“As the story goes, Robert Johnson was an aspiring guitar player — but not a very good guitar player,” said Delta historian, author and filmmaker Willy Bearden. “The other guys kind of made fun of him. He went off and no one saw him for weeks. When he showed back up, he could miraculously play guitar — he had become a spellbinding performer. Word got around that he had gone to the crossroads and sold his soul to the Devil to be able to play the guitar.”

Robert Johnson

Johnson will be one of the focal points of a “magical” tour of the Mississippi Delta that is being presented in conjunction with the wildly popular “The Delta — Everything Southern!” conference June 3 in the Rose Theatre on the U of M campus. Bearden, one of many distinguished presenters at the symposium, will lead the new two-day Delta tour June 4-5. A “Memphis Music” pre-conference tour is set for June 2. (Details for both tours are available at www.sweetmagnoliatours.com)

“The Delta holds a lot of fascination,” Bearden said. “It is made up of these two tectonic plates that are white and black culture that are constantly rubbing against each other. That kind of action, something dynamic is going to come from that. That is what you see in the Delta.

“It was the ‘last frontier’ in this part of the world,” Bearden added. “The Delta wasn’t really settled until the turn of the 20th century. Most other places had been settled for 50 years — Memphis had been here for 80 years. Until they got a railroad into the Delta and roads and the levee system to stop the flooding, it was a wilderness. There were people there, but they were mainly in little outposts on creeks and rivers.”

Blues music such as Johnson’s adds to the mystique of the Delta.

“What gets lost in the whole blues saga is that there was a lot of voodoo or black magic attached to it,” Bearden said. “Today you don’t hear a whole lot about that, but back in the ‘30s, that was certainly a part of that. Muddy Waters was singing, ‘I got my mojo working ... I have a charm that is going to help me get you.’ There was always a lot of talk about spells and potions and mojos and things like that.”

Last year’s conference sold out and is expected to do so again this year, with several big name speakers including Al Bell, this year’s recipient of the Grammy Trustee Award for lifetime contributions to the recording industry. Tony Russell, a British music historian; Ron Nurnberg, director of Teach for America’s Mississippi Delta region; Minor Buchanan, author of Holt Collier: His Life, His Roosevelt Hunts and the Origin of the Teddy Bear; U of M English professor Reginald Martin; noted food expert/chef Elizabeth Heiskell; and archaeologist Sam Brookes, who will discuss prehistoric art in Mississippi, are among other guest speakers. Musical entertainment will be provided by blues and Beale Street veteran Robert “Nighthawk” Tooms.

Bearden said the conference is looking to draw more Europeans to the event.

The tour is a fund-raiser for Friends of the University Libraries. It will travel from Memphis through Indianola and Clarksdale to Greenwood, Miss., where Johnson died. Stops include Johnson’s gravesite, the Hopson Plantation, Mound Bayou and the Dockery Plantation, considered by many to be the birthplace of the blues.

 “A lot of people haven’t gone to those little towns and haven’t felt that little magic that is there,” Bearden said. “That is why we are offering it. It will give you a good look at the Delta by people who know the Delta. It is going to be a lot of fun.”

— by Greg Russell