Blind Joe Biscuit is an old bluesman, real old. He was born at the turn of the 20th century in Mississippi, sometime between 1892 and 1901, he doesn't really know. He's lived the life of a penniless sharecropper on the Stovall Plantation, living his whole life in a one room shack. His childhood was days spent carrying water to his family in the fields, and Sunday was church. Sometimes there was a day in school, but Joe never did learn his letters. In his teens, he fell in love with music, playing at the Saturday night fish fries. Blowin' on jugs, banging on washboards, hollerin' and whoopin' it up. Obviously, Joe had more passion and enthusiasm than ability.

Joe was raised on a musical cusp, coming of age at the time the blues was forming as a genre. The catalyst had been the Reconstruction, when his people were freed from their chains and became unmoored, searching for their place in a society which had previously defined them as property. They took voice in a mix of the Hillbilly ballad traditions and jigs (which had come down from the Mountain and into the Delta) with the existing dominant form in black music— string bands, led by violins and banjos, with mandolins and guitars playing two-chord breakdowns. The blues, born from the frustration of freedom, began taking shape. Blues came from hardship and became nothing less than a tool for survival. Like gospel music, blues offered release and relief. It commands the present moment, demanding that you forget the toil of your past, forget the woes ahead, that you get into this song and this feeling right now and give yourself over entirely to it.

Life in Stovall was slow: two mules to a wagon, four mules to a plow. That slow and steady turning of the wheels set the rhythm for the music, the pace for life. Kids on the farm didn't have much but each other to play with, or maybe a barrel hoop and a stick. One year, his family got a radio. There was so much he could hear on it. Country-inflected white music; the Grand Ole Opry was popular. Joe dreamed of playin' on stage for everyone to hear. The Shadow. The Avenger. Joe dreamed of fighting for truth and justice with supernatural powers, righting wrongs and doing good. News from around the country and across the ocean. Joe dreamed of being far away from the dirt and dust and mud and toil of the Stovall Plantation.

Life in Stovall was fast: playin' at sex at a young age. Chewin' tobacco until your teeth rotted out yo' head. Drinkin' moonshine from the bathtub still. Stuff tasted like turpentine, but you weren't drinking it for the flavor, you're drinking it to drown the pain. The pain in your back. In your arms. In your heart.

It was sometime during the Depression ('course, when you ain't got nothin' ain't much of a Depression, just another cotton pickin' day...) that he met the Man at the Crossroads. The Man offered Joe what he desired most... for a price. The Man wanted Joe's soul at first, but he weren't ready to part with that. Joe wanted to keep his soul so he could at least have some peace and rest in Heaven with the Lord, so the Man settled for Joe's eyes. Joe traded his eyesight for the ability to play a mean guitar and harmonica and belt out a heartfelt tune. Joe now had the talent to match his passion, and he was now able to play The Blues. Not just the blues, but The Blues.

Blind Joe became a fixture in the church bands (churches in the Delta are thick as flies) and in some of the Delta's seedier honkey tonks, and he became somewhat of a local legend. He had finally found his Voice, and had the ability to play like he always dreamed. He longed to leave the plantation and head to Kansas City or Nashville or Austin and get himself one of them big time record contracts. However, due to his blindness, he needed to stay near his family, and his family had to stay on the land, where they'd always been...

Seems the Man at the Crossroads had given Joe the laugh. He had given Joe the voice and gift of music, but had removed any chance he had of finding a broader audience. 'Maybe,' Joe thought, 'I shoulda paid in full! Maybe I shoulda just given the Man my soul. I ain't usin' it right now, after all!'

Sometime after the Second World War, some white boy showed up at his shack. Said he was collecting negro folk music for the Library of Congress in Washington, and that everyone in Stovall had pointed him in Joe's direction. Joe agreed to play for him. Finally, people outside of the Delta would be able to hear him play. Maybe even President Eisenhower would hear him play! That day, Joe put on one of the best performances of his life, playing like his life depended on it, pouring his heart and soul into every verse and chord. And the boy's tin can recorded it all. Strangest thing though, after that boy made some records of his music and had gone on his way, Blind Joe Biscuit lost his talent. He could still play competently, he still had a strong voice and could turn a colorful phrase... it was that his music lacked... passion. And The Blues requires passion; be it abandon or anger, heartbreak and soulache. Somehow, that damn white boy had stolen Joe's musical soul! He was now nothin' but a simple dime-a-dozen old bluesman! Even worse, a few years later, Joe's hearing his music bein' played on the radio by white boys from England! Boys with names like Clapton, Mayall and Page!

So, for those of you keeping score, the Honkey Boss Man had stole not only the fruits of his people's labor, their dignity, and their hope, now they stole his people's music and turned it into their own!

Joe fell into a Real Depression this time, a black hole that he filled first with whiskey, rye, and gin, and later with reefer. And contrary to what you're told about not finding salvation at the ass-end of a bottle, the booze and leaf helped. Blind Joe began to have visions, see things as they really were. And he found he could make changes here and there sometimes; if he was lit enough and believed enough that what he was imagining were true.

'Course all this stewing in his own juice kind of preserved him. Joe has that peculiar timeless quality-- with his white hair, milky white eyes, craggy face and stubbly chin, body stooped and yet whipcord strong from years of back breaking labor in the fields; he looks as though he could be aged anywhere between fifty and seventy. Blind Joe Biscuit, now beginning his second century, is still going strong. And he's made a decision. He's going to spend the twilight of his years getting the hell out of the Delta. Hitting the road with his trusty old hound dog Scraps to hopefully find the white boy who stole The Blues. Joe figures if he breaks the vinyl platters that boy from Washington carved that fateful day fifty some-odd years ago, maybe he will free his mojo and get it working for him again. Maybe he can even help weaken The Man's grip on America, help liberate the people's mojo... give them back the lives they slowly and quietly lost to the humdrum and workaday toil without ever realizing it.

Joe hopes to also run into the Man at the Crossroads again some midnight somewhere. He'd like to offer him his soul this time, see what kind of Real Power he can get for it if he makes his mark on one of the Man's contracts... Armed with Real Power, Joe could hopefully Stick It To The Man, and Oh Lord, that would be sweet.

Blind Joe did meet TheMan one last time, and perhaps found a bit of that redemption before he died. He was buried at a CrossRoads turned into a Rotary as part of the summoning ritual for TheMan.

See Also

• DelilahWest

Links

• "The Long Road's Lament": http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UnknownUSA/message/285