Schoolboy Blues

In 1972 my dad got stationed in Blytheville, Arkansas at the end of his 20 year Air Force career. I had dropped out in my junior year of high school and hitchhiked and wandered around for a year or so. I’d returned home, the prodigal son, and was living with my parents again, so I ended up going with them. When I got there I discovered that I only had to have 16 credits to graduate, and since I already had 14 from Texas, I decided to go back to school and get my diploma.

While I was at Gosnell high school (the Air Force base was in Gosnell, Arkansas, just outside of Blytheville) I met a couple of other like-minded stoner musicians and we started a garage band. As fate would have it, the bass player, a guy whose parents had actually named him "Su", got caught smoking pot or something equally heinous, and was sent away to a free school. You may remember free schools from the film “Billy Jack”.  This one was just outside of Crystal Springs, Mississippi and I think it was named Caritas Community. Anyway, he was there about six months and had taken his Kustom bass amp with him. 

When he returned, he'd left the amp down there, so one day we decided it would be a good idea to drive down there and get it so that we could start playing gigs. Being the brilliant thinker that I was, I decided it would also be a good idea to take a half pound of pot with us, bagged up in lids, to unload to the kids at the school. So we loaded up and took off one evening down Highway 61, which runs through Blytheville. 
A few miles south of Jackson, Mississippi we picked up a hitchhiker whose dad was the steel guitar player for Dave Dudley, the guy who did all of those truck driving songs in the 60s and 70s. Being good hippie drug brothers, we told him if he could ride with us down to pick up the amp we would keep him stoned and give him a ride back up towards Tennessee, as he was headed to Nashville to see his family. He agreed and we went on down to the free school and picked up the amp, but couldn’t sell any of the pot because the kids were all broke. As we were leaving, a couple of the younger kids tried to sneak out in our van but we caught them and made them get out. A couple of the counselors saw this and after we left called the sheriff and reported that we may have stowaways. We didn't get more than a couple of miles down the road before we were pulled over by the Copiah County Sheriffs deputies, immediately searched, and the entire van dismantled until they found the pot in the breather under the engine cowling.

I ended up spending a few weeks in the Copiah County Jail in Hazlehurst, Mississippi.

The sheriff’s name was Earl Guess, a former pro wrestler, who used to come to our cell on a regular basis and inform us that we were all headed to Parchman for a long stay. I have a lot of weird, mixed memories from my jail stay in Mississippi. Too many to write down here, but they eventually released us one at a time, with fines and lectures, they even kept the guitar player's van. (Andre' if you ever read this, contact me and I'll finally pay you that money I owe you) Finally the last two remaining jailbirds were Su, the bass player, and me.

 My dad, having been in regular contact with the sheriff since our arrest, finally made arrangements to come and pick us up and made the drive down from Blytheville. I ended up getting marched to the barber shop on the square in handcuffs, having my long hair buzzed off, and paying a $100 fine (under the table I'm sure) to the sheriff before we were released.

Needless to say it was a long, mostly silent, but grateful trip home with my dad that day. 

Fast forward to last year. 

I had a day off in Jackson, Mississippi, so I decided to rent a car and drive down to Hazlehurst and quite literally revisit the scene of the crime. 

When I did the time in the Copiah County I was already very aware of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Son House, and was a dedicated student of the Delta blues so it was not lost on me that we had been arrested in the area that Robert Johnson was born in and that we were doing time on Highway 61. But, much like Lubbock, Texas' relationship with Buddy Holly until the past decade or so, the good people around there had no interest in the rich musical history of the area. In fact, the jail was still segregated into upstairs (black) and downstairs (white) and if you opened your mouth wrong to one of the deputies on the way "upstairs", they bounced your head off of every step on the way up and the way down. I saw firsthand the results of horrible, racist police beatings while I was in there.

As I drove into Hazlehurst that day, I was greeted by signs touting the “Robert Johnson Blues Museum" and had to smile, realizing that somebody had probably figured out there might be some cash to be made embracing these old dead guys and their devil music.

So I stopped in the museum and talked to the proprietor for a while and told him about my jail experience in Hazlehurst. He said I was not the first guy who'd who came in with that type story and suggested I go over to the jail and read the plaque on the median in front of it.

So I drove over to the jail. It looked exactly the same. I drove around it a couple of times reliving memories of my time spent there, and when I parked in front of it I saw the plaque he was talking about about 15 yards to my left. 

Things change. 

Maybe not as much as we'd like, but they change...