Black Prairie Blues

A couple of years ago, I started tracking down some information about the blues that originated on the eastern side of Mississippi.  I had gone up toward West Point with the intention of checking out the Howlin' Wolf Museum, along with the statue near the middle of town next to the Blues Marker.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get in the museum that weekend, so I planned to revisit it in the future since my daughter and her husband reside in Tupelo.

I posted about my visit up that way and got some feedback from a few people, who took the time to enlighten me on just how much great blues music came from northeastern Mississippi and northwestern Alabama.  I am still in the process of digging into this huge source of music that I had previously took for granted and I hope to, in a future post, provide more information for those unfamiliar.....I just don't want to do it until I feel like I've got it covered pretty well.

In the meantime, my birthday was a couple of months ago, and we decided to visit my daughter and son-in-law in Tupelo.  While we were going that way, I decided to see about visiting the museum as we passed by.  Since I tried to visit previously, the museum has moved to a larger building and is now called the Black Prairie Blues Museum.  I was able to get on Facebook, track down the contact information for the museum, and get in touch with Jeremy Klutts, who oversees the museum.  

The museum is a work in progress, the contents are mostly upstairs while the lower floor is used for events and occasional performances.  There's a stage and room for a couple of hundred in the audience.  There's also art on display from art students at nearby Mississippi State University that captures the spirit of the blues.

   

Since the museum was formerly centered around Howlin' Wolf, the bulk of items in the museum focuses on the Wolf......lots of photos, album cover displays and a few guitars donated by Hubert Sumlin and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, among others.  There were a few pictures of other artists interspersed.....Willie King, Big Joe Williams, etc.. as I said, it's a work in progress, the museum and the building, but when it is finished it will be a nice stop for blues fans in the area.  In the meantime, you can contact them at their Facebook page if you're traveling through and they will be glad to give you a tour.

There's a lot more blues history in the Black Prairie region than one would imagine.  In addition to the Howlin' Wolf Blues Marker and statue at West Point, there's also a marker in Crawford to the south for Big Joe Williams, which we posted about previously, and a marker in Macon (several miles south of Crawford) recognizing the Black Prairie Blues.  In addition to Wolf, Williams, and Willie King, this region was the home of Bukka White, Albert King, Lucille Bogan, Jesse Fortune, and the Houston Harrington family.  Harrington was a fiddler from the Macon area who migrated to Chicago, eventually setting up a recording studio and a record label (Atomic-H) and steering his family, which included Eddy Clearwater, Carey Bell, Lurrie Bell, and Steve Bell, to careers in the blues.

Howlin' Wolf statue in West Point, MS

  

Black Prairie Blues marker in Macon, MS

And that's just a taste of what originated in this area of Mississippi and Alabama (we haven't even made it to Alabama yet).  We will dig deeper into the artists from the Black Prairie Blues region in the near future, so keep checking back with us!