Cotton Belt Notebook

Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Highway 61 crosses 49 and Robert Johnson met the Devil, who taught him the secret of the blues. Out of the blues came Elvis, rock and roll, most of today’s popular music. My wife Linda was born here when Clarksdale was ‘the golden buckle of the Cotton Belt’. At the height of its prosperity the Delta was a magnet for both capital and labour. The labour had names like Muddy Waters, Son House, John Lee Hooker. They created the Delta blues and took it on the train up to Memphis and Chicago with the cotton. When I first came here, the picked cotton was so thick on roads and embankments it looked like snow in summertime.

Now we’re shocked to see it all gone. Clarksdale looks abandoned, like a city threatened by Isis, her shops boarded up, streets deserted, lovely old southern houses derelict, burned out, empty. Crime in Memphis is dropping but there’s still little to attract Clarksdale’s largely black, unskilled population. Morgan Freeman’s here sometimes. He owns a restaurant and a blues club. There’s a superb Blues Museum in the restored depot where Linda’s grandfather was stationmaster. Those and a couple of T-shirt shops are among the few viable enterprises we see.

We came on serious business. A family grave has vanished. Our photographs prove Linda’s grandfather was buried, as we remember, in a matching grave next to his wife. There is no trace of his headstone. What happened? There’s no sexton. It’s impossible to discover anything by phone. Well-trained androids give you the runaround. Clarksdale’s graveyards were recently privatised, sold to a corporation. Now no call is returned. A beloved relative has no memorial. City and church are no longer responsible. Nothing is sacred.