Monday, October 4, 2010

Mississippi Goat Roast

Last month on the way back from a business trip I stopped off in Memphis, rented a car and drove just south of Senatobia, Mississippi to attend the Turner family’s annual Goat Roast, a weekend-long party in August on the old family farm that features two nights of performances by local blues musicians -- who happen to be some of the very best musicians in the world -- on a bandstand in the backyard.

Senatobia sits in the heart of North Mississippi Hill Country, a region that serves as keeper of the flame for traditional African American music spanning centuries. It’s in Hill Country that you can still find old traditions kept alive like the Fife & Drum bands that the Turner family is famous for fostering; back in the early twentieth century a regular dribble of Hill Country migrants bringing their traditional culture south to the Delta (where the jobs were) went a long way to creating The Blues. Even today, if you listen to Hill Country guitarists like the great Robert Belfour, you can hear a blues style that seems audibly connected to the West African Sahel, with guitar playing that sounds at times like Malian kora licks forced onto a fretted instrument, with sub-tonal bent notes unbuckling the seams of its normally well-tempered straightjacket. Others like the late Robert Kimbrough sound a dissonant drone in the bass strings torn straight out of a Sahara Desert camel caravan.

The Turner family occupies a special place in Hill Country’s musical universe. Recently deceased patriarch Otha Turner was the highly regarded fife-master of Rising Star Fife & Drum, with his grandchildren & cousins making up the drum corp. These picnics have been going on since at least the 1930s, when Alan Lomax filmed one of them, and attract hundreds of people all across Mississippi from Como to Clarksdale. The list of musicians that played here is a who’s who of blues history, including Belfour, Kimbrough, Napoleon Strickland, T Model Ford, the Burnside clan and many others.

Fife & drum bands were a major source of African American music & entertainment since the Revolutionary War. During slavery Africans weren’t allowed drums because they were known to be a means of communicating across large distances and therefore constituted a potential threat to European slave owners. But fife & drum bands started as adjuncts to the military and so were allowed, back when European armies were signaled and ordered via drums – something they were taught by North African invaders of Spain in the late Middle Ages. Fife & drum ensembles persevered through war and peace for over two centuries, serving as house band for parties in the agricultural off-season during the Jim Crow period. On these military snares and bass drums you can hear all the overlaid polyrhythmic complexity of Cuban or Congolese music in a completely new context, with a hand-made cane fife laying syncopated melodic patterns over the top of it.

Otha Turner died several years ago, but his large family is spread out along both sides of a wide stretch of rural Como, MS highway, and they continues the tradition with his nineteen year-old granddaughter Chardé Thomas as fife master. The goat roast is held on Otha’s old farm. Picnics like this were a near-daily feature of the agricultural off-season in the early twentieth century, with each family in the region hosting one a year. Back when Lomax visited, the fife & drum bands ruled the day, often with an African holdover opening that involved stylized, erotic drum saluting and male line dancing to entice the women. There were other instruments played then that are now extinct, including multi-flute pan pipes torn straight from Cameroon (soon to be replaced by the harmonica), home-made fiddles, hair combs covered in toilet paper, and diddley-bows – one long string often tied to a tree and anchored down to the ground until the tree was bent over, with enough pressure to turn it into a giant, multi-faceted instrument that can be played like a slide guitar & drummed at the same time (I did see one of these in the Dominican Republic a few years, where it’s called the gajumba, but it’s completely died out in Mississippi).

Those instruments are gone now as the blues’ unrecorded origins slide into the mud of oblivion along with the names of its inventors. But Rising Star and the goat roast carry on. I stopped off first at a grungy Super 8 motel by the side of the highway, torn from some picaresque David Lynch gothic noir, complete with creepy, obese motel clerk watching 1970s slasher movies & slugging down candy bars behind the counter, then made my way over to the stretch of country road where the goat roast was about to commence. Very pretty country, but remote and fairly poor. The neighbors had set up do-it-yourself parking operations in their front-yards for four dollars a pop and there were small kids playing on a trampoline in front of an adjoining house. Otha’s shack was still there, with a shed in the back where he made his fifes & kept his musical instruments, & the porch was a good place to kick back and check out the music.

This was an all-in-the-family operation and so there were teenagers directing traffic into the adjoining field, middle-aged ladies camped out in front of the house charging a modest $2 admission and a dozen family members behind the counter of a jury-rigged concession stand shelling out Wonder Bread goat sandwiches and beers for another $2. Out back there was a rented bandstand with power cords strung up overhead and leading to a generator by the house. It was vaguely disappointing to see no goats being slaughtered on-site, but one guy manned a gigantic woodsmoke grill out back where mass barbecuing was underway.

The first night of the party gets started with a drum call, and while most of the African ritual has been bled out of it by now, there’s still a big crowding and swaying around the drums when things get started. People are still really into it, and see it as a source of local pride. And a careful eye picks up the little fossil remnants of the old days, like one big & one small drumstick, male & female, a modest West African holdover. Then the first B-class acts start playing, but here a B-act is one guy playing reverbed-out guitar and drum-set at the same time, so awesome and raw that it made the White Stripes sound like Donnie & Marie. More people start filtering in and a Turner family matriarch who appears to have already had a few drinks ascends to the bandstand, demands a rhythm section and starts riffing a blues about how sexy her new wig is and how you can’t take it from her. The bass player dutifully demands the wig in a stanza of his own and he eventually winds up wearing it as she tumbles triumphantly into the dancers up front and makes a beeline for the beer concession.

By now everybody’s camped out on the backyard lawn. There are a bunch of plastic chairs but mostly people are sitting on grass or leaning against derelict pieces of farm equipment as the A-listers start filing up to the bandstand and jamming out. There’s living legend R.L. Burnside moseying up with a cane, clearly a little drunk and getting lost from time to time as he knocks out a hypnotic drone riff and commences to blowing everyone’s mind. At one point he throws a beer can at some harmonica player who wanders up and starts stepping on his buzz. The Turner family matron is back to move the show along and tries to bring in the next group, but R.L. just keeps sitting there and playing like he can’t hear her.

“Don’t be nasty, R.L.!”

He just smiles vacantly and rocks out for another half-hour. No one else complains.

Musicians meander up and down the bandstand in an ever-shifting ensemble. The old folks here are shocking, and when you start to talk to them you realize you own a dozen different recordings that they’re on. One man in a Fedora and a t-shirt that says “I’m 80% Redneck and the Rest is Beer” was Robert Kimbrough’s rhythm guitarist; he mistakes me for somebody and engages in an extended reminiscence that I’m supposedly a party to that is only half-understandable because he’s buckled over in hysterics the entire time. The North Mississippi All-Stars show up at one point, which consist of six different blues legend each a star unto themselves, and R.L.’s amazing son Dwayne turns up late and high as a kite to reverb out on some especially nasty Hendrixified blues -- some of which he forgets half the words to.

Up in front of the bandstand everybody’s making it clear that the blues was intended as a dance form. Couples are slow dragging one another head-to-toe or going solo with their arms up in the air and making herky-jerky leg moves that are as oddly graceful as they are abrupt. At one point an alarmingly large woman grabs me and drags me onto the dance floor with a vice grip on my wrists, turning her attention away from me only long enough to swivel her head and cackle at her friends: “Watch out! I got this one!”

Then of course there’s Charde and Rising Star. They start a set on the bandstand but something goes wrong with the monitor and Charde in a fit of pique storms off. From then on they simply wander through the festivities from time to time, all other music comes to a halt and everybody crowds around the six of them as they slam out local classics like Shimmy She-Wobble and generally jam out. It’s a miracle you can hear Charde’s fife at all given how loud they’re drumming, but somehow she makes herself heard, sometimes breaking into song with a surprisingly smooth & beautiful R&B voice, sometimes chanting out a latter-day addition like The Roof...The Roof...The Roof is on Fire...

Everybody’s really into the fife & drumming and you can tell it’s a point of local pride and a link to best part the past. So much of the old local musical tradition has been lost but thanks to these six kids the fife & drum is still going strong and doesn’t look to be going anywhere for a long time. Given how self-assured she is during performance it’s a surprise to talk to Charde in person and realize how young she is, a super-smart, slightly unsure of herself sweet kid. I had been corresponding with her previously about the possibility of performing at the Festival au Desert outside Timbuktu, but apparently she took one look at the photographs of fully decked-out Touaregs on camels and the tents she would have to sleep in and got a little freaked out. But we’ll get Rising Star out there eventually, along with some of the great local blues musicians, and it will be worth it to get them on the same stage with the kora virtuosi and bala players from whence so much of their musical foundation comes, even after all these centuries.

Outside the confines of the family farm, it’s clear that the Turner picnic is a magnet for every African-American kid with a car in a hundred square mile radius. You can walk a half-hour in each direction and see a solid line of teenagers and twenty-somethings partying by the side of the road and checking each other out, with strong-smelling mushroom clouds of pot wafting into the star-filled sky here and there and a long line of cars & trucks cruising the backroad and blasting R&B in a never-ending circuit. Some are barely aware that there’s music going on back at the farm. I tell them I'm from New York City and they look at me like I said The Moon.

But off in the distance as you chit-chat with local kids you can still hear the blues in the background. At one point an amplified guitar emits a long, inconsolable howl that crawls up your spine, like a woman mourning the death of a child.

So much bad is buried with our ancestors. But also just about everything that is good about us, about our culture, and all of it burns to ash in the same furnace. I’m standing with my fellow children of the twenty-first century, trying to make sense of one another as we listen to the last echo of a musical tradition that emerged out of these hills and quite literally transformed popular music across the planet. Our American descendants hundreds of years from now will cherish every bit of early African music that was captured before it disappeared as if they were fragments of Sappho, because it will still be what they are made of. The creation of the American soul took place while history was looking elsewhere. Tonight we are lucky to be here & hear it for ourselves.

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