- “Half blues festival, half small town fair” in Clarksdale will celebrate Red Paden and feature Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, says organizer Roger Stolle.
When Clarksdale’s Juke Joint Festival turns 21 on Saturday, April 13, the absence of one great local blues act will be unavoidable.
The late Red Padden, founder and owner of Red’s Lounge on Sunflower Avenue, was a key inspiration for the annual event, which draws people from the U.S. and the world, says festival co-founder Roger Stolle.
“The concept of his place is really what drove the idea of [creating] a festival that celebrates this [juke] culture and include as many of the traditional sites as possible,” he says.
Gone and gone are very different things, however, and memories of Payden, who died in December at the age of 67, will be strong when his jukebox reopens to host a triple date Saturday night featuring Little Willie Farmer , Beverly Davis and the 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 Thursday through Sunday. And that’s not counting the small stages that will be scattered around eight city blocks Saturday, where blues acts will play to an expected 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 the Juke Joint Festival will bring together a roster of top blues acts including Terry “Harmonica” Bean, Dwayne Burnside, Gary Burnside, Lightnin’ Malcolm, Libby Ray Watson, Robert Kimbrough Sr. and Kenny Brown, and will feature a tribute to Como bluesman RL Boyce, who died in November at 68. But young and up-and-coming artists also get stage time. 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 can show people from a younger perspective 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 1990s while living in St. Louis and falling in love with the culture.
At that time, he gravitated to Greenville, where he could watch T-Model Ford perform and talk blues history. Eventually, though, he went to Clarksdale and began hanging out at Red’s, Sarah’s Kitchen, Messengers Pool Hall and the Riverside Hotel, a longtime hotspot 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’d even be here – it’s part of the story that got me here,” he says. Those historic jukes forced him “to keep going back to a time when there wasn’t a lot of live music, to be honest,” he says.
“You could talk to these older, experienced characters and it was like stepping into a history book. You hear it first hand and it really gave me insight into things.”
Since then, Stolle has gone all-in on Delta Blues, creating the 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.” As a director, he starred in the 2008 documentary M for Mississippi: A Journey Through the Birthplace of the Blues.
In January 2004, he and Bubba O’Keefe, now director of tourism at Visit Clarksdale, began planning the first Juke Festival together. Less than three months later, they welcomed visitors to a small version of the event with the concept and setting they still use today – including the famous pig races, designed to get the locals to mingle with the tourists.
“We had some secret mission [of attracting] locals who either aren’t blues fans or just aren’t part of what’s going on in town,” he says. “And the answer at the time was racing pigs. Everyone wants to see a pig race, let’s be honest.”
Visitors and locals alike will have plenty of opportunities to mingle and cheer on the pigs in between musical sets at 18 pig races held three per hour from 11am to 4pm on Saturday and monkeys riding dogs herding sheep. Other non-musical events include the Dash Down Delta 5K, promoted by the Crossroads Economic Partnership, starting at 8 a.m. at the Cutrer Estate on Friars Point Road.
Stolle’s plan to spread southern hospitality to the region was a success. As of press time, they’ve sold event cufflinks 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 continue to visit and enjoy this, [but it’s about] wanting to be a part of something and trying to support it because you believe in it. And to have a friend like Miss Sarah [Moore] or Red Paden, to be a part of their history even for a moment is pretty special.
