Slices of lives in Mississippi

Audio 29:00

Welcome to Mississippi.

Philippe Pretet

By: Joe Farmer Follow

33 min

The sociologist Éric Doidy, passionate about blues, immersed himself in the American southern heritage by meeting, over the years, many musicians whose daily lives espouse the history of the black community in Mississippi.

From John Lee Hooker to BB King, he let them speak and thus give a very vivid reading of the condition of African-American citizens at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Not all of them have acquired the notoriety to which they undoubtedly aspired, but their words and their artistic investment are nonetheless valuable.

Publicity

Junior Kimbrough, RL Burnside, T-Model Ford are not names known to the general public, their epic however deserves our keen interest.

 (Le Mot and Le Reste editions) is a dense work punctuated by rough but authentic accounts.

Whether you are in Clarksdale, Holly Springs, Greenville, Indianola, Oxford or Jackson, a special atmosphere reigns in Mississippi.

This state, long segregationist, is unable to shed its social, violent and unequal past.

During his meetings, at the turn of the 2000s, with the actors of the American southern heritage, Eric Doidy felt this harshness which seems never to have softened over the decades.

The portraits he sketches of all these brave bluesmen reflect this painful centuries-old African-American destiny.

Faced with these witnesses and actors of rural America, he perceived mistrust, mistrust, but also generous simplicity during ultimately warm exchanges.

Betonia (Mississippi).

Philippe Pretet

Going Down South

 is also an inventory of the still palpable divide between North and South, between towns and countryside, between whites and blacks.

Racism has not disappeared in the United States and the many words collected for this thick book express in half words this heavy heritage and this flagrant injustice.

Time has stood still in Mississippi.

The sounds, the smells, the colors, instantly bring us back to the ancestral African source, to the dark hours of slavery, to the slow rhythm of toil in the cotton fields.

A European passing through this region loses his bearings and must learn to deal with the habits, moods, rites and codes of the local population.

Eric Doidy was only 23 years old when he began this pilgrimage to the roots of the blues.

His meetings, sometimes improvised, taught him patience and adaptation.

He also became a fine listener of the artisanal repertoire of the Deep South.

To hear the tone of these valiant virtuosos is also to know how to detect the original African musicality.

The transatlantic link is solid and undeniable.

The Ground Zero Club in Clarksdale.

Philippe Pretet

During this musical journey, Eric Doidy heard names, experienced the expressive power of legends of yesteryear, conversed with their contemporaries and their heirs.

And yet, many of them have enjoyed only modest notoriety.

Who remembers Big Jack Johnson or Big George Brock today?

 therefore celebrates these endearing characters whose role in American popular culture is underestimated.

Apart from a few die-hard enthusiasts like Roger Stolle, owner of a record store in Clarksdale, no one talks about the forgotten pillars of southern blues.

Eric Doidy therefore added a stone to this slow, tedious building of rehabilitation, but so useful to understand the issues of America in the 21st century, still too reluctant to honor the builders of its greatness.

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