Rossville, Tennessee, in Fayette County, was once called Lafayette Depot, but there was another Lafayette in Middle Tennessee, so sometime during Reconstruction, the town was renamed Rossville. For most of its history, it has been a small, quiet settlement of three or so streets, with some historic homes. A frozen foods plant came in the 1970’s, as did a Federally-funded community health clinic, which the Reagan administration eventually removed from the control of local community activists. Although proximity to Collierville is fueling a fair amount of suburban growth in Rossville, the main attraction is still the Wolf River Cafe, a local eatery famous for catfish that opened in 1989.
What people may not know is that the Wolf River Cafe is a great place for breakfast, too. They serve it until 10:30 AM, and on a summer morning, the place is fairly crowded. Like many rural cafes, prices are low, and the biscuits, omelettes and breakfast potatoes are truly amazing, and worth a drive from Memphis.
Also worth the drive is the little town itself, shady but full of historic houses. Little signs in front of some of them name them and give their dates. Some were built in 1860 or 1869, and some have dates that show they have been continuously added onto or improved. Rossville is best traversed on foot, as the historic district is only a few blocks wide. There is also a battlefield of sorts, the site of a small Civil War skirmish at what was once Lafayette Station, as well as a city park and a sort of boardwalk leading back across a creek to a lake behind the cafe. Altogether, Rossville makes a pleasant destination for breakfast and exploration.
After a breakfast at the Brunswick Kitchen at Brunswick near Lakeland, I decided to spend the afternoon putting up flyers for the R. L. Boyce Picnic and Blues Celebration, which is being held on September 1 during the Labor Day weekend. Coffee bars make a great place to promote events, as they typically have large community bulletin boards, or plenty of window space, so I made my way around to several Memphis area coffee bars on what was a very hot day indeed.
At Cafe Eclectic, one of Memphis’ oldest coffee bars, I was intrigued by what appeared to be a beer tap with the Illy logo on it. As Illy doesn’t make beer, I was curious, and had to ask the barista what it was. She explained that it was nitro, or nitrogenated coffee, and to my inquiries of what it was like, she responded by giving me a cold free glass of it. Without any added sugar or cream, it was absolutely delicious, mild and rich, the perfect option for such a hot day.
Downtown in the Pinch district, I came upon the new Comeback Coffee on North Main Street near Westy’s. This is Memphis’ most recent coffee bar, and an amazing and cool oasis in the city, with excellent coffee, wi-fi, comfortable seating, and an awesome multi-story outdoor courtyard.
At breakfast, I had downloaded a new iPhone photo app called Hydra, and so I spent the afternoon experimenting with it. It basically takes multiple photos and then merges them to create amazing detail and clarity with your phone. Of course it has limitations, because that method of improving photo clarity does not work with moving objects like people, pets or vehicles. But for buildings, such as old churches and other historic structures, it works very well indeed. In the South Memphis area along Florida street, I came across an old warehouse that bore an inscription for Mr. Bowers’ Stores, an old Memphis grocery chain. A painted logo for one of the locations still exists on Jackson Avenue near Breedlove. Further down Florida was an interesting new lounge called D’s Lounge, with an attractive guitar logo painted above the door. Great blues and southern soul recordings were playing inside, and I would have liked to check with them and see if they ever book live bands. But a rather draconian sign on the door read “Members Only” so I thought better of trying to go in, and continued on my way down to Mississippi, as the blues picnic portion of the annual Hill Country Boucherie was starting at 7 PM in Como.
Part of my plan when I decided to go to Vaiden to take pictures on a Saturday afternoon was to try to make it to Turnrow Books in Greenwood, Mississippi before they closed at 6 PM and buy a copy of Michael Ford’s new book of photographs North Mississippi Homeplace, which I had read about online. Scott Barretta, the promoter of all things Mississippi blues-related, had been discussing the book and the film on social media, so I texted him on Facebook to see if he wanted to meet for dinner in Greenwood, but he told me he was going to Tallahatchie Flats to see someone called Ben Wiley Payton. I told him I knew the place and would meet him there.
But the first challenge was to get from Vaiden to Greenwood before the book store closed. The distance didn’t seem that far, but the road from Vaiden to Carrollton seemed to take awhile, and although I left Vaiden by 5 PM, it took until 5:45 PM to get to downtown Greenwood, and so when I got to Turnrow Books, I had little time to browse before they closed. It was just as well, because the store was full of books that I would have loved to have owned, and I had limited money. One of the peculiar things about Mississippi is the number of truly excellent book stores in the state. Square Books in Oxford, LeMuria Books in Jackson, Pass Christian Books in Pass Christian, and of course the store I was at in Greenwood. All of them are always full of treasures and it is hard to avoid spending too much money. Fortunately, Turnrow had plenty of copies of Ford’s book, signed by the author, and I was able to buy one, and then go on my way so they could close up the store.
Down Howard Street was a coffee bar called Mississippi Mo Joe Coffee House, which the people at Turnrow had suggested was likely already closed for the evening, but which I found wide open. There had apparently been a bicycle race in Greenwood on that Saturday, and so the coffee bar stayed open to accommodate the race visitors, and I was able to get a latte before I headed out Grand Avenue into the wilderness along the Tallahatchie River toward Money, Mississippi to the north.
I was headed to Tallahatchie Flats to meet my friend, but unexpectedly, I came upon an historic marker for bluesman Robert Johnson outside a church called Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church. Although I had always been told that the burial location of Johnson was disputed, I decided I ought to stop and take photos at the spot and I did. Apparently, the general consensus now is that Little Zion is in fact the burial place of Robert Johnson, with documentation available to support the contention.
Tallahatchie Flats proved to be not at all far from the Little Zion church, practically walking distance. It reminds one of a Greenwood version of Clarksdale’s Shack Up Inn, with rentable sharecropper shacks, and a big tavern building where Ben Wiley Payton was performing. Tallahatchie Tavern proved to be packed to the rafters with fans, some of them blues lovers and some of them people in town for the bike race. Ben Wiley Payton was not an Americana artist as I had imagined, but a Black bluesman, originally from Mississippi but who had lived in Chicago for a period of time. His repertoire was a mixture of traditional blues and soul and R & B covers, and the crowd was enjoying every minute of it.
The tavern itself was of interest. Scott had told me that it had once been owned in part by Steve LaVere, the blues researcher, and perhaps because of that, it was full of Memphis blues memorabilia on the walls, rare flyers and posters for events which I had never seen. I made sure to take photographs, particularly of a flyer that announced a sort of Barn Dance somewhere out in the Fisherville area, which featured performances from Furry Lewis and a band called Common Law Catfish, which sounded like another one of Jim Dickinson’s concoctions.
I had come to watch and listen, but Scott asked me if I wanted to sit in with Ben Payton, and since the tavern had a worn, beat-up piano that was yet reasonably in tune, I agreed. I ended up having a ball playing with Ben and his band, but when it got to be 8 PM, I reluctantly had to leave, as I had made reservations for 8:30 PM at Lusco’s in Greenwood. So I walked the long distance back to my car, and made the drive back into town.
It was kind of a rough day, actually. David Kimbrough Jr, son of the late Junior Kimbrough had died on July 4th, and was being buried on this particular Saturday morning, and in addition, a sudden hurricane, Barry, was headed straight for my friends in New Orleans, where massive flooding along the lines of Katrina was feared. R. L. Boyce was scheduled to perform in Merigold, Mississippi for the annual Monkey Day, an event held in honor of the late Willie “Po Monkey” Seaberry, a man who had owned the legendary Po Monkey’s Lounge juke joint in a remote cotton field west of Merigold, so after a breakfast at Moma’s Bar-B-Que in Bartlett, I drove down to Como to pick R. L. up.
Despite the weather warnings, the sun was out, and our drive from Como to the Delta was relatively uneventful. But upon our arrival in Merigold, we noticed that things were quite different from last year. Perhaps the larger Grassroots Blues Festival in Duck Hill, the David Kimbrough funeral, the outrageous heat at last year’s festival and the threat of a tropical storm all combined to keep down attendance, but there were few attendees when we first got to Merigold. There were no food trucks this year either, but Crawdad’s restaurant was open and people could get food and non-alcoholic drinks inside. Beer was available from a tent outside. I noticed for the first time this year that Crawdad’s had a crawfish weathervane on its eaved roof, which is pretty cool.
Lightnin Malcolm had already arrived when we got there, and the day started off being really hot, like it had been last year, but this year, the organizers had provided fans and misting machines under the big audience tent, which was a good idea. And there was a considerable amount of wind this year, which helped with the heat. As time passed, people began to trickle in, and by noon or so, the first act of the day, Terry “Harmonica” Bean, had come on stage. Lightnin soon came and warned us that Jimmy Duck Holmes from Bentonia was not going to make it to Merigold. He said Holmes’ wife would not let him come, and presumably it was the threat of bad weather that was frightening him. At any rate, Bean performed for nearly an hour, and then R. L. Boyce and Lightnin Malcolm came on stage to perform. By that point, there was enough of a crowd that some people began dancing in front of the stage, and some members of the Seaberry family had arrived.
Garry Burnside, a son of the late R. L. Burnside, was next up, with Lightnin Malcolm playing drums for him. Some friends of Lightnin had come up from New Orleans due to the storm, and were in the crowd. They were staying at the Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale and had driven down at his recommendation.
Garry was followed by Lightnin Malcolm’s own set, which was briefly interrupted by a speech from the mayor of Merigold, and the sheriff of Bolivar County. Malcolm performed a mix of his original tunes and some Hill Country standards, before closing with a rousing tune called “Clap Your Hands, Stomp Your Feet.” The outdoor stage ended an hour early, but music was also going on inside Crawdad’s, where I had reserved a table for dinner.
The move inside came just in time, as the clouds began to gather, and the winds began to pick up to the extent that guitar cases began blowing across the outdoor stage. As Crawdad’s specializes in steaks and seafood, I decided to order the filet mignon with french fries, and it was a good decision. The filet was extremely tender, wrapped in bacon, and with a good charcoal flavor, which is rare in restaurants today. It had been marinated with a slightly sweet marinade that clearly had worcestershire sauce in it. The fries were excellent as well, and although I was tempted to try something called Black Bottom Pie, I decided against it. Although the restaurant is truly massive, with rooms upon rooms, it was nearly all filled on this particular night.
Afterwards, Lightnin Malcolm was headed with his friends back to Hopson Plantation at Clarksdale, and R. L. and I were headed back out to Como, but we stopped at Clarksdale for coffee at Yazoo Pass before heading on to Panola County. Although we were concerned about the weather, we managed to stay ahead of it all the way back, and my friends in New Orleans were posting on social media that Barry had been something of a dud.
During this day, I had largely been experimenting too with the Reica Film Camera and Nizo movie-making apps on my iPhone 7, with a goal of seeing if I could cover a typical live music event with just my phone. For the most part, the experiment worked well. I love the Reica app, as its filters are based on historic varieties of camera film, including my beloved Agfa 400, with its brilliant reds and blues. Unlike a traditional film camera of course, one can switch film with each shot, changing from Kodak, to Fuji, to Agfa, to Ilford black-and-white, shot by shot. Of course, the iPhone 7’s camera has some limitations, and when zooming out, there is some loss of detail. But under festival conditions it worked well.
I was even more impressed with the Nizo movie-making app, which makes cinemtographic-quality footage. However, it can automatically string clips together if you forget to export them to your camera roll, and it has to be focused when shifting to different light levels. All the same, I was impressed with its performance, which in some ways surpasses my Nikon D3200. I probably won’t ever have to cover an event with only my iPhone, and its battery wasn’t up to the challenge, having to be recharged for an hour mid-festival. But it’s nice to know that I could if I had to.
I had a vacation day from work, and early in the day, I saw a Facebook post from my favorite coffee brand, Southern Coffee Services in Lexington, Mississippi, which said that their products were now available at the Piggly Wiggly store in Batesville, Mississippi, which is about 35 miles closer to my house than the store in Grenada where I had gotten some last time. So in the afternoon, I decided to drive down to Batesville and pick up some bags of coffee, and then, after debating where I wanted to eat dinner, I decided to drive back up to Como and grab a dinner at Windy City Grill.
Como, Mississippi has a special vibe to it. It has always been a unique place in my experience, perhaps because for a long time Tate County did not allow any liquor, and Panola County did, so restaurants located in Como instead of Senatobia. Como’s Main Street is not only historic, but something of a destination, with five great restaurants, a hotel, an antique mall, an art studio, and an event hall for rental which is the scene of many a wedding.
After shooting some photographs with my iPhone in the gathering dusk, I sat down to a thin-crust pepperoni and bacon pizza, which was so much food that I could not finish it. I asked for a box, and took the rest of it by blues musician R. L. Boyce’s house for him to enjoy.
It was a fun evening in one of my favorite places.
On a couple of rare instances when my jazz group played in Tupelo some years ago, my old bass player Monte Butts had recommended a dessert cafe downtown called Crave. I fell in love the first time I tried it. The place had delicious cakes and pies, as well as great coffees.
So, after rain caused an early end to my day at the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic at Waterford, I made my way to Oxford and grabbed a burger at the Oxford Burger Company, and afterwards, I wanted something sweet. Checking my Yelp app on my phone, I soon saw a reference to a place called Crave in Oxford that specializes in desserts. I found myself wondering if it was a branch of the place I remembered in Tupelo.
Wonder no more. Oxford Crave is in fact a branch of Tupelo Crave. And it is located next to Lost Pizza Company, away from the hustle and bustle of the square, along College Hill Road. The atmosphere is upscale and welcoming, and the coffee and desserts are delicious. I enjoyed a slice of peanut butter-chocolate cake, which was absolutely amazing. Despite an error on Yelp with regards to hours, Crave is open most nights until at least 9 PM.
After a hot afternoon of interviewing people for my masters’ thesis, I had driven down into Marshall County to a spot where my iPhone indicated that Coldwater Church Cemetery would be located. Coldwater Church had played a role in an incident in the 1870’s, in which a Black benevolent society, led by a fife and drum band, marched toward Collierville to protest the shooting death of the society’s president. But in the area indicated by my phone, I found no sign of a church nor of a cemetery. It is entirely possible that the cemetery is in someone’s backyard on private land, so I gave up looking for it and ventured into Collierville looking for something cold and sweet.
I ended up at Levee Creamery, a welcoming and inviting spot at the corner of Houston Levee and Wolf River Parkway, which, as it turns out, is owned by the folks behind Pyro’s Fire-Fresh Pizzas and the Wolf River Brisket Company. The place was sleek, colorful and comfortable, with a full espresso menu as well as ice cream, and soft serve. I opted for the latter, a chocolate soft-serve with Oreo toppings. The lack of Reese’s peanut-butter cups as an available topping was a minor quibble, but not a big deal, and I found the soft-serve absolutely amazing, even more delicious than Dairy Queen, and I am a DQ fan.
The Creamery also has an interesting jukebox, which people can control from an app on their phone, to which they can upload money in order to play songs. They are open at 6:30 AM weekdays, so that people can get their caffeine fix before heading to nearby Houston or Collierville High Schools, and have recently opened a second location on Highland near the University of Memphis. They are a good, reliable option for your coffee or ice cream needs.
I had recently come across a company called Southern Coffee Roasters on social media. They are based in Lexington, Mississippi, and I found that the nearest retail store to Memphis selling their products was a supermarket in Cleveland, Mississippi called Vowell’s, so when I left the Clarksdale Caravan Music Festival, I decided to head down to Cleveland, buy some coffee, have dinner and then head back to Memphis.
My path took me down Highway 61, and so I decided to head into Duncan, a community I had often seen from the road, but never ventured into. What I found was a village of beautiful houses, with some historic downtown buildings, but much has been abandoned. Even the old Town Hall, which looks quite historic, is abandoned and vacant. Even so, I found some great photos to shoot in the little village, and then headed on my way to Cleveland.
In Cleveland, after picking up my coffee at Vowell’s, I had intended to have dinner at a place call Sea Level Oyster House, but to my shock, I found it closed permanently. It had only opened in November of last year, and didn’t make it six months. Nearby, a restaurant called Backdraft was open, but the menu items were fairly expensive, and I decided that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I returned to Airport Grocery, where I often go for a good steak or burger when in Cleveland. A waitress there explained to me that Sea Level had been shut down abruptly because they sold alcohol to minors. What a shame.
On the way back, I stopped in Winstonville, because it seemed like something was going on. Cars were everywhere, and people were standing out on the sidewalks by the hundreds. It was only with difficulty that I was able to enter the little town, and when I did, I found that it was Winstonville Homecoming, when people from the town return from all over the country. Although lots of people were out, and certain streets were roped off, there did not seem to be anyone performing, so I headed on up the road to Shelby, hoping that something might be going on at the Do Drop Inn. Nothing was, and in fact, it was locked and dark. So I gave up on finding any live music, and headed back to Memphis.
At one time, as far as music festivals went, Clarksdale, Mississippi had one, the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival in August. Later, after former advertising executive Roger Stolle came to town, a second one, the venerable Juke Joint Festival took root, becoming the city’s largest festival, attracting people from all over the world. But now, Clarksdale’s burgeoning tourism business is driven by a succession of festivals, stretching nearly all year long. Music, film, art….all are celebrated in different events. The Clarksdale Caravan Music Festival is one of these newer events, held in May, with performances at Cat Head Delta Blues and at the New Roxy.
Like the better-known events, the Clarksdale Caravan is primarily about blues, although it is in a much more intimate setting, with only two stages, and therefore a lot more interaction between the artists and performers. On this year’s festival, there had been a considerable amount of rain up in Memphis, and I feared that could disrupt the event, as the Cat Head stage was outside, but in Clarksdale the sun was out, and shining.
My primary goal was to catch R. L. Boyce at the Cat Head stage, and I did. He was performing with Lightnin Malcolm and a violinist with whom I was not familiar. A small crowd had gathered under the tent in front of the store, and due to the threat of rain, I decided to do my photographic work with my iPhone instead of my Nikon. Indeed it did start raining briefly, and I eventually took refuge in the Meraki Coffee Roasters shop a block down the street.
In the afternoon, Lightnin Malcolm was scheduled to perform on the stage at New Roxy, a former theatre in the New World district of Clarksdale, but I arrived early, and nothing was happening yet, so I spent some time walking around the area shooting pictures of the buildings, many of which are sadly beginning to collapse. Local artists have attempted to brighten the ruins of what remains, with painted images and slogans, such as “I am of this city and this city is of me,” but the loss of such history is not easy to bear. The New Roxy is a better story, however, as it has survived, despite the loss of its roof, to become a popular music venue in Clarksdale.
Perhaps because of the rain threat, Malcolm’s performance took place in the smaller, lounge portion of the New Roxy, within the former box office of the theatre, rather than the larger outdoor stage. He performed primarily with his drummer, but also did a couple of tunes with R. L. Boyce, with whom he had played earlier at Cat Head. The crowd was fairly small but enthusiastic. It was ultimately a great day of music, and the rain threatened but never actually disrupted anything.
The weekend after the soggy Juke Joint Festival was Easter Weekend, and that weekend got the weather that Juke Joint Fest should have gotten. Easter Sunday was bright, blue, and summer-like, and I decided that it would be a good day to drive down into the Mississippi Delta with my Nikon D3200. So after church services, I headed into Midtown for a brunch at Sunrise Memphis, which has just about gotten to be my favorite breakfast restaurant in Memphis. The weather was so pleasant that they had opened the front doors to the outside patio, and the place was not even particularly crowded.
From there, I decided to head out Third Street, the old Highway 61 by which people would have left Memphis for the Delta (or New Orleans for that matter). It led past a new club called the K3 Studio Cafe, which I had seen on Facebook as the scene of some local music events. The place looked interesting, indicating that it occasionally hosted jazz and jam session events. Around the corner was an old blues club, Club Insight, but it isn’t clear to me whether it is still open for business. But I soon realized that if I spent too much time in Memphis, I would never make it to the Delta, so I headed on out toward Westwood and Coro Lake.
