Photos taken in 1977 in Wise Fools Blues Bar, Chicago – © W. Brett McKenzie

I began this trip without a theme other than it was a voyage to my future life. I knew leaving the Northeast would mean traveling well-trodden paths. South and west was new, undiscovered country. That meant west of the Alleghenies and south of Kentucky, excepting a strip of border lands with Tennessee, but I no reason to travel there.

I had felt fully gone after spending a few days in Watts Bar, Tennessee with Navy Alumni. A camper I’d met earlier in the Blue Ridge, a local from Watts Bar, had warned me, “There ain’t nothing in Watts Bar.” I would agree, except for the surprise of a once-a-month siren test for the nuclear plant up the waterway.

Scottsboro, Shiloh Battlefield, the National Civil Rights Museum, Chucalissa Indian Mounds and three days in Memphis opened a new world. Headed further south. New lands. Clarksdale Blues Museum had a strong recommendation from graduate students at the University of Memphis, along with a lunch stop at the Dutch Oven. 

Walking into the Blues Museum, I was again treading old ground but territory long before the Navy, marriage, or graduate school and my professorship. In the interlude between high school and enlisting in the Navy, I roomed, more like cohoused, with a circle of artists and students at the University of Pittsburgh. Those were the days of the five-, six-, even nine-year bachelor’s degrees, when classes were cheap and you could take one here or there just to see what it offered. 

Our group included: Michael, the oldest, from the far West, finishing his PhD in Art History; Atris, a hoped-to-be published writer in the Gravities Rainbow way, who took his name from the inspection tag in a pair of jeans he had bought; Bill, our resident drug experimenter who could drink, drop pills, huff nitrous oxide, smoke more hash, and still be coherent; and our leader, Gilbert, the scion of a real estate family who owned the apartment building with the three apartments we used. One, Gilbert had as his own and was also our clubhouse. We shared the other two. 

Gilbert, among many passions, loved the blues. And Gilbert had a family allowance to resource his passion. There was not one, not two, but the whole catalog of Robert Johnson albums. This was long before the 1990 Columbia issue of The Complete Recordings, the movies and other cultural moments that made Johnson more of a household name. 

Walking through the museum, I saw the album covers from Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf that I had come to know so well. I can hear Gilbert’s voice. Remember his generosity, not just with his welcome of housing, but also his free spirit to share his knowledge and his passions with others. Listening sessions were serious. Music was never background or wallpaper.

I carried Gilbert to Chicago with me. Haunting Wise Fools blues bar long before I knew that it was a central location for blues in Chicago. Gilbert died in his mid-fifties. Were magnolias in season, I would toss a blossom into the mighty Mississippi and wish him well in the next world.