Literature

If you don’t know a lot about blues music and the Delta musicians who birthed it, lived it and kept it alive - in spite of the more popular modern American musical genres spawned from it - then “Hidden History” can rectify that in as little as 119 pages of easy-to-understand text.

Roger Stolle, a transplanted Mississippian, and owner of Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art in Clarksdale, has penned a short, well-articulated portrayal of the blues and the Delta musicians for whom it was and still is a way of life.

The foreword, preface, and introduction alone are worth picking up a copy at Stolle’s store in downtown Clarksdale, or ordering via his website: www.cathead.biz. Stolle begins by discussing how the death of Elvis Presley dramatically changed the life of a 10-year old Ohio boy who grew up in a home with little music.

The ready availability of Elvis’s music after his death in 1977 fueled Stolle’s interest. He quickly discovered Elvis’s musical roots and his ties to Mississippi and the blues. Stolle recounts his first trip to Mississippi, years after The King’s death to hear bluesman Junior Kimbrough play in his juke joint near Holly Springs.

Stolle learned many lessons the first night he heard blues played in Mississippi. He writes, “The main one I took home was that you can take the blues out of Mississippi, but you can’t make it feel the same.”

Six years later, Stolle left corporate America behind and “charted a course for a fabled land.” Landing in Clarksdale, his mission was to assist “the last generation of cotton-farming, mule-driving, juke joint-playing bluesmen deeply inhale the final breath of this amazing tradition we call Delta blues.”

Stolle is well known around the Delta for his organizational and promotional skills on behalf of the old school, real-deal, been-there, done-that blues musicians who are now too quickly passing on.

“Blues is a genre now,” Stole writes. “It used to be a music and a culture.” He quotes prominent blues historian William Ferris: “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” How true.

Stolle’s business acumen, encyclopedic knowledge of the blues and tender heart are well displayed throughout the book. He not only wants blues to survive in the rawest and purest form possible, but he desires that the producers and artists be able to receive ample remuneration and recognition for their musical and cultural accomplishments.