (or so they say) close to Greenwood.

Having checked into our hotel, me and my buddy, who left his wife and child behind) headed out for Money Road. On the banks of the Little Tallahatchie River there’s an ancient church called ‘Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church’ and right beside it is a graveyard. Soon after we found the grave which wasn’t hard to miss considering it is festooned with empty bottles of bourbon and other hard liquors and vinyl albums by various artists.

Considering the impact Robert Johnson has on the blues genre it wasn’t hard to know why so many people would stop by this isolated spot. And of course the story of Robert Johnson is the stuff of myth or legend depending on your own view. Selling your soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play the blues does indeed make a great story. Fortunately we do have audio recordings of Robert Johnson performing his songs. Given the recordings are from the late 1930s they are somewhat hard to listen to from a technical viewpoint but nonetheless very historic. We also have modern day interpretations of his songs performed by legends such as Eric Clapton who routinely perform versions of Johnson’s songs.

After the obligatory photos we walked to the banks of the Tallahatchie River a hundred yards away just to say we’d seen it and thereby acknowledge a totally different genre of music, I’m referring to the country song ‘Ode to Billie Joe’. It was almost dark as we left the graveyard. The only music we could hear was the sound of cicada’s and the occasional car passing by on Money Road. We left the graveyard at Little Zion in the rear view mirror and drove back to Greenwood listening to what nowadays passes for music on the car stereo.

Some years later I was close to Greenwood on a different trip and I went to pay my respects again. Nothing had changed except the old junk was dumped and replaced with… newer junk.

Fergus Nolan