The Walnut Street Bait Shop
128 Walnut Street
Greenville, Mississippi, 38701

(601) 332-0315

 

It's hard to miss the Walnut Street Bait Shop. Follow the signs directing you to the riverboat casinos and don't go over the levee to the casinos. If you're on Main Street, turn right at the levee. There on your right sits the Walnut Street Bait Shop. If you're on Washington Street, turn left at the levee. There on your left sits the Walnut Street Bait Shop.

Technically, the Bait Shop is what I call a "white people blues bar." But the only thing "white people" about this great place is the owner and the location.

Here's Brad Jordan, the owner, on the sidewalk outside the Bait Shop. Brad's a fine blues harp blower and keyboard player. On the 3rd Saturday in every September, you'll find him on the Jukehouse Stage at the Delta Blues Festival. Any other day, you'll find him trying to keep the Bait Shop's doors open.

On this day, May 16, 1998, he was having hell finding a bass player for that night's blues band.

Check out the stuff outside the Bait Shop. Those wooden things are chain saw-carved statues Brad makes when he's not playing the blues or trying to keep the blues-doors open. The rest of his time, he drinks beer and listens to blues.

Check the Road Trip! section for Willie Foster in concert at the B & B Quick Mart, and check the Bluespeople! section for an interview and photos at Willie's home. Awesome stuff.

Brad Jordan not only gets his beer wholesale, he listens to better blues than anybody in America. All the great blues people from around the Greenville area play in the Bait Shop. The band that played the night of the above photo, the band in need of a bass player, was Willie J. Foster's band. Willie Foster is probably the greatest living blues harp blower.

Here's a shot of a poster nailed to the wall just inside the Bait Shop's front door. As most of y'all already know, John Horton is, in my opinion, the best all-around bluesman in The Delta. He performs at the Walnut Street Bait Shop on a regular basis. He blows a mean harp and plays his Flying V like Albert King, his blues idol. If you catch Tammy Gibson singing with John Horton, ask her to sing End Of The Rainbow. She sings an awesome version of that Wilbert McKinley song.

Here's the bar, located to the left of the front door. If you look closely just beyond the bar you can see the edge of the bandstand which runs along the same wall as the bar. For many years the building was the location of a bait shop. Brad built the Bait Shop's bandstand over the bait shop's minnow tanks. Notice the rusty tin roof over the bar. Brad and friends scrounged trash piles, junk yards, old barns, and even abandoned shotgun houses for both building material and wall-hangers.

You won't believe the junk and blues memorabilia hanging from the Bait Shop's walls. Here's a small section of the wall opposite the bar. If you run across the Grim Reaper, don't worry. His scythe hangs just to the left of this torn poster.

Here's a fellow named Michael Oltremari. He's grilling chicken breasts on the sidewalk outside the Bait Shop.

"The Bait Shop doesn't have a food permit, so we can't sell food," he informed me. "We just cook it out here and give it away."

"Huh?" I replied. I had just splurged on a meal at the fancy C & G Depot Restaurant. For $25, including the tip, I ate maybe $10 worth of good bread and fairly good shrimp and $0 worth of soggy French fries. I also endured teenaged-looking hostesses who much preferred chatting with each other than seating a bum-looking guy like me.

"Yeah, it's free. Besides, this chicken didn't cost anything. Ida Mae--she's the real cook around here--she's got some cornbread and stuff cooked inside--she said her freezer was full of chicken and she wanted some of it out of there. The newspaper called this ‘pothole chicken.' A frozen-chicken truck hit a pothole south of town and turned over. They gave away the chicken. Ida Mae got a bunch. The newspaper called it, ‘A chicken in every pothole.' Get it?"

"I get it." What I got was deep regret over the $25 I wasted at the C & G.

Along about that moment, up walked Ida Mae--the real cook. I was more interested in knowing what she had cooked inside the Bait Shop than I was her, so I forgot to get her last name.

That's okay because she was more interested in seeing that Michael didn't burn her chicken than she was in talking to me. But she finally gave me the menu: "I got mustard greens an' cornbread an' candied yams."

"Candied yams? God, I love candied yams. You put marshmallows on ‘em, Ida Mae?"

"Shore," she answered with a look that said, Damn, you're a dumb white boy. Who ever heard of candied yams without marshmallows on ‘em?

"How you cook ‘em?"

"On the stove top in a pan."

"No, I mean exactly how do you cook them?"

"Why you want to know that?"

"So I can write about it and a million Yankees can read it and learn how Ida Mae cooks candied yams."

"Okay. I cut ‘em up in little pieces----"

"How little?"

"'Bout a half inch. Then I boil ‘em in water ‘til they're soft enough to mash. Then I pour off all the water but a little bit----"

"How much water do you leave in the pot?"

"'Bout an inch. Then I add some nutmeg an' some butter an' let ‘em cook some more. Some people put cinnamon in, some put allspice in. But I don't. When they cooked enough----"

"What's enough?"

"I don't know. I just know they ready. Then I put in some syrup."

"How much syrup?"

"Enough. Don't use that syrup they put on pancakes up north. Use that dark syrup. You know that dark syrup?"

"Yes, ma'am. Country syrup. Ribbon cane."

"That's it. Then I take ‘em out of the round pot and put ‘em in a flat pan an' put marshmallows on top----"

"How many marshmallows?"

"How'm I supposed to know how many marshmallows? I ain't never counted no marshmallows. Just put enough marshmallows in so that when you dip yore spoon in for some candied yams, you get some marshmallows. You got that?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then you put the pan in the oven an' bake it ‘til the marshmallows are brown. That's all."

"I think I got it, Ida Mae. Your candied yams are kinda like candied mashed sweet potatoes, right?"

"That's right."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"You welcome. Reckon them Yankees will cook some of my candied yams?"

"Some of them will. You lived ‘round Greenville all your life, Ida Mae?"

"I was born in Glendora, Mississippi, an' raised up in Clarksdale. Lived in Barker, New York for ten years."

"New York?"

"Yep, Barker, New York. ten years. Whole time I was there I dreamed 'bout comin' home to Mississippi. Wanted to git me a place so I could have me some chickens an' a pig."

"You got some chickens and a pig?"

"Nope, but I'm home in Mississippi."

During an afternoon spent mostly jawing with Walnut Street denizens out in front of the Bait Shop, I looked up and unexpectedly saw a familiar face.

Meet William "Harbo" Harbison, blues drummer extraordinaire.

Harbo lives across Big Muddy in Hamburg, Arkansas. He's unloading his drums for that night's session in the Walnut Street Bait Shop.

You can also find him playing at the Delta Blues Festival and at several juke joints scattered around Greenville, some mentioned here in Junior's Juke Joint.

Harbo is on the Internet. E-mail him at  acr@cei.net

Y'all, he can tell some juke joint tales. I met Harbo three years ago at the Delta Blues Festival where he drummed with John Horton's Special Occasion Band. One night after that first meeting, the Special Occasion Band and I were sitting around talking. Someone, Harbo, I think, told about the night old Bluesmen Willie Foster and T-Model Ford played in the same juke joint. That's an invitation to disaster. The two old men got in a fight. The rest of the band broke up the fight, not wanting those blues icons, probably three times the age of the next oldest member of the band, to hurt each other.

A few minutes later, Willie Foster started blowing his harp into his microphone and no sound came from his amp. He picked up the microphone cord and lo and behold it was cut in two. So he started beating T-Model on the head with the microphone.

I thought this guy looked cool sitting there beneath a colorful wall painting, so I snapped his photo. "My name's Donnie Brown," he informed me, "but they call me ‘Downtown Donnie.' I play bass guitar."

Downtown Donnie couldn't play bass for Willie Foster that night in the Bait Shop because he had a gig on a riverboat casino. Say what you want about casinos, but the ones docked at Greenville are good for the blues. They provide employment on week-nights and weekends for local musicians. If a musician has a steady source of income from a casino, that means he can play off-nights in a juke joint for $40 or $50 or even less. Why do you think Booba Barnes left Greenville for Chicago? No gigs or nothing but low-paying gigs, that's why. Why did Muddy Waters go to Chicago? Same reason.

A musician with a full-time musical job means a better musician. It means a shortage of musicians for other less well-paying gigs which, eventually, means more musicians as they move in or move back in to fill the gaps. Everybody wins except, of course, the folks who lose their money in the casinos.

Blues bands from all over the world have e-mailed me wanting to know where they could get a gig in the Delta. Well, the Walnut Street Bait Shop is a good place to start. You'll make only a small amount of money, but Brad Jordan will give unknown bands a chance because sometimes the genuine Delta articles are off in Europe making large amounts of money.