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Geography Professor Hits The Road For Classes On Delta 'Blues,' Hawaiian Food
Dec. 2, 2014
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
Story By: Amy Barnett
It all started when a 12-year-old boy put the needle on the full-size record he pulled out of a Muddy Waters album cover.
“I remember listening to the music and looking at the cover. The back of it had a picture of a shack and all of these romantically mesmerizing descriptions of the Delta as this mysterious place where blues was born,” said John Strait. “The feel of the music really grabbed a hold of me and I remember at that point thinking, ‘I’m going to go there some day.’”
Strait, a geography professor at Sam Houston State University, made his first trip to the Mississippi Delta when he was 19 years old.
“I was always interested in music and blues and the Mississippi Delta as a hobby, but I never dreamed I would be able to go there regularly as part of my job,” he said.
When Strait came to SHSU eight years ago, he wanted to give his students hands-on, site-based learning experiences to “really make them feel and understand the geographic areas they are studying.”
So, he developed a course called “Cultural Field Studies: Race, Blues, Rock ‘N’ Roll and the Mississippi Delta,” combining his love and understanding of the Delta blues.
“The more I got into it, the more I realized the blues is just the musical aspect of the area,” Strait said. “The music is the lens through which we study everything else, including a broad array of social and cultural processes.”
These processes include musical evolution, migration, urbanization, economic transformations, religion, social and technological change, gender relations, racial segregation, civil rights, and other topics.
“In addressing these topics from a geographical or spatial perspective, we examine the powerful role that musical culture can have in reflecting, influencing and actively transforming the nature of place and space,” Strait said.
In August 2014, Strait took a new group of students to the Mississippi Delta for his six-day field study course. Although much of the trip was on “Delta time,” meaning there was no strict schedule, there were places that are always a “must see,” as events that unfolded there literally changed the world.
His group usually consists of geography majors, but often includes at least one photographer or a music lover who is ready to absorb what the Delta has to offer.
SHSU education major Nick Oinonen couldn’t wait to be part of the group, as he has always been fascinated with blues music and had previously taken a cultural geography course from Strait.
“In the first course, he tied cultural things and geographical locations to people and places and time and music,” Oinonen said. “Just the way he put everything together then, I knew the Mississippi Delta trip would be a great course.”
Some of the sites on the field study trip included the National Civil Rights Museum, Sun Studios, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
“When we were at the Stax Museum, we saw how it related to the Civil Rights Movement, and we went to the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated,” said Oinonen. “The ties between the music and the Civil Rights Movement and how it all came together is something I will never forget.”
Graceland is always on the agenda, as is listening to and discussing the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Son House, as well as that of Ike Turner, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and many more.
One guaranteed stop is at The Full Gospel Tabernacle is Memphis, presided by the Rev. Al Green, legendary soul and gospel singer. While Green was not at the service on the most recent trip, he typically spends time with the SHSU students.
“He talks about gospel and how it is significant culturally–how it was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, how it was spiritually comforting to people who were enslaved, and his personal career as someone who started out in the secular world as a soul singer and eventually felt a calling,” Strait said. “And, of course, hearing and witnessing Rev. Green and his choir sing the gospel is an experience few could ever forget.”
After the church service, the group enjoyed lunch at a local soul food restaurant.
“Food is a huge part of this; it’s not just for fueling our bodies,” Strait said. “It’s a vital expression of culture. We ate at the restaurant that is presumably where Martin Luther King Jr. had his last dinner.”
Strait said authentic soul food throughout the Delta often includes fried catfish, okra, barbecue, fried dill pickles and maybe even Kool-Aid pickles, for those who are bold enough to try them.
Oinonen didn’t get a chance to try a Kool-Aid pickle or “koolickle” but enjoyed other great soul food.
“We ate at Gus’s Fried Chicken in Memphis. Earnestine’s and Hazel’s in Memphis had soul burgers. I can’t tell you what’s in a soul burger,” laughed Oinonen. “But it’s good!”
During each trip, when the group leaves Memphis and heads to the Delta, Strait says things typically get a little more informal.
“We might stop to get some water at a gas station and strike up a conversation with some of the locals and the next thing you know we are sitting there for an hour and a half,” Strait said. “We go to where the levee broke (in 1927), just north of Greenville, Mississippi; we talk about the event and the significance of the flood and relate it to the song made famous by Led Zeppelin in the 1970s – ‘When the levee breaks’ (originally recorded by the blues musical duo Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie).
“The point is to put a location to places they’ve read about; if you are there where the levee broke, then you can really understand the impact it still has today.”
Strait also likes to take his students to Stovall Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi, to stand in the very spot where the photo was taken for the Muddy Waters album cover he loved as a child. Next they head to a real juke joint –something most on the trip have never experienced.
“It’s like going for a night out on the town for the people who live there. They get dressed up, but instead of going to a club that we may go to on the weekend, they go to a clapboard shack on a plantation somewhere,” Strait said. “There’s no Starbucks in Merigold, Mississippi, but there is a juke joint where people don’t just go to drink and dance but to people watch, to socialize and to share life for a spell.”
Strait also asks his students to create a “mojo bag” by collecting mojo, or memorable souvenirs, from the trip. The purpose of a mojo bag is to offer students a way to forever remember their experiences and to provide a mechanism for them to be able to share what they’ve learned with others when they return home.
“A couple of people who are important to me in the Delta blues are Son House and Charlie Patton, the ‘Father of the Delta blues’, so I grabbed a couple of things from Dockery Farms where Son House played and a brick from the old commissary where Charlie Patton played,” Oinonen said. “I found a coricidin bottle at the Hopson Plantation where the first mechanical cotton picker was introduced in the Delta. Duane Allman is famous for using a coricidin bottle as a guitar slide; I’m actually using the bottle for my mojo bag.”
While Oinonen won’t soon forget his trip to the Mississippi Delta, 11 other Sam Houston students experienced a similar course with Strait in Hawaii, where they dissected the food, music and geography there to also learn more about culture. This course, which Strait team-taught with wife and colleague Ava Fujimoto-Strait, was entitled “The Mixed Plate: A Field Experience on the Cultural and Environmental Diversity of the Big Island of Hawaii.”
Aloha, Hawaii |
“In Hawaii, a lot of restaurants serve what is called a ‘mixed plate,’ which would be like a meat and three sides for us here. You usually get some type of meat or fish and usually rice and mac salad,” Strait said.
“When you evaluate that plate of food, you will learn the rice is from Japan, the sausage may be Portuguese, the barbecue could be Polynesian or Korean; so we are using the food to learn about migration.
“If you talk to a Hawaiian, they will tell you the food is not Korean, it’s Hawaiian, because over time, they claimed it.”
In this way, the food is demonstrated as a metaphor for understanding how Hawaiian culture is the result of the relocation and assimilation of multiple immigrant groups into a distinct ethnic collective.
In Hawaii, Strait’s students also evaluated the musical instruments common to the islands and environmental concerns including recycling and alternative energy.
“The overall mission is to get students out of the classroom and to try to figure out how a place is distinct, how it influences the world and how has it been impacted by the world,” Strait said.
Next on the list of field study courses is a trip to Brazil, where Strait describes both the food and music as “vibrant.” This new course, entitled “Sights, Sound, Food and Ethnicity: Cultural Diversity in Brazil,” will be offered in summer 2015.
He hopes the field study opportunities also give students a chance to make new friends who have similar interests and to have a better appreciation of how music, food and geography truly shape the culture of a location.
“What I want them to learn when they leave this department,” Strait said, “is that you can go to another place—it might not have a juke joint or a mixed plate, but there’s probably a way you can learn from that place and make connections to other places, which is a huge part of what geography is about.”
For more information on Strait's summer 2015 "Sights, Sound, Food and Ethnicity: Cultural Diversity in Brazil" course, email Strait at jbs008@shsu.edu.
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