Flew into a cold, rain streaked Memphis Saturday before Easter, smiling girl at Hertz acts like Father Xmas as she tells us we’ve been ‘upgraded’. Outside a monstrosity of a gas guzzling 4 wheel drive awaits – just working out how to start the thing up is a nightmare let alone being catapulted unknowingly - jet lagged - onto a slidy black Interstate. After a hellish couple of miles inadvertently trapped in the fast lane, we pull off into a bleak industrial estate and find the old Highway 61 which I know leads right into the heart of old downtown.

Memphis as ever a joy to behold, old yellow high rises nuzzling next to shiny new office blocks, hustlers on every street corner and the lights twinkling like diamonds on the Mississippi Bridge outside our window.

Easter morning wrench ourselves from bed and drive back 61 to find Al Green. His church is much smaller than I’d imagined it might be, looks like a converted funeral parlour and is snuck away in the middle of a leafy suburb of well maintained clapboard houses. Inside a bemused selection of the curious watch as gat toothed black kids take it in turns to tell their Easter story, each beautiful with platted and braided hair and shyness. White clad Deacons watch from their lofty plinth and eventually the Rev’d Green arrives to preach to his eager audience . Al’s good but still needs a few more chops – should catch the Rev’d in Gloryland Baton Rouge or the Church Of God in Orange where I went to meet Robert Randolph. But when he sings it’s amazing, his 15 year old son playing keyboards, small drummer boy and guitarist come on like Curtis Mayfield. Outside in the lobby shop alongside CD’s of Al preaching, you can buy his ‘Greatest Hits’ – drive back through rainy suburbs totally weirded out.

Beale Street at night still does it, just something about seeing B.B.’s joint and Schwab’s still looking like it’s done for seventy years, that’s instantly engrossing. Ignore the blue rinsed tour parties and fat guys strolling with King size cokes and loud voices, the spirit of Johnny Ace and the Beale Street Boys is still here; can almost smell it in the air.

STAX MUSEUM on S. Lemore is an oasis of refinement in a desert of dereliction. ‘Gotcha gotta get the feeling… DO YOU LIKE SWEET SOUL MUSIC ?’ Across the road a guy sitting on a brown plastic settee, stuffing billowing out through rips, watches the world slide by with blank hostile eyes, as the disembodied voice of Arthur Conley comes from hidden car park speakers - but inside it doesn’t matter. After a fifteen minute movie about Stax, kind of telling it like it was for anyone who might have mistakenly thought this was a Disney annexe, walk through a reconstructed Mississippi chapel into the museum proper. Well done and wonderful, smell of old dry pine pews, hand claps and Sunday morning Gospel emotion hanging in the air. Brings it all back home as well it should. It’s all here – the stories, mixing desk with ugly black bakelite knobs, Steve Cropper’s faded yellow Telecaster, Booker’s Hammond…..history never smelt so right.

Outside the Lorraine MOTEL wreaths of flowers next to 60’s Cadillacs are all the clues you need. Martin Luther King died on the balcony but you can’t get to it. Instead we see the cheesy small room where the great man spent his last hours and try to imagine why someone so enormous in the pantheon of human endeavour should have chosen to stay here ? But heck, so did Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Aretha…..The whole place – despite crocodiles of bored looking jabbering school kids and bemused teachers – is a very spiritual experience. Outside get hassled for a few bucks from a guy who I thought wanted to discuss George Bush with me because I looked so interesting.

Old red brick Memphis railways station is deserted in the late afternoon heat, thick mahogany balustrades and the high vaulted ceiling would be more fitting in some Victorian museum in Knightsbridge. Unbelievably impressive – back in the ‘Forties any share cropper arriving from a dusty Delta farm would have thought he’d truly arrived in heaven.

Out where Furry Lewis’s house once stood the grass grows and next to it a workman lazily hammers nails into a plank. Blue jays flit through the bushes and crickets whirr in the distance. Bukka White lived next door too, must have been quite some jam session in the evenings.

Down in Clarksdale place still feels like time’s stood still. Across the road from the Blues Museum an old wooden warehouse is now Ground Zero, an attempt by Morgan Freeman to try and bring some life back to the place. And it’s good – the club really does feel like it should – fried catfish and Coors with beads of sweat hanging off the tins, air pulverised by angry metallic shards of blues. Onstage a crazy guy who plays his placid blue Strat like Buddy Guy and sings like Chester Burnette on Sterno, really lays it down. Next night I meet up with Ernest ‘Guitar’ Roy whose band are the night’s main attraction. Amazingly he remembers me from ’87 and despite my excuses, lets me play his guitar while he plays drums and anther guy thumps out the bass. Nobody throws any bottles and I end up pushing out my usual repertoire of second hand white boy blues for about an hour and a half. Hardly anyone out there to listen but it feels like I did OK. At the end of the evening promise to stay in touch. Ernest once played back up guitar for Albert King and is an accomplished fine player, almost too sophisticated for a town where Robert Johnson once busked on the street corner.

Over at the Blues Museum some of the Hendrix guitar collection has been shipped in from Seattle, amongst them Muddy’s crazy shaped Guild he used during the ‘Sixties, Clapton’s ‘Brownie’ and the most awe inspiring of all – Magic Sam’s worn out white Strat. As these instruments sit in suspended animation in their glass cases, it’s almost impossible to come to terms with the phenomenal musical history they’ve produced. I’m so shocked that I leave my rucsac behind and don’t realise until we hit Mooreshead 100 miles South. Came to check out where the Southern crosses the dog – that’s still there but a little café we hoped to check out from last time has disappeared. As Keith Richard says ‘ Shit happens’. Family popularity stakes plummet as we retrace our steps……

Mississippi still much as I first found it back in 1987, huge skies with the flat featureless grey cotton fields stretched to the horizon. But most of the lonely roadside sharecropper shacks seem long gone. Maybe it’s because the road’s been widened ? Talking of shacks, outside Clarksdale is the Hopson Farm, a rusting pile of old cotton gins where you can stay in the ‘Shackup Inn’. Maybe I’m a cynic – well I am – but I can’t help but scoff that this collection of shacks tastefully arranged like a wagon train in a large semi circle, can boast to be the ‘true blues experience’; the whole thing seemed a well inspired but ultimately soul less exercise. OK - the shacks are well maintained, adorned with chintzy curtains, smell of pine, and have a refrigerator near the porch in which to sit in a rocking chair swigging back Coors – but why ?

Didn’t help that most were occupied by whooping fatties, hell bent on finding out how it felt to be black and poor in Mississippi. Heck.

And VICKSBURG ? Well, big money’s come. Where downtown was always a wonderfully seedy atmospheric taste of the ‘old’ South, it’s now been replaced by natty little cobbled streets and mushroom like speakers embedded in the sidewalk oozing some kinda jazz shit. My favourite Pawn shop has been replaced by a newer tidier and soul less version, the old Biscuit Factory which served the best Club sandwiches in the world, stands shuttered up and dusty. On the Mississippi the gambling boast rides up and down with the swell laughing at the changes it’s brought. That night hang out in a bar with a crazed half drunk guy who claims to have shot Manuel Noriega and a biker king who acts as his confessor. All very spooky – claims he was helicoptered in to shoot the IRA at the Marine base three miles down the road from where we live, back in ‘85. Could be.

KING OF THE SWAMP BLUES

Down in Louisiana Tabby Thomas ‘King Of The Swamp Blues’, my old mate and story teller par excellence now holds court from his chair at home. The golden days of the ‘Blues Box’ all seem far away, Tabby’s had a stroke, can’t play guitar any more and to make matters worse, his wife Jocelyn has lost her leg because of diabetes. After chewing the blues fat for hours, I leave sad and wracked by memories of Tabby’s stentorian rule at the ‘Box’, padding purposefully around serving drinks, playing dynamite Blues up on the creaky stage and his indomitable character capable of subduing any big mouth that came through his doors. And Silas Hogan, Guitar Kelly, Clarence Edwards, Lonesome Sundown – now all gone but for one amazing year people that I played with, drank with and classed as my friends; a blues education that few get the chance to experience. Can’t help feeling as sense of emptiness about Baton Rouge, much as I love the place time has moved on and I don’t like change. Feels good to sit down on the levee and watch the orange sun go down over the buzzing swamps; some things are still the same.

NOO ORLUNS always feels great, always looks the same and always smells the same – a kind of murky humid jungle inhabited by humans, as low down funky and greasy as ever. It’s a place where you can’t ever drop your guard too. First afternoon Sam and I get a ‘flat’ when we’re driving around in our appalling vehicle in one of the ‘shiftier’ areas – everyone staring blank front porch stares, and us hopelessly lost until we find that last chance Texaco filling station with an air hose - it’s a scary experience – thought we’d never Wal Mart again.

Clubs I used to play when I lived in Baton Rouge are mostly gone but not much else changes – until recently. As Bob Dylan said it’s a ‘one day at a time type place’ – and it is. Hang out eating beignets with the tourists (which we are too of course but pretend not to be) We get to spend time with Tabby’s son Chris who shows us his latest movie role as Lowell Fulson in ‘Ray’ at 3.00am, cats scuttling around in the darkness outside, ride the trams up and down St. Charles under the cool spreading oaks, stay with our wonderful friends Peter and Meryt, and generally hang out in a way you couldn’t do anywhere else on the planet. We all love New Orleans and when Katrina devastates the city a mere four months later, it’s as though we’ve lost a close relative. At present feel scared to go back and see the carnage - but I know we will. Laissez les bon temps roullee……………..is that how you spell it ? Guess you know what I mean……….