Leavin' Trunk Blues Read Online Free PDF

she’d found Nick in bed with that lanky blonde two years ago. Nick remembered the vacant look on her face as she rolled back his warehouse door. She saw a strange woman sitting in her robe and drinking out of her favorite mug.
    Kate had shot him a look that wasn’t exactly hatred, just a drained expression of absolute disappointment. She said in an even, dead-sure tone, “You’re such an ass.”
    But there were other memories. Better memories. Nick could still feel the heat of her dark skin when they made love in his warehouse. Aaron Neville on the stereo. Both of them loaded with Dixies, whiskey, and blues. The best time he’d ever had.
    Maybe JoJo was right. Maybe this whole trip was about her.
    Some kind of masochism to see if she would kick him in the nuts this time. But she was worth it. If only he could talk to her for a moment, he’d feel better. He was never much for closure. In fact, he thought the whole concept was bullshit. Endings are seldom neat. They’re sometimes jagged and ugly. But he needed something … another screw you. Another chance.
    Maybe he was just bringing hope with him, a dream of something that could never happen. Nick sipped the whiskey again and stared back at the blues highway and laughed at his situation. He felt New Orleans melt away in the flickering light, the history roll by, and the endless black night reconnect to a past that once showed hope to an entire generation. The train rolled, bumped, and vibrated his back. Thinking about the old travelers made him feel good.
    Nick could imagine them now as he turned out his overhead light and pulled down his narrow bed. He could almost smell the migrants loaded with shoe boxes full of fried chicken and biscuits staring at the same Mississippi night. There were stories of women kissing the floor of the railcar as they crossed over the Mason Dixon line at Cairo, Illinois. Trading what was familiar for what could be.
    The journey of the blues started somewhere outside, somewhere in a heated evening about a century ago. The blues was born in the rich, brown earth of the Delta, a region stretching two hundred miles from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis to the edge of Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was once a frontier of mean swamps with bears and water moccasins, a land broken in by blacks who worked from sunup to sundown in levee and prison camps. Sometimes at gunpoint.
    From that soul-breaking work came the blues. Like their African forefathers, they used songs to make the work pass— sometimes alone, others in unison—as they picked cotton, unloaded steamship cargos, or beat their tools into the rich earth. Soon, they coupled the hollers with guitars and harmonicas.
    The music worked its way into backwood shacks where couples danced, bathed in sweat, as the music brought back the spirit. The early players thumped drumbeats on the buckled, wooden floors, making the guitar talk back to them. The instruments just an intimate extension of the players’ voices.
    Blues became a core of Delta life and of the southern black community.
    And in the late thirties and forties, blues followed that community. About five million blacks left the south between World War II and 1970 for northern cities in a shift that changed the complexion of America. It used to cost about twelve bucks for a ticket from Clarksdale to Chicago on the Illinois Central—about a week’s pay for most. Some families, like Old World immigrants, had to split up. They would send money home to bring everyone over to the other side.
    In 1943, Muddy Waters caught a train to Chicago with nothing but a yearning soul, a single change of clothes, and his old Silvertone guitar. He knew fame was just a trip away.
    Nick believed that’s when the blues really left the Delta and started a new life in the Windy City. Muddy would help mold that country sound into a tightly backed band with piano, drums, bass, and harmonica. The future of the blues arrived with Muddy at the Twelfth Street