- Clarksdale’s ‘half blues festival, half small-town fair’ will celebrate Red Paden and feature Anthony ‘Big A’ Sherrod, says organizer Roger Stolle.
When Clarksdale’s Juke Joint Festival turns 21 on Sat., April 13, the absence of one major local blues lifer will be inescapable.
The late Red Paden, founder and proprietor of Red’s Lounge on Sunflower Avenue, was a key inspiration for the annual event that attracts people from across the U.S. and around the world, says festival co-founder Roger Stolle.
“The concept of his venue is really what spurred the idea of [creating] a festival that celebrated that [juke] culture, and involved as many of the traditional venues as possible,” he says.
Passed and gone are too different things, though, and memories of Paden, who passed away in December at age 67, will be strong as his juke reopens to host a triple-header Saturday night featuring Little Willie Farmer, Beverly Davis, and Big A and the Allstars, fronted by Anthony “Big A” Sherrod.
More than 20 venues, including the historic New Roxy Theater, will join Red’s in hosting performances by dozens of acts from Thursday through Sunday. And that’s not counting the small stages that’ll be scattered around eight city blocks on Saturday, where blues artists will perform for an anticipated crowd of thousands amid vendor booths and food trucks.
“It’s half blues festival, half small-town fair, and all about the Delta,” Stolle says.
The 2024 edition of Juke Joint Festival will bring together a roster of top blues acts including Terry “Harmonica” Bean, Duwayne Burnside, Garry Burnside, Lightnin’ Malcolm, Libby Rae Watson, Robert Kimbrough Sr., and Kenny Brown, and feature a tribute to Como bluesman R.L. Boyce, who passed away in November at 68. But young and up-and-coming artists are getting stage time, too. Seventeen-year-old harmonica and guitar player Harrell “Young Rell” Davenport will make his Juke Joint debut after years of watching legends perform.
“This will be my first year, but it means a lot because I’ll get to meet and see so many amazing people who have inspired me for years,” says Davenport, who will play sets on Thursday and Friday, including an opening slot for Charlie Musselwhite and Kirk Fletcher at the New Roxy. “I get to show people from a younger point of view that the blues — especially the traditional blues — is still alive.”
The annual event is largely organized by Stolle, a native of Dayton, Ohio, and Nan Hughes, who has been involved since the first festival. Stolle began making regular trips to the Delta in the late nineties while living in St. Louis and became enamored with the culture.
At the time, he gravitated to Greenville, where he could watch T-Model Ford perform and chat about blues history. He eventually took to Clarksdale, though, and began spending time at Red’s, Sarah’s Kitchen, Messengers Pool Hall and the Riverside Hotel, a longtime waypoint for African American travelers and home to musicians like Ike Turner and Sonny Boy Williamson II. He moved to Clarksdale full time in 2002.
“Without Red’s, I don’t know if I would even be here — it’s part of the story that brought me here,” he says. Those historic jukes compelled him “to keep coming back at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of live music, frankly,” he says.
“You could talk to these older, experienced characters, and it was like stepping into a history book. You’re hearing it first hand, and it really gave me the lay of the land.”
Since then, Stolle has gone all-in on Delta blues, establishing Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art on Delta Avenue and publishing two books, “Hidden History of Mississippi Blues” and “Mississippi Juke Joint Confidential: House Parties, Hustlers and the Blues Life.” As a filmmaker, he was involved in the 2008 documentary “M for Mississippi: A Road Trip Through the Birthplace of the Blues.”
In January 2004, he and Bubba O’Keefe, now the tourism director at Visit Clarksdale, began planning the first Juke Joint Festival. Less than three months later, they welcomed visitors to a small-scale version of the event with the concept and framework they still use today — including the famous pig races, designed to get locals to mix with tourists.
“We kind of had this secret mission [of attracting] locals who either aren’t blues fans or are just not part of what was going on in town,” he says. “And the answer at that time was racing pigs. Everybody wants to see a pig race, let’s be honest.”
Visitors and locals will have plenty of opportunities to mingle and cheer on the porkers between music sets at 18 pig races, held three per hour from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and monkeys riding dogs herding sheep. Other non-musical events include the Dash Down Delta 5K, promoted by the Crossroads Economic Partnership, beginning at 8 a.m. at the Cutrer Mansion on Friars Point Road.
Stolle’s plan of spreading the region’s Southern hospitality has been a success. As of press time, they have sold event wristbands to people in 48 states and at least 14 countries, plus more than two-dozen Mississippi counties.
“You come for the music, but you stay for the people,” Stolle says. “I could have kept visiting and enjoying that, [but it’s about] wanting to be part of something and trying to support it because you believe in it. And, to have had a friend like Miss Sarah [Moore] or Red Paden, to be part of their history for a moment even, is pretty special.”
