Me: Honey? Can we stay in a sharecropper’s shack when
we’re up in Clarksdale next month?
Husband (looking up over his book): Does it have air
conditioning?
Me: Yes, I see a window box a/c unit in the picture.
Husband: OK, if it will make you happy.
And that is how we came to
spend two nights in a shotgun-style shack with a tin roof and Mississippi
cypress walls on the Hopson Plantation just 3 miles east of Clarksdale, MS. And
next to the plush Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, it was Jerry’s favorite stay of
the trip.
The Shack Up Inn developed over the past 15 years on the Hopson
Plantation in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, the cradle of Blues music.
Located just 3 miles east of Clarksdale, MS, there are over 30 “units” sprawled
in a ramshackle fashion. They have been modified just enough so as to provide
the modern amenities of an indoor bathroom and shower, heat and air
conditioning, and coffeemaker/fridge/microwave and sink.
A visitor can stay in a former sharecropper shack, seed house, old
tractor shed or in one of the newly created "bins" in the old cotton
gin.
We stayed in the two-room Pinetop Perkins shack, named in honor of
the legendary Blues pianist of the same name. A tall upright piano stood in the
corner of the front room with a life sized mural of Pinetop smiling from the
opposite wall. There were “dishtowel” curtains and old Mississippi license plates nailed down over holes in the bare wood floors. There was a screened porch with
rockers for sittin' which made for a fine early evening spot to wave to our
neighbors and read in the fading light.
The Ground Zero Blues Club operates out of one half of the big old
Cotton Gin building offering smokin’ blues and zydeco several nights a week. Donuts
and coffee are available in the morning, beer and wine in the afternoon after 5
pm. The old gin has seen a lot of living and hard work in its decades of use.
Now it provides for a place to sit, play and listen to the music that grew up
out of all that living and hard work.
The complex is littered with ancient Ford and Chevy pick-up
trucks, colorful bottle trees, a windmill, silos converted to shade structures,
and even one of the first mechanized cotton-picking Int'l Harvesters.
The bottle trees (or “haint” trees for some) are common to the
south and are believed to be a tradition brought by slaves from Africa. Now used
primarily for garden decoration, the original belief was that a bottle tree
outside of a home would attract evil spirits with the sunlight shining through
the bottle. When evil spirits followed the light into the bottle, they were
trapped and could do the house no harm. Blue bottles were thought to be the
most attractive to the evil spirits.
We heard tell that when a strong wind is blowing that the
bottle trees moan and whisper with the wind. Not hard to understand how some
would believe they were filled with evil spirits. Now the colorful hand-made
trees stand on the grounds of the Shack Up Inn dedicated to honoring the hard
work and music of the Mississippi Delta, so perhaps now those bottle trees are
simply joining in to sing the Blues.
From the Shack Up Inn it is an easy 3-mile drive west on Hwy 49 to
Clarksdale's legendary juke joints and the Delta Blues Museum, Abe’s BBQ, and
the childhood home of Tennessee Williams.
More about all that in
another post.
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