Clarksdale Juke Joint Festival

Billy F. Gibbons to Play Guitar He Had Made in Muddy Waters’ Name

It’s appropriate that when ZZ Top’s Billy F. Gibbons makes his appearance at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale this Wednesday, April 9^th, he will be celebrating both the creation of the “Muddywood” guitar, in honor of Muddy Waters, and the longevity of the museum itself. His vision of commissioning a guitar paying tribute to Muddy Waters went hand-in-hand with his discovery of the museum some 37 years ago.

“One of my associates in Memphis came back from a sales run which allowed him to pass through Clarksdale,” Gibbons tells me, recollecting events from more than three decades ago. “And he spotted a tiny sign simply stating ‘Blues Museum,’ stuck in the grass next to the curb.”

That alone should indicate how long ago it was, for now the Delta Blues Museum is one of Clarksdale’s and the Delta’s crown jewels. It’s educational programs are the toast of Mississippi, inspiring young people such as Grammy-winner Christone “Kingfish” Ingram to throw themselves into the blues. But when the museum opened in 1979, it was merely a single room, and a little hard to find, even well into the ‘80s, when ZZ Top frequently worked at Ardent Studios, and Gibbons heard tell of the place from his associate.

“The following week,” he says, “we headed down to Clarksdale in search of this blues museum. For a good hour, we were stopping around town asking about it, but no luck. But right as we were about to give up, we were filling up on petrol, and the gas station attendant overheard us talking. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you must be talking about Sid Graves and his blues museum, which is located in the public library.’ And with that, we turned around, marched up the steps to the library, and sure enough, found the annex room where Sid Graves had made a place to park his personal collection of artifacts from that great American art form called the blues.”

But there was more afoot than seeing artifacts on the day that Gibbons and company showed up. Graves had his finger on the pulse of the whole Delta region and beyond, including a wide network of blues aficionados. On this day, Graves was consulting with a fellow scholar.

“Lo and behold, visiting Sid was none other than Jim O’Neill,” says Gibbons, “who was the founder of Living Blues magazine. I had met Jim on a couple of occasions. He and Sid had gathered to discuss their concern over a recent storm where the high winds had dislodged a few timbers in the cabin that Muddy Waters grew up in. And they said, ‘It’s just a few miles down the road next to Stovall Farm.’ And we said, ‘Yeah, we will go.’

Muddy Waters’ cabin (Photo: courtesy Delta Blues Museum)

“Sure enough, there was a pile of rubble that had been gathered up and placed next to the highway. We had a nice visit for a while, and on departure, Sid said, ‘Listen, they’re hauling this refuse away tomorrow. Why don’t you take a stick of this wood as a souvenir?’ And there was a big, big square timber, about six feet long, and we piled it in the trunk of the car. About halfway back to Memphis, my buddy said, ‘What are you going to do with this log?’ I thought for a minute and then I said, ‘Well, I know a guitar maker. We could probably saw this thing, and glue the planks together and cut a guitar out of it.’”

That guitar-maker was none other than Rick Rayburn, Gibbons explains, who owned Pyramid Guitars at the time. Others have identified the cabin plank as cypress wood, and Gibbons said it just happened to be perfect for its new purpose.

“Once it was all together in one piece, there was a bell-like resonance. It was just a match made in heaven, and it turned out to be a really resounding and very strident-sounding instrument.” Its basic shape was a design Gibbons had been toying with at the time. “I had outlined the perimeter of a guitar, and we had it in in a blueprint form. And I thought, ‘Gee, now’s the time to break it out!’ We handed it over to Rick, and he said, ‘How shall we finish it out?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s give it a nice, bright coat.’ And then I said, ‘I’ve got a design for a graphic.’”

The paint job Gibbons had in mind spoke to the very muddy waters that the great bluesman (born McKinley Morganfield) had lived beside for so long. “The squiggle down through the body and down all the way down the neck is the Mississippi River,” Gibbons notes. “The two colors represent the water and the banks of the river. And it culminates in the headstock, which is kind of a deltoid shaped piece, representing the Mississippi Delta.”

Muddywood (Photo: courtesy Delta Blues Museum)

It came out better than anyone had dreamt possible. “We tagged it the Muddywood guitar,” says Gibbons, “and it was such a delightful instrument, we thought, ‘Gee whiz, this would make a nice addition to the collection that Sid Graves put together.’”

The rest is history, as that encounter led ZZ Top to contribute funds to the museum, which in turn spawned matching grants and an ambitious event in which Muddywood was added to the museum’s collection. John Lee Hooker even showed up. It was just the kickstart that the Delta Blues Museum needed, paving the way for its eventual move into a train depot in Clarksdale, which it still calls home today.

This Wednesday, the support that Gibbons and his band gave to what is now a Delta landmark will be honored in a full-circle moment, as the museum pays tribute to ZZ Top at a “Crossroads Connection” event, part of its annual Muddy Waters Month celebration. The program kicks off at 2:00 PM at the Delta Blues Museum Stage where local musicians, civic leaders, and state dignitaries will help the Museum thank Billy and ZZ Top for their long-time support of the blues and the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Live music will be provided by the award-winning Delta Museum Student Band, joined by Gibbons, who will play the Muddywood guitar for the occasion. That event in turn will serve as a lead up to the 2025 Juke Joint Festival that kicks off in Clarksdale this Saturday.

At 3:00 PM, festivities will continue inside at a ticketed reception in honor of Gibbons and in support of the museum’s programs. There, Gibbons will be joined in conversation by the Delta Blues Museum’s “Blues Ambassador,” Charlie Musselwhite, a Delta native, Grammy winner, and Blues Hall of Fame and Memphis Music Hall of Fame inductee. The two will discuss the life and legacy of Muddy Waters and his enduring influence on music. Visit this link for tickets.

Hunter’s Chapel in Como, Mississippi, has venerable links to the blues community. Not only did the legendary Fred McDowell attend services there, he recorded his 1969 album Amazing Grace with the church’s choir. And it was fife and drum master Othar Turner’s church of choice. So it’s rather fitting that the resident pastor is the Rev. John Wilkins, an heir to blues blessings in his own right.

To Wilkins, there’s no contradiction between the blues and gospel. “People got to realize I listen to blues,” he says in liner notes for an upcoming new album. “That ain’t gonna send me to hell — the way I live is what’s gonna send me to hell.” And that has long been his credo, perhaps to his late mother’s dismay. “Son, you can’t play both of ’em,” she told him. “Just pick one to play.” By that time, he’d already been mixing them up.

He learned music from his father, Robert Wilkins. By the time Robert became an ordained minister in the late 1930s, he had already recorded blues for the Victor, Brunswick and Vocalion labels. In the 1960s, while still a preacher, the elder Wilkins recut one of those early tracks, “That’s No Way to Get Along,” as the more sanctified “Prodigal Son,” a song made famous by the Rolling Stones.

Adam Smith

Rev. at Hunter’s Chapel Church

I asked Wilkins the younger if that led to any royalty checks. “Oh yeah, we still get ’em. After daddy passed, mama was getting ’em. And after mother passed, it was split between the children.” But by the time the Stones’ record came out, young John, growing up in Memphis, had already inherited a far greater reward: his father’s musical acumen.

“I started on one of them little toy plastic guitars,” he recalls. “And I kept watching daddy. That’s a gift from the good Lord.” He was soon immersed in the hopping Memphis music scene of the 1950s and 1960s. “I grew up playing with gospel groups there. Old Man ‘Bless My Bones’ Wade at WDIA. Any time a group would come from out of town, if they didn’t have a musician, he would recommend me to play for ’em. I had to play for a lot of groups while they was in town.”

He also rubbed shoulders with the era’s classic soul singers. “I played a little bit with James Carr. And I played lead guitar on ‘You Gonna Make Me Cry’ with O.V. Wright. That’s the only one I did with him.” By then, he was also exploring a more profane world.

“I was playing the gospel until I got to be about 18 years old. And then I started going to Mississippi country ‘tonks and playing the blues on Saturday, come on back and play the gospel on Sunday.” He would also play with blues luminaries in Memphis. “I got a chance to play with Fred McDowell, when my daddy played at the shell in Overton Park. I played upright bass guitar for him. And I used to play lead guitar with Memphis Minnie Downtown, back in the alleys and different places.”

That all changed in 1985, when Wilkins settled in at Hunter’s Chapel and quit guitar entirely. “I pastored there and had one blues singer that still belonged there, Othar Lee Turner. A lot of people come from overseas to his funeral, ’cause he had played everywhere, you know. And after the funeral was over, they saw my name on the program and said, ‘Hey, did you know a man by the name of Robert Wilkins?’ And that’s where I got started again. That was about 2003. And by 2008, I was in London.”

The international acclaim keeps building. For our interview, Wilkins phoned from Paris, between sound-checks for shows there, before he returns to kick off the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi, this week. And, contrary to his mother’s advice, he keeps mixing it up. “I get a little stinky. I call it stinky beat, you know. That blues beat. And I’ve had a lot of people at them blues shows, starting to shout with beer cans in their hand! They tell me, ‘Reverend Sir, I haven’t been to church since I don’t know when, and I’m going Sunday.’ So that makes me feel good.”

Rev. John Wilkins opens the four day Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi, this Thursday, April 11th, at the New Roxy Theatre, 5 p.m. Free.