The Delta Furniture Stage (so-called because it sits in front of Delta Furniture Company) is several blocks away from the crowds and excitement of the Juke Joint Festival’s nerve center, and so it always seems to have a more down-home pace and feel, with plenty of barbecue smoking on oil-drum cookers and a performance line-up that tends more toward the local. Such is the case with
Bill Howl-N-Madd Perry, a Delta bluesman who moved to Chicago and then returned to Clarksdale. Like all the best authentic blues, Perry’s music is anything but polished, but it has a joy and spontaneity about it that many of the modern blues artists lack, for all their sophistication. Members of the crowd were soon up on their feet, some of them dancing in time to the music.
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