In Clarksdale, Mississippi, located at 0 Blues Alley (or 387 Delta Ave), is a juke joint — Ground Zero — repurposed but unremodeled, of exposed weather brickwork, corrugated sheet metal awnings over a covered patio, replete with neon signage, mismatched chairs and barstools, newspapers plastered to the walls recalling generations of singers and songwriters, guitars hanging like portraits, serving fried green tomatoes and catfish BLTs where, any given day, you may find a gentle older local with a golden voice, one Morgan Freeman, listening to the blues.
Ground Zero was established in 2001, recycling the bones of the Delta Grocery and Cotton Co., which had fed and clothed the locals for about seven decades before shuttering, condemning and remaining in a state of vacant disrepair for 30 years. It was bought by Freeman, former Clarksdale mayor Bill Luckett, and blues tourism pioneer Howard Stovall to reinvigorate Mississippi’s dense history of blues music, reigniting a torch that had been carried by a handful of institutions that suffered an erosion brought on by time, economic downfall and apathy (the defunct Margaret’s Blue Diamond Lounge is mentioned in Ground Zero’s history page as is, notably, Red’s, Mississippi's very own Alexandrian library of blues culture that lost its namesake and keeper of flame Red Paden in 2023). Alumni of its humble stage include such luminaries as ‘Kingfish’ Ingram and Charlie Musselwhite, as well as tangential transients like Willie Nelson and Robert Plant.
Ground Zero’s own name came from its proximity to Dockery Farms, about 45 minutes away if you take Delta Ave to the US-49W highway onto Dr. Martin Luther King Junior Drive, an old cotton plantation and Sawmill along the Sunflower River. It is here, on its emerald lawn beneath a slackened power line, in timber and fluted tin works established from scratch by Will Dockery, a fair man by all accounts, aged grey and rusted years over, that they say the blues was born. It is where Charlie Patton, the father of the Delta Blues and first to establish the strain on wax, moved with his family in 1897, living there 30 years and establishing a true American art form until his lustfulness wrought expulsion. It became a destination for touring bluesists to sharpen their teeth, providing a roof for giants like Son House, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Brown to excorise demons, where a harmonica and slide guitar could suitably replace the sacred capacity of the rosary and holy water. It is, colloquially (and according to the heritage Mississippi Blues Trail signage out front of the property), the “Birthplace of the Blues.” So they say.
The blues, maybe more than any popular genre before or since, is impregnably tied to mythmaking. Spawned only a couple of generations removed from the emancipation of American slaves, the horrors of indentured enslavement were from its roots inextricably entangled with the hellish conditions that survived and retained in collective memory. The genesis of many a great form can be traced back to the catharsis of dissociation, and the blues, especially the blues’ fabric is made of interwoven fact and folklore.
Perhaps the most important lore associated with the blues is that of the legendary Robert Johnson, who, allegedly, full of promise and tremendous yearning to become the greatest blues musician there ever was to be, took his guitar to the crossroads down the dusty gravel thoroughfare at midnight for it to be tuned by an enormous cloven figure. This mephistophelian character, horned and reeking of brimstone and damnation, so it is said, tuned the guitar and noodled for a moment that spanned the history of mankind’s duel with the forces of sin, imbuing it with the power to articulate the generational trauma of servitude and brutality, stolen histories and cultural erasure — the audacity of slavery — unto Johnson, in exchange for his soul.
That same myth is also attributed to one Tommy Johnson (of no relation to Robert) for his own preternatural mastery of the blues. So the veracity of the claim, not to be entirely discounted, seems dubious. Other accounts, potentially but not necessarily more accurate accounts, were reconstructed by blues historians to trace Robert Johnson’s life, no small task as his short life was poorly documented and disparately attributed to various names. Johnson’s first ten years were divided amongst Hazlehurst, Mississippi and Memphis, and Crittenden County, Arkansas, circling back to Miss. with his mother, who remarried and changed Robert’s name. Then across the Delta to the town of Commerce, where Robbert became Little Robert Dusty, then eventually Robert Spencer, now in Lucas, Ark., where he retook his biological name and locked in the amorphous identity we’ve come to recognize as Robert Johnson. At 19, Johnson married 14-year-old Virginia Travis, who soon thereafter died in childbirth, which struck Robert like a bolt of seraphic retribution for his already burgeoning secular musical talents, wringing from him ties to any native land and ultimately pushing him towards a life of nomadic blues musicianship.
In his sojourns across the mostly southern states (but also some northern metropolises and even parts of Canada), he bumped elbows with Son House, Johnny Shines, Henry Townsend and Robert Lockwood Jr., amassing a patina of folklore around his name, all the while stunning adherents to the Delta style with his mystical talents and causing anxiety to the pious about how he so quickly became a maestro. Though tales surrounding his name still overshadow eyewitness reports (most of which are either lost or inconsistent), his reputation is generally considered that of a well-mannered gentleman who loved whiskey and women nearly as much as his music and the freedom of the road. He was known to disappear for weeks at a time, vanishing from the joints and street corners where he would play for cash. His original compositions were intricate and not for the faint of heart, and so, benevolently, he played to his crowds, opting for popular covers over his own material. His entire recorded catalogue consists of only 29 songs, recorded between November 23, 1936 and June 20, 1937. There exist less than five verified photographs of Johnson. Even to this day, despite being a focal point of American music's cornerstone, his cause of death remains unknown. Really, the only concrete evidence of Johnson’s existence is the influence of his (and Patten, Wolf, House et al.) music, which he delivered by the tread of his soles to the world.
Which brings us back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, one of the only documented residences of Johnson. Of the 200 Mississippi Blues Trail designations, 10 reside in Clarksdale. Some go back over a century, while some, like the Delta Blues Museum, have more recently been founded to carry on the Delta’s minted musical history. There you can find an entire wing dedicated to Muddy Waters, celebrations of Big Mama Thornton or B.B. King, a history of Clarksdale’s blue romance, a few of John Lee Hooker’s guitars and, any given day, Morgan Freeman, humming the blues. The Museum sits at 1 Blues Alley. And around the corner, thrumming with power cords and the auditory glint of harmonica, sits Ground Zero.