Devil Sent the Rain (5 page)

Sacred and Profane in Clarksdale

S
aturday afternoon at the Western Sizzlin restaurant in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Outside, just beyond the parking lot, runs Highway 61, which in Clarksdale is the strip with the fast-food places, the chain motels, the turning lanes, the mini-malls—the oasis in the desert for those passing through the Delta south toward Greenville or north toward Memphis. Inside, Reverend Willie Morganfield, trim at seventy years of age in a beige windbreaker and brown touring cap, walks past the end of the salad bar and affectionately greets a couple of waitresses, flirting politely and generating good-natured laughter.

On Sunday mornings, when Reverend Morganfield emerges from his wood-paneled basement office at the Bell Grove Baptist Church and ascends in glory to the pulpit, he gives the impression of great size, like a barrel wrapped in a bright blue double-breasted suit. Here, though, as he makes his way to the restaurant's back room, he looks compact, spry, something like a fight trainer—quick on his feet, able to notice small increments of advantage and disadvantage in a developing situation. To an outsider, his eyes present a pleasant, guarded, searching expression, as if he were waiting to be tipped the first part of a password. He is Muddy Waters's cousin.

As he settles down at a table in the Sizzlin's back room, he lights up a Virginia Slims menthol. “I don't like the members of the congregation to see me smoking that much,” he explains. “It's okay around a certain small group of them, but . . .”

The reverend is one of the best-known preachers in the Mississippi Delta. He is also a prolific recording artist with several sermons committed to record as well as a string of gospel songs (many written by him) stretching back nearly forty years. A preacher in the Mississippi Delta has a peculiar problem, to this day, because he has to coexist with a secular tradition—the blues—as profound as any sacred tradition. The blues offers an implicit, comprehensive, existential philosophy that operates outside the framework of Christian belief, yet which is haunted by it just the same; they are the Delta's spiritual poles—one sacred and the other profane—and I am here to ask Muddy Waters's cousin his thoughts about them.

As a preacher, Reverend Morganfield's technique runs toward the “Behold, I set before you a multitude of details” variety, as opposed to the intensely anecdotal, narrative, even poetic style favored by preachers like Reverends C. L. Franklin and Jasper Williams Jr. Reverend Morganfield tends to lecture his congregation on performing church duties, or on the need to contribute more money to the church. In one of his recorded sermons he estimates what an average church member might spend on cigarettes, soda pop, chewing gum, and other nonessentials in a given year, and contrasts that with what he or she might give to the church.

If his preaching tends toward admonishment on the subject of communal duty, his singing is a totally different story. Any preacher is something of a divided soul, split between the administration of public and social duties (for which the church is a center), and the essentially private business of revelation and personal relation to God. Reverend Morganfield may be an extreme example of this inner division; when he sings, his spirit becomes airborne with his voice, his high, burnished tenor broadens on long syllables into a wide vibrato, and something tender and vulnerable shows through at the heart of his sound. The modest bureaucrat of the church disappears, and his voice becomes a flag in the wind of his own faith.

Reverend Morganfield was a singer before he was a preacher. He got started singing early, leaving Clarksdale after World War Two to sing with various groups until the army drafted him, in 1950. After his discharge he continued singing, but despite some success he always had trouble making a living from it. He spent years away from Clarksdale, in Cleveland, Memphis, and elsewhere, performing, writing, and recording gospel songs for Jewel Records, out of Shreveport, yet also working construction jobs to make ends meet, before he started to preach in 1971. He came back to Clarksdale in 1975 and became pastor of Bell Grove Baptist Church, a solid brick structure that accommodates a hundred or so members every Sunday morning on Garfield Street, a narrow residential road across Highway 61 from downtown.

He is careful and politic in answering questions; he sits listening, squinting a little, smoking, then, as if feeling his way along, he begins talking.

“Well . . . any kind of music is power. You can go all the way back to Africa—those people couldn't count up to four, but they had a crude way of playing music that would get attention. Music is designed for certain different things. Biblically, music was designed to praise God. In later years, man developed a liking for music to the extent where he wanted to do it for his own benefit.

“Blues and gospel are not the same. Gospel is more . . . flexible. Like a blues singer would sing a song if his wife is gone, or a girlfriend: ‘My baby gone and she won't be back no more.' That derives from the feeling of the things that happened between he and she. The average person would sing that the same way every time; very seldom do you hear a pop or blues song in a different spirit at different times.

“Now, when it comes to gospel, today you sing, ‘Precious Lord, take my hand,' because you in such a downward mood until you don't know what's happening, and you say, ‘Take my hand and lead me on. I can't make it unless you take my hand.' But then maybe I'll sing it, and I'm singing it because he's already blessed me, and I want him to continue . . .”

He looks at me now with that searching expression, as if he is trying to read whether this is what I am looking for. As he pauses, another waitress comes over and says, “They didn't tell me you were here.” He gets up, kisses her, gives her a little squeeze around the midsection, introduces me (“He's doing an article on me.”). I say hello, but I'm thinking about what he has said. It seems to me that he is making an effort to be diplomatic; when the waitress leaves I ask him straight out if he thinks of the blues as sinful.

“Well”—there's the searching expression in his eyes again, trying to see why I'm asking—“it's the things that's done from the blues. I would think it was sinful if it's not pertaining to right and righteousness. I'll have to see it that way because of my position. I don't fight that person that does it, because I feel like he's doing what's beneficial to him, or best for him. But you'd have to look at it as being something that's being contrary to the will of God. Because if you're drawing people from the church . . .” He pauses, puts out his cigarette, thinking.

“I had a guy to tell me once,” he says, exhaling, “about a certain artist; he said, ‘He could be just as good a Christian as anybody.' I said, ‘No, he couldn't, because, first thing about it, he's drawing folk away from God.' So he said, ‘Well, he could be singing during the week and go to church on Sunday . . .' I said, ‘Well, if you had a wife, would you like for her to stay with another man for three nights, and then come back and stay with you?'

“Now, I sang rock and roll,” he goes on. “I haven't always been goody-goody. And I'm not goody-goody yet. I've gone to Muddy Waters's concerts . . . I've even sung on his concerts. I was staying with him up in his home on Forty-third Street in Chicago. A man offered me a lot of money to sing rock and roll. I turned it down. I had been recording gospel for a while, but I wasn't making any money. So this guy offered me this money, and Muddy told me, ‘He wouldn't have to ask me but once.' But I turned it down.”

“Why?”

“I just couldn't do it, because it wasn't me. I couldn't sing something that I'm not a part of. It just wouldn't work. My daddy was a preacher, and he had written me a song—‘I Can't Afford to Let My Savior Down.' He wrote it for me, and I recorded it. And that night, when I was trying to make up my mind to sing the rock and roll, that song stayed with me all night. And the next morning, I said, ‘I'm not gonna do it.'

“You see, you got enough folk doin' whatever's to be done for you not to ever get involved. There's enough folk playing football for you not to ever have to play it. There's enough folk getting drunk, so you don't have to. If you do, you just want to. Is that right? And they doin' it because they want to do it. And that's what I'm saying about the singing—I don't have to sing rock and roll, 'cause there's a lot of folk out there doing it, so it really don't have to be me. I can stay in my field and let that other person stay in his field. You don't have to endorse it. You don't have to condone it. Just let 'em go on and do it. Now if you can change them over to stop them from doing it, good. But if you can't, they still going to do it.

“What you have to look at . . . The store across the street sells clothes. You have to wear clothes. And over here they sell food. You have to eat. So it's a difference in whatever come up. That person survive off of selling clothes, this person survive off of selling food. But by the same token, the company he buys food from, they survive off of selling it to the restaurants. Everybody have a different thing that they are doing, and all of them work together, because you wear clothes and you eat food. So you can't fight the person that's selling clothes just 'cause you selling food. Does it make sense?”

“It makes sense to me,” I say, “as a practical philosophy for how you conduct yourself, but finally, there is some kind of tallying up. Food is not necessarily in opposition to clothes. You do have to have both. But,” and here I struggle for a good counterexample, “if one person has a store and they're selling fur coats, and someone comes up and says it is morally wrong to kill animals for their skins . . .” It's not a good example, but it is the best I can do.

“Well, we won't get into the wrongness,” he says, “because if that's the case, it's a whole lot of things that's wrong. It'll be bad for you to buy a steak for a dollar and a half and sell it to me for nine dollars. . . . Is that right? So what we need to do is get to the median.

“You got to remember this. I said previously that blues and gospel are not the same. Music was designed to praise God, and man have made it to praise man, and that's what makes the difference. If it's praising God, good. If it's praising man, good for the man. I'm not . . . fighting because someone likes music. Anybody that have good sense like music.”

“But,” I go on, wanting to force him into an actual answer, “I would still think that a person who believed in Jesus as the savior would have to find blues sinful. Because you're not asking God for help, in the blues. That's not correct?”

“You're right.”

“Football is one kind of thing—it just takes time away. But it seems like blues is spiritually opposed . . .”

“ . . . to the gospel.”

“Right.”

“Well,” he says, “now here's what you got to watch. There are two sides to everything. If you have hate, the opposite word is love, or vice versa. Right? So both of 'em can't be the same. You can't be wet and dry all at the same time.” He laughs. “If you pushing, you not pulling. There has to be two sides. So you have to determine within yourself what side is more profitable to you. Say, if I sing the blues I'll make a lot of money. But are you thinking about the money, or are you thinking about the hereafter? That's what's important.

“Now, Muddy Waters was a good fellow, when it comes to being nice to his family . . . He was nice to us, you know—I stayed with him, I went to his home. Many times. He'd come to our home, call my mother and tell her what he want to eat, she'd fix it for him, you know. But Muddy never accepted Christ. That's going to be the difference. His daddy was ninety years old when he died, and
he
never accepted Christ. But my daddy was his daddy's brother. My daddy preached for one church for forty-two years. They fellowshipped—they got together, you know. But it's a difference in what the ultimate end is.”

“What is the ultimate end?” I ask.

“Being with Christ. Now, you have to do this by faith. Some people say, well, I don't know what's going to be at the end. I don't either, but I'll tell you what, I don't want to take no chances. I'd rather be with Him, then go and not have Him. Because the Scripture said, ‘Hell is a bottomless pit.' You know what bottomless mean?” He regards me across a plume of exhaled smoke. “Ain't no bottom.”

“The Lord said, ‘Behold I set before you good and evil. You choose. Your choice is your choice. If you want to accept good, okay; if you want to accept evil, it's okay. But now you have to pay the penalty for whichever one you accept.' ”

“Did you talk to Muddy about religion at all?”

“Mmm-hmm,” he says, “He went to church with me. Yep.” He is silent for a moment. “Geneva, now, she went to church pretty good. His wife. She died before he did. But you see, it's a difference in going to church and being churchy. There's a lot of people in the church, but nothing in the people. You know, you can have a purse full of money, but a person full of nothing. But, now, if you don't go to church, you can't be churchy. Because He said, ‘Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.' See, you need to be together. And then He said, ‘I'll meet you in my house,' and His house is the church house. So that mean, if He don't meet you there, then you might not be meetin' Him.

“And I don't mean that you can't feel Him, or have an urge, at home, right here—but, say for instance if you got a job, you got to go to the job to get paid. So that's the way it is about church. You fellowship, and you learn about folks . . . you learn their desires, their shortcomings, and you learn how to accept that person as he or she is. You can't do it if you don't be around them.”

“What role does music play in church?”