It appeared the coronavirus would cause Clarksdale to temporarily suspend its tradition of having live blues music in town seven nights a week, 365 days a year.
That was when Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art owner Roger Stolle; Colleen Buyers from San Francisco, who had already created Clarksdale’s mobile walking tour; and local musicians took action.
Two days after the Juke Joint Festival was cancelled and COVID-19 was beginning to force blues clubs to shut down, Buyers added a link to her Shared Experiences USA webpage www.sharedexperiencesusa.com/livefromclarksdale with “Virtual” Sounds Around Town. The page lists schedules a week in advance of musicians playing in Clarksdale and links to see their performances.
Some of the musicians can be seen on the Shared Experiences USA Facebook page along with other photos promoting Clarksdale.
“We still can share Clarksdale with the world and I want to inspire them to put Clarksdale on their bucket list and come visit us when they come travel again,” Buyers said.
“I wanted to create a single place online where you can go to find where there is live music in Clarksdale all seven days of the week. So I created Live From Clarksdale. Just like the Sounds Around Town used to tell you where you could go to see music physically at various bars and restaurants on town, Live From Clarksdale now tells you where you can go online to hear live music from Clarksdale.”
Some music was not publicized for a short time, but it took place every night.
“We missed advertising or marketing three of them, but music did happen,” Stolle said. “Things were live streamed on those days.”
Some music is during the day, but most is at night.
Some of the blues musicians who have stepped up and played frequently since the coronavirus caused the clubs to close are Lucious Spiller, Mississippi Marshall and Watermelon Slim.
Bluesberry Café and Hambone Art Gallery have been the main venues.
“It depends,” Stolle said. “In some cases, it’s the musician’s living room. In other cases, it might be a venue without an audience.”
While musicians are still playing every day, they will not be making the money they once did.
“I think this can go on indefinitely,” Stolle said. “However, there is the law of diminishing returns, which basically in this case means, in the beginning, people are super excited to a musician live streaming in the midst of a crisis. But, if for example, a musician is performing, say, every day, at 5 p.m., then, generally speaking, he or she is going to make a little less every day.”
Musicians are able to receive tips through PayPal.
In the long run, Stolle believes blues musicians can benefit from being part of the “Virtual” Sounds Around Town.
“The overarching reason to be doing this in an organized marketing sort of way is that we keep Clarksdale, Miss., and our music culture in front of the world every day with the hopes that when the crisis is over, everyone will still know that we have live blues 365 days a year,” Stolle said.
Buyers said the tradition in Clarksdale was why she wanted to be part of keeping blues going every night, particularly after Red’s Blues Club, one of Clarksdale’s most known blues clubs closed.
“That was very sad, but on that day, I realized we as a community could make a difference we could come together on whether we would keep blues alive in Clarksdale seven days a week,” Buyers said. “If everybody else wanted to do that, I wanted to help make it happen.”
