My Blues Christmas

A couple of days before Christmas, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse—to write a story for a new crime fiction collection that features such writers as James Lee Burke, John Grisham, and Charlaine Harris, author of the books that inspired the HBO show, “True Blood.” The book is called “Delta Blues,” features an introduction by Morgan Freeman, and when it’s published in October, the release party will be at Ground Zero, his blues club in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Dropping everything else to research and write and rewrite my story, “Death at the Crossroads,” I’ll always remember 2008 as my Blues Christmas. While everyone else was doing the “Jingle Bell Rock,” I was having myself one mean “Blue, Blues Christmas.”

As I read accounts of the music birthed in the Delta, and subsisted on a diet of nothing but the blues, I spent a lot of time with Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and several other artists whose lives and music are featured in Darnell Martin’s “Cadillac Records.” This enhanced my enjoyment of the feature immeasurably, transforming what would have been an interesting, enjoyable movie with great music into something far more personally resonant.

But even without my literary journey to the crossroads, I would have thoroughly enjoyed “Cadillac Records” and highly recommended it.

The film is a much fictionalized story of the founding and flourishing of Chess Records in 1950s Chicago. Started by Leonard Chess, the label recorded and promoted artists who would become some of the greatest names in blues and R&B—artists shuch as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and Etta James.

Director, Darnell Martin, who also wrote the script, takes great liberties with the Chess story, but by doing so tells a dramatic and compelling yarn with one of the year’s best soundtracks.

All the major players of “Cadillac Records” emerge as fully-formed individuals and are brought to life by Eamonn Walker (Howlin' Wolf), Columbus Short (Little Walter), Mos Def (Chuck Berry), and Beyoncé Knowles (Etta James) in powerful performances, but the finest work is done by Adrien Brody (Leonard Chess) and Jeffrey Wright (Muddy Waters). And as fine as Brody’s performance is as the charming, flawed, father-figure Leonard Chess, Jeffrey Wright’s Muddy Waters is on a level with Frank Langella’s Nixon, for both actors actually seem to become the men they’re playing. (More on “Frost/Nixon” soon.)

There’s a truth to “Cadillac Records.” Though much of what’s in the film never actually happened—or didn’t happen in exactly the way it’s depicted, it’s true to a time and a place and a people that great and enduring music was born out of. If you brought Chess or Muddy or Wolf back and set them down in a dark theater showing the move their lives inspired, they might say what Muddy says when, as a sharecropper in the Deep South, he hears Alan Lomax’s recording of his music, “I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time.” But I don’t think they’d deny that it was, in fact, themselves.

My 2008 Holidays were some of the best and bluest ever. I’m thrilled that my story “Death at the Crossroads” will be in the upcoming “Delta Blues” collection, and I’m honored that my writing could be inspired and informed by the blues born in the region where my family is originally from, and I’ll forever link the legacy of the Chess label and the film “Cadillac Records” with the experience.