A Day of Blues at Fordyce’s Cotton Belt Festival

It is often hard to be a journalist or observer and also a working musician within the scene I am trying to document. But I find it fun to perform with my favorite blues musicians, so when Garry Burnside called me to play keyboards with him in Fordyce, Arkansas for that town’s Cotton Belt Festival, I was eager to accept. I soon was asked by his brother Duwayne to play for him as well, since they were going on back to back on the main stage. Since the day of the performance was warm and pretty, I decided to leave Memphis early and make a day of the journey down.

I started my journey with breakfast at the Waffle and Pancake House in Marion, Arkansas, and then worked my way across Crittenden County to Highway 70 at Shearerville. I drove through Madison and Forrest City, but it was at Brinkley that I finally stopped and took pictures of some of the crumbling buildings. I was saddened to learn that the old abandoned Marion Anderson High School, which I had always intended to take a picture of, was now nothing but a vacant lot. The same was true of an old juke joint on East Cypress Street, a club which I could remember still being open with older men sitting out front on benches just a few years ago. At Clarendon, I stopped to take a picture of the Monroe County Courthouse with its iconic clock tower, and in Stuttgart I went to North Maple Street to see the area where Calvin Brown and Calvin Rhodes had run the Riceland and Soul Beat record labels. Although the actual address was only a slab, there was an old store next door, and across the street, the New Image Club, another historic-looking juke joint. 

I had considered stopping for lunch in Stuttgart, but half of town was without power for some reason, so I went on to Altheimer, and took pictures there of a juke joint and two abandoned school campuses. From there to Pine Bluff was not far, and I ended up stopping at a great coffee bar in the downtown area called Indigo Blue. Not only was the coffee great, but the shop was beautifully decorated, with attractive artwork and even old University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff yearbooks. Next door was a custom cupcake shop where I bought a cupcake, and then I stopped by the Record Rack record store and browsed for vinyl before starting back out on the road toward Fordyce. 

By the time I made it to Fordyce, it was hot. So hot, in fact, that I stopped at the Sonic and got a cold drink before making my way downtown to the festival grounds. Fordyce was a railroad town, and like most of the Arkansas towns I had seen that day, it was largely in ruins, and only a shadow of the town I recalled from trips to Grambling in the 1990s. The massive abandoned hotel I had photographed back in the 1990s was completely gone without a trace, and I could not even recall where it was. One interesting thing is that Fordyce had two train stations rather than one, and both are still standing. One was the Cotton Belt station at the south of downtown, and the other was the Fordyce and Princeton station to the east of downtown. By the time Garry Burnside went on stage, the heat had relented somewhat, and a fairly decent crowd had settled into the grandstands in front of the stage. Garry was followed by his brother Duwayne, whose music I have always enjoyed playing, as he does a lot of his father R. L. ‘s music, as well as a number of Junior Kimbrough songs. By the time we came off stage, I was thoroughly tired, although it was a pleasant kind of tiredness. 

Unfortunately, because of the lateness of the hour at which we finished performing, there was no opportunity to get dinner in Fordyce. Most of the town’s nicer restaurants seemed to be permanently out of business, and anything that might have still been in business was closed for the evening. I decided to drive back by way of Little Rock, and stopped at a shiny new truck stop for a slice of pizza and a drink. I did not stop in Little Rock, as again almost everything I would have wanted to eat was already closed, but at Brinkley, I stopped at Waffle House and got an early morning breakfast. After that, I had to stop frequently, as I kept getting sleepy, but I made it home by 2 AM.