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He had a little green in his pocket from walking table to table and holding his pitcher out to patrons. But as our conversation progressed, I found that Ironing Board Sam was feeling awful bad. The scoop-jawed 65-year-old, dressed in a tattered suit and fedora, felt trapped.
He'd left his native South Carolina in his teens when his stepmother put him out, he said. Sam cobbled together a homemade keyboard out of two-by-fours, thumbtacks and telephone wire, which he set on an ironing board and covered with a cloth. It was quite the curiosity, and he made a little name for himself in Memphis in the "60s and "70s. Sam eventually wound up in New Orleans and, after splitting with his wife, moved to Jackson three years ago.
He said he works six days a week for $300, and a portion of that goes toward renting a nearby hovel from the club owner. He has no car. A local dealer offered to give him a clunker, but Sam suspects the 930's owner nixed that -- in order to keep him in servitude. "I'm somethin' like a slave," he said. "I can't get enough money to leave. I live in a five-block area, down to the sto' and "round here. That's the real blues. That's too much blues."
As much as I sympathized with Sam's plight, I couldn't help but think that the tip money in his pocket would probably cover a cab ride to the bus station. Was he being exploited? Probably. Was he really trapped? Not likely.
Ironing Board Sam's situation might be more melodramatic than most, but it's reflective of the strained financial relationships between Mississippi bluesmen and their employers. Written contracts for local gigs are all but nonexistent, lawyers a rumor. Clarksdale singer/guitarist James Johnson, who goes by Super Chikan, complained to me that he was underpaid for a caravan tour representing Fat Possum Records. "We was out two weeks and I'm thinkin' we gon' make good money, "bout $3,000 apiece," he says, sitting in his work shed. "When we got back, me and the two other guys split a thousand dollars."
Back at Fat Possum, Matthew Johnson scoffs at the allegation. Eating lunch on the square in Oxford, he runs his hand wearily through his hair. He says he lays out every detail of tour compensation in a contract. How much everyone makes on any given night is even posted in the tour vans, yet his road personnel still gets queries about pay.
Maybe that's because most old black bluesmen grew up with ambiguous financial arrangements. Many worked pieces of land as sharecroppers or as sharecropper's sons. (Most said they'd picked cotton and handled mules.) According to this feudal system, plantation owners' accounting is what determined sharecroppers' portion of the cotton profits. But the local white gentry also could be called upon for special needs. This murky situation often carried over to blues careers. It's widely held that Muddy Waters earned little or no royalties from Chess Records, but owner Leonard Chess made sure his star always tooled around in a new Cadillac.
"The economic relationship is very paternalistic," said Stolle of Cathead. "It harks back to sharecropping days. It's not like you give someone straight-up $500 to do something, a specific thing. It gets blurred."
Stolle books Ground Zero, Clarksdale's premier blues spot, which is partly owned by actor Morgan Freeman. "I get stuff like, "Roger, my car broke down,' or "I got a rent problem.' It gets complicated. We're both guilty in a way."
The blues most of us take in at festivals or clubs or on community radio derives from Chicago, which over the years merged heavily with rock and has put an increasing emphasis on guitar heroics, much of it played by studious white men. Thankfully, this is not the case with most Mississippi blues. The music we witnessed was generally low on pyrotechnics, fairly high in rural authenticity.
There are no recordings of the earliest blues, so its origins are open to supposition. Most experts agree that it emanates from African traditions brought over with slaves, which evolved into spirituals and field hollers and were then spliced with European classical, Tin Pan Alley pop, white country music and other forms. Some researchers claim that actual blues did not develop until the first generation of freeborn blacks exercised their mobility -- around the 1890s. Blues, they say, was rebel music, performed from an individual's point of view, rather than as a collective musical expression of slaves.