Exploring the birthplace of the blues

Here & Now Anytime

NPR

News

4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On a recent reporting trip, Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd and Chris Bentley stopped in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town known as the birthplace of the blues. They speak with Mayor Orlando Paden, who runs the blues club Red's, and Shelley Ritter, executive director of the Delta Blues Museum.

Then, music journalist Betto Arcos goes to Bentonia, Mississippi, to get a music and history lesson from a storied musician and owner of one of the region's remaining juke joints.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com.
0:17.0	WBWR Podcasts, Boston.
0:28.4	Once blues got out of the fields and into the nation,
0:31.0	it changed music as we know it today.
0:34.7	As Muddy Waters said, the blues had a baby, and they named it rock and roll.
0:38.8	And it all started in the Mississippi Delta.
0:50.3	It's Friday, August 8th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBOR.
0:55.9	I'm Chris Bentley.
1:00.6	Today on the show, we'll take a trip through the Mississippi Delta, the home of the blues.
1:05.8	Going down to big red, going down to big red place. Going down to Big Red play.
1:13.0	Delta Blues is often referred to as Roots music, and some of it does have a primal energy.
1:21.7	Just listen to the growl of Charlie Patton, for example.
1:25.7	But that doesn't mean it's simple or inevitable. The music's
1:30.0	origins are shrouded in mystery. People debate to this day who invented it and when. But the
1:36.7	blues is the product of an explosion of black creativity in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
1:43.4	It's gone on to influence every popular genre of music since.
1:48.6	And today, musicians like Jimmy Duck Holmes carry on that tradition from the Mississippi Delta.
1:55.0	Well, it's hard time to hear people.
1:58.0	There's be where I go.
2:00.5	Give the way they did, they give it a haunting, deep wood, jungle sound.
2:06.7	Real lonesome and real haunted.
	...

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