“I grew up in Dayton Ohio and got into music on August 17, 1977 –  the day after Elvis died. I was ten years old, and Elvis was all over the radio. My parents didn’t listen to much music, so this was my introduction. I took my allowance to the record store at Sears and bought the 45s and LPS of the blues and R&B covers that Elvis recorded. I read the song credits and educated myself on who wrote them and what made this blues music from Mississippi so compelling.

I grew up and became a writer. I worked my way up from copywriter to marketing director for a multi-billion dollar company. I traveled the world for work, but my life changed when I took a trip to Mississippi and lucked into a true juke joint experience in Chulahoma on a Sunday night. The walls and ceiling were covered with folk art, and folks passed moonshine around in a plastic jug. Junior Kimbro, R.L. Burnside, and their kids and grandkids, played to a packed house in what seemed to be an old country church built without an architect. The blues was still here.

Six years later, I moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in March 2002 and opened Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art. My mission was to use my marketing and advertising experience to help organize and promote the blues from within. Seeing the tiny blues museum and having lunch in Clarksdale was just a two-hour stop for people heading to Memphis or New Orleans. We needed to give reasons for overnight stays with hotels, restaurants, retail, and more nights of music. We needed something to market. 

We started booking blues four nights a week at Ground Zero Blues Club, and I slowly got Red Paden to reliably book two nights a week at his place, Red’s Juke Joint. I made him a weekly flier and worked the door or behind the bar for free. Things had fallen so far in Clarksdale that no one worried about what I was doing.  

We now have live blues almost every night of the week, with 13 music festivals last year.  Some musicians have their own businesses making guitars or art. A couple have a blues club or recording studio. Musicians also move here to play. This revival seems visionary because things worked out, but back then it was one step forward and five steps back for this crazy guy from St. Louis. We want to keep the next generation of blues growing, but also stay true to the heritage and culture. We don’t want to become Nashville. 

I named my store Cat Head after three things: southern biscuits the size of cat heads; the blues record labels that have animal names: Blind Pig, Fat Possum, Armadillo, and Alligator Records; and for the cat head drawings of bluesman Pat Thomas.

Living in Clarksdale has given me opportunities not available anywhere else. I spent time with living fossils walking the earth and with legendary dinosaurs while they were still here. I hung out in the homes of T-Model Ford and Bilbo Walker and traveled the world with older bluesmen. You can’t pay to have those experiences.  Now people from around the world come here.

I tell everyone who walks in my door, ‘the blues brought me to Clarksdale, but the people made me stay’.“

Roger