He made the music inside me meet the music outside me: everything harmonized raucously for a blazing moment.
Then the music stopped, after just three songs. R.L.’s wife of close to fifty years was taking him home. “Awh, Mama,” he was protesting, but laughing. Someone said she’d objected to a song he’d played, or didn’t play. So his grandson Cedric climbed behind the drum kit and with Kenny Brown on guitar they picked up that emphatic, roiling rhythm full of one-chord riffs, and everyone danced again and drank moonshine until the moon wasn’t shining anymore.
Three years later I’d move to Mississippi, but I never returned to Junior’s. I couldn’t—it burned down in 2000. I’ve heard someone torched it, wrongfully thinking there was insurance money to be had, but I don’t know about that.
Every now and then, someone talks about rebuilding Junior’s. But some things can’t be replicated. They exist on this earth for a while, and then they’re gone. You can rebuild an Applebee’s or a Hilton Hotel bar. You can’t rebuild a Junior’s. You can’t rebuild that soul. I’m proud I can claim it: Children, I went there once. I danced a dance of great power and joy. This was years ago, before the flames came to embroider the blue gown of the Oprah Virgin Mary, before her brown hands blistered, before she cried her soot tears, her eyes cast downward to the clearing where R.L. Burnside used to play and where, once, a shop light glinted off a hook that gently, gently, gently brushed a lock of sweaty hair from off my forehead.
