The young drumline known as the Baby Blue is one of the few independent drumlines left in Memphis, a city that was once known for having a lot of drumlines in the various inner city neighborhoods. Once needed to provide the funky grooves and excitement for majorettes, the latter have taken to using compact discs and DJ’s, and the need for drummers has diminished. Still, it’s not uncommon to see the Baby Blues out at various events, and they usually appear late in the day on the Saturday of Clarksdale’s Juke Joint Fest. In the afternoon, their performance draws the curious, but by the evening, they usually draw a crowd of dancers that confront and battle each other in a style that seems akin to ritual, moving in perfect time to the drum cadences. I have tended to associate the phenomenon of African-American drumlines in the South (and elsewhere) as a latent echo of African and Caribbean music and dance practices, but witnessing it in the Clarksdale context makes me wonder if the tradition was filtered through the Black fife-and-drum experience in North Mississippi, where, after all, so many Black Memphians came from. If so, it appears that the endangered tradition of majorette and drill team drumming is even more worthy of study and preservation.
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