Cotton Belt Notebook

Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Highway 61 crosses 49 and Robert Johnson met the Devil, who taught him the secret of the blues. Out of the blues came Elvis, rock and roll, most of today’s popular music. My wife Linda was born here when Clarksdale was ‘the golden buckle of the Cotton Belt’. At the height of its prosperity the Delta was a magnet for both capital and labour. The labour had names like Muddy Waters, Son House, John Lee Hooker. They created the Delta blues and took it on the train up to Memphis and Chicago with the cotton. When I first came here, the picked cotton was so thick on roads and embankments it looked like snow in summertime.

Now we’re shocked to see it all gone. Clarksdale looks abandoned, like a city threatened by Isis, her shops boarded up, streets deserted, lovely old southern houses derelict, burned out, empty. Crime in Memphis is dropping but there’s still little to attract Clarksdale’s largely black, unskilled population.