We pick a solid, thickly painted door, which gives after I push against it, and it opens up to the sweet, acrid smell of a woodstove, a smoky array of blue and green lights dangling from an overhead pipe, and, atop a stage in the corner, a sixty-year-old man in a two-piece suit and brown patent-leather shoes-Johnnie Billington playing electric guitar. Main Street is thrumming-a heavy, amplified bass coming from behind a number of boarded-up store-fronts. And for half an hour we’ve been on county highways, all straight lines and right angles, cutting through plowed fields of cotton and soybean, seeing no other vehicles, no people, no lights except the distant dull blue of a farmhouse television, and then this explosion of busyness, in this place near no place, an embellished dot on a road map.
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Our drive began in Clarksdale, near the birthplace of Muddy Waters, and continued through the very crossroads where Robert Johnson, seventy-two years ago, was supposed to have done his legendary transaction with the Devil, exchanging his soul for a satanic facility on guitar. It’s Saturday night, and we’re in the heart of the heart of the Delta, the homeland of the blues. What a thing.” Photograph by Martin Schoeller. Lucinda Williams, in her home in Nashville. The town seems to be deadly desolate, and yet, weirdly, it is also busy with people. As we pull in, flames leap out from a corner, the only light on a street without street lights: it’s a barbecue, the pit constructed from fallen loose bricks, right out on the sidewalk.
#JESUS KEEP ME NEAR THE CROSS FRANK WILLIAMS CRACK#
(The “x” in Rexall has broken off.) The feeling of the place is of impoverished improvisation, variations on a squatter’s theme, and Lambert’s empty buildings have been taken up by anyone who has the know-how to crack open a padlocked door and get the electricity turned on. Now they’re home to whomever, whatever, anybody, nobody. One of these would have housed the barbershop, or the bank, or the post office. The town center consists of two rows of Main Street-like buildings, vaguely Victorian in design, relics of nineteenth-century antebellum cotton commerce, almost all of them abandoned. The railway station-stripped down and operated in an only-one-man-needs-to-run-it kind of way-is still functioning as an agricultural freight stop, more or less as it always has, but it seems to be the exception.
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It’s a damp Delta night in January, and we’ve pulled into Lambert, in Quitman County, Mississippi, at one time a modestly prosperous cotton town, now reduced to a rather curious thing.