New World a-Coming, Ch. 38
Mississippi Stokes
b Issaquena County, Mississippi 1919; Mixed Choctaw-French Creole-English ethnicity
Family story has him related to “Daniel Stallings” of the Elizabethan Jamestown settlement in Virginia’s early colonial period, but the line was lost when the settlement failed. He may have been the offspring of a major banking and cotton-farming family in North Mississippi, though his “Stokes” surname, primarily associated with African-American sharecroppers, is probably a pseudonym and thus obscures the historical record.
He was powerfully attached to trains; after 1929 there are multiple references in the Stallings Family letters to “young Steven” having run away by hopping freight trains; in the ‘30s, he appears to have visited, through this means, Dallas, San Antonio, San Francisco, Denver and Oklahoma City.1
His love for trains and of the roaming life may have originated in his childhood experience on subsistence farms in north Mississippi. He later said ,“I done my share a sharecroppin. I decided I’d ruther drink whiskey an set down ta work.”
While still living in the Hill Country as a teen, he learned harmonica and guitar licks from Mississippi Fred McDowell (b1904), from whom Stokes got his monicker; the panpipes called “quills” from Henry Thomas (recorded 1920); and the fife from Otha Turner (b1909), patriarch of a family of fife & drum musicians whose repertoire reached back before the American Civil War. This cross-racial access between older black and younger white blues players was a characteristic of the north Mississippi Hill Country context, and differed significantly from that of the highly-segregated turpentine camps, cotton plantations, and penal farms of the Delta and south Mississippi. The Hill Country was much more heavily populated by small, family-run subsistence farms, where before the Civil War there might have been only one or two slaves on a homestead. The result was that, during and after Reconstruction, black-white shared work and musical exchange continued.
Of the juke joints, picnics, and fish fries he played as a “lead boy” and second guitarist for older black musicians, while reminiscing years later with Muddy Waters, Stokes said:
“Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.”
He heard Huddie Ledbetter, “Lead Belly,” busking outside the Harlem Theater in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood in 1937, and the Texas songster’s booming voice and 12-string guitar became a powerful influence. Lead Belly’s “Take a Whiff on Me”, which references Deep Eullum in its lyrics about cocaine, became part of Stokes’s own repertoire, though “Mississippi” later said “Lead Belly had a way of gettin inta things. He could git out agin—but I didn wanta get inta them in the first place!”2
Part of Stokes’s aversion to the southern parts of the Delta may be a reflection of not only racial discomfort but also personal trauma: he appears to have been in Greenville MS, August 15, 1938, on the night that the seminal bluesman Robert Johnson was poisoned in a juke joint: an anguished note found in his guitar case decades later, crawled on the back of a bar napkin, reads
I seen it—I seen her hand him the sekund botle—but I dint think nothin iv it—the wimminz allus loved Robert. I uz talkin to the furriner wit that crazy long-necked tater-bug mandlin & we wuz drinkin a bucket a beer. I didn’t think nothin of it, not til Robt tuk sick. An by then it uz too late.
In 1940 he was busking in New Orleans: there is a series of photo-booth images of “Steve” and a succession of fashionably-dressed young women from May of that year. May have met Rashka Boenavida during this period (she was 14, and playing in the Second Line with street bands while washing dishes on Royal Street) but there is no confirmation of that meeting.
In March 1941, perhaps anticipating the long arm of the Selective Service (e.g., Draft Board), he shipped out with the US Merchant Marine, at the opening of F.D.R.’s “Lend-Lease” program which sent billions of dollars worth of materiél to England, France, and those European nations who resisted Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland. Claimed to have hated the sea (“I uz a Hill Country boy. Don want nothin ta do wit no ocean”) but a virtuoso engineer: he spent much of his time below-decks greasing engines, and during the July1943 voyage that jumped-off to Operation Husky (the invasion of Sicily), he spent off-duty shifts lovingly rebuilding the engine of a particular, brand-new 1943 Willys Jeep. This vehicle disappeared from the ship’s manifest upon landing at Palermo—it was later claimed to have been requisitioned by and assigned to the legendary combat cartoonist Bill Mauldin—and its eventual point of arrival is unknown; however, a supercharged vintage Jeep was part of the BNRO’s motor pool in the late ‘50s, and in 1959 Žaklin Paulu used the same vehicle to drive Yezget-Bey non-stop from Ballyizget to Prague in the Bassandan monsoon, in one night, on an occasion when Madame Szabo, Részeg Vagyok, and their offspring, after a visit to Madame’s Roma relatives, had been detained by the Státní bezpečnost (Secret Police) for “irregularities” in their papers.
Stokes also played on Merchant Marine ships with Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie in 1944; of him, Guthrie (d1966) said “Mississippi Steve was the blackest white man I ever did see, and I seen a few. If you couldn’ta seen him, ya wouldn’ta knowed.” After the War, Stokes appears to have returned to his wandering ways: he met Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in Denver Colorado in 1948, during one of the extended road trips that Kerouac later thinly fictionalized in On the Road. He was present in the Sun Records studio in 1950 as a tape operator and second engineer when Chester Arthur Burnett, “The Howlin’ Wolf,” laid down the tracks that later led the great American producer and music impresario Sam Phillips to say “This is where the soul of man never dies.”
By this period of 1949-50—still only in his mid-30s—he was already regarded as something of a sage by younger musicians. He played some gigs in the tough black clubs of West Memphis (Arkansas). Yet the rootlessness and sense of adventure from the War was obviously still with him: in summer 1952, he abruptly boarded a coal barge in Memphis, telling the bandleader Phineas Newborn Senior “There’s somethin’ callin’ me. And it’s back East.”
“Way back East.”
He has a brief cameo in the highly evocative Riding the Rails documentary produced in 1997 by WGBH Boston (USA): interviewed in the Ballyizget railway yards in his mid-70s, he is visibly energized and engaged by the sight of the antiquated diesel engines and open boxcars of the Xblt-Bassanda line, and clearly considers one more attempt at hopping a freight.
Ledbetter was twice arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for manslaughter, but sang his way into a pardon both times.