On the Streets of Bolton (MS)

By Graham Clarke

This blog post was written by Mississippi Department of Transportation engineer Graham Clarke. His vast amount of field experience makes him the archetypical professional who first began to search for the Blues listening to the music and later ended up tracking down the burial grounds of Blues artists across the state. This post details his experiences in Bolton, Mississippi–a place that at the turn of the twentieth century featured the Chatmon, Patton, Sloan (Salome), and McCoy families, all of which later boasted commercial recording artists in the 1920s & 30s.

Each year, my brother and I take a “blues journey” somewhere in Mississippi. We live in the east central part of the state, which means we’re about two – three hours from where most of the great blues men were either born, grew up, or died.

I’ve been a fan of the blues since the mid 80’s and like a lot of blues fans, I came to the music via the popular artists of that time…..Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Eric Clapton, the Blues Brothers, etc…. What’s probably different about my approach to the blues than a lot of blues fans is that I decided to trace the music I was hearing back to its roots. I’m not sure why, but I also did that when I listened to rock, R&B, and pop music back in those days….if I knew a song I heard was a cover, then I wanted to hear what the original sounded like. This was the case with “Soul Man,” when I heard the Blues Brothers’ version, “Double Trouble,” from Clapton, and “Texas Flood,” by SRV.

The more blues that I heard, the further back I went, and within a couple of years, I was buying pre-war blues collections from Yazoo Records. One of the first I picked up was Roots of Robert Johnson, which featured selected tracks from artists who had influenced the legendary blues man…..among them Skip James, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr, Son House, Charlie Patton, and the Mississippi Sheiks.

The headstone of Ezell Chatmon at Bolton Cemetery in 2021 [Photo: © Graham Clarke, 2021]

Bolton Cemetery contains a headstone for a man named Walter Vinson, but the grave is not that of the famous Mississippi Sheiks guitar player. (Photo: © Graham Clarke, 2021)

Pilgrimage in the Magnolia State

A couple of years ago, on one of our blues trips, we made a circle that went from Canton (Elmore James’ stomping grounds at one time), Bentonia (Skip James, Jack Owens, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes), Inverness (Little Milton Campbell), Belzoni (Pinetop Perkins), and Indianola (B.B. King Museum and his final resting place), ending up in Greenwood, where we tracked down Robert Johnson’s final resting place northwest of town).

Prior to this trip, I had not thought about visiting grave sites very much…mainly because in previous years, I hadn’t had much time for such trips due to a busy family schedule. Over the last couple of years, my time has freed up a little bit, and I’ve really enjoyed these trips. It was really cool to know that your favorite blues artists actually walked these areas, played in these areas, and some were even laid to rest in areas very close to where I live. There’s really nothing like it that I’ve experienced.

Graves of Legends

Over the next two years, we made other stops….last summer we visited Newport Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery in Holmes County, Mississippi, where we saw the grave sites of Elmore James and Lonnie Pitchford. This past winter, we journeyed to Saint James Cemetery in Carroll County to see Mississippi John Hurt’s grave (I wrote about these excursions on my Friday Blues Fix blog).

In my regular job, I work as an engineer with the Mississippi Department of Transportation. Part of my job is to do pavement designs for our state highways, which requires me to travel to various locations to investigate potential issues and possible improvements. Recently, we decided to overlay two state-owned roads that go through the town of Bolton, in Hinds County, Mississippi.

Bolton Cemetery actually contains several different headstones for men named Walter Vinson, but none of the grave are that of the famous Mississippi Sheiks guitar player. (Photo: © Graham Clarke, 2021)

Ground Zero for MS Blues

Most blues fans know that there’s a lot of blues history in Bolton. Charley Patton was born just south of town…..a blues marker is located at the site. There’s another blues marker in town that pays tribute to the Henderson Chatmon family and the Mississippi Sheiks. Henderson Chatmon was a former slave and was considered a fine musician, with his descendants carrying on the tradition. The Chatmons lived near the location of this blues marker on Texas Street in Bolton, and the family provided musical entertainment for black and white listeners for several decades in several different ensembles.

The Mississippi Sheiks formed in the mid 20’s around Jackson, MS (about 20 miles east of Bolton) and consisted of several of the Chatmon family, Lonnie Chatmon, who played fiddle, and guitarists Armenter (who you might know as “Bo Carter”) and Sam Chatmon, along with guitarist Walter Vinson. The Sheiks’ music combined characteristics of blues and country music, which certainly contributed to their appeal to both blacks and whites at the time. They began recording in 1930 for Okeh Records and produced several songs now regarded as classics in the blues genre.

The Sheiks’ most popular recording was one of their first, “Sitting On Top Of The World,” which has been recorded by many different artists, including Howlin’ Wolf, Ray Charles, Bill Monroe, John Lee Hooker, Cream (where I first heard it), the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Nat King Cole, and even Frank Sinatra.

The group recorded between 60 and 70 songs between 1930 and 1935, with Lonnie Chatmon and Walter Vinson holding down the fort for the entire tenure with various other artists stepping in for Carter and Sam Chatmon. The Sheiks also recorded for Bluebird Records and Paramount Records until their popularity waned in the mid 30’s. When the recordings stopped, the Chatmon brothers stopped playing music and returned to farming.

Eugene Powell & Sam Chatmon performed together at the 1979 Delta Blues Festival in Greenville,. MS.

Storytelling & Survival

Sam Chatmon played and traveled throughout the south until the 40’s, then retired from music until he returned in the 60’s and made more recordings (check out Arhoolie’s I Have To Paint My Face for a taste) until he passed away in 1983. Vinson performed until the early 40’s, returning to record and play festivals in the 60’s through the early 70’s. Lonnie Chatmon owned a café at Glen Allan, MS, but relocated to Bolton in the mid 40’s, where he worked at various ventures until he passed away in the late 40’s/early 50’s.

Armenter Chatmon (“Bo Carter”) was one of the most popular Mississippi blues men of the 30’s as a solo artists. He specialized in double entendre songs such as “Banana In Your Fruit Basket,” “My Pencil Won’t Write,” and “Your Biscuits Are Big Enough For Me,” but he was also the first artist to record “Corrine Corrina” in the late 20’s. He started losing his sight in the 30’s and settled in Glen Allan, where he farmed and continued to play and perform. As his sight worsened, he gradually wound down his music career and eventually settled in Memphis, where he died in 1964.

Networking on the Blues Trail

A few days after I posted about our visit to Mississippi John Hurt’s gravesite (click here to visit Graham’s FB page), I received a few friend invitations on Facebook from folks who had read the post, including T. DeWayne Moore, who I did not know, but upon visiting this site, I became familiar with his work. He offered a few helpful pointers on how to improve the presentation and readability of my blog.

After I spent a few days in Bolton working, I took a few pictures and shared them on my Friday Blues Fix page on Facebook. After seeing those pictures, Dewayne sent me a message requesting a favor. One of his current projects is a book about the Chatmon family and he asked me to take a picture of Ezell Chatmon’s grave in the Bolton cemetery. Ezell Chatmon was Armenter Chatmon’s (Bo Carter) oldest son, born around 1914.

[For more information on Graham’s Friday Blues Fix, please visit his website!]

John Hurt with guitar and microphone circa 1964

Field Research in the Blues

I ventured back to Bolton on the last Saturday in March. The Bolton cemetery is easy to find, just off of the old U.S. Highway 80 east of town (now a frontage road). The cemetery is divided into two sections, a white area and a black area. Dewayne had given me general directions to Mr. Chatmon’s marker, but as I drove up to the cemetery, there was a funeral in progress, so I drove a few miles south to the town of Raymond and spent about an hour at a used record/CD store there.

When I returned, the funeral was over, so I ventured out into the cemetery. A lot of the markers in the black cemetery were very old and either the engraving on the stones had worn off or some of them may not have had markings. The cemetery was kept up fairly well, but we had several days of rain before my trip, so there were some places that were pretty boggy. It was early spring and the grass had just started growing enough to be cut…..a bit on the weedy side (the white side had already been mowed and when I came back to Bolton a couple of weeks later to work, this side had been cut as well).

Following DeWayne’s description, I found Ezell Chatmon’s marker fairly easily. Someone had taken the time to attach some kind of plastic pieces to his coffin-like gravestone, and they also had stuck letters on the plastic spelling his name. There were some other similar markers on either side of his that looked a little older, I know that there were probably other family members, but none of them had any sort of identification for me to make sure that was so.

I walked through the rest of the cemetery, trying to see if I could find any more of the Chatmon family markers in the cemetery, but I didn’t have any luck. I did find several Vinson graves, including a man named Walter (part of a very nice three-person vault), but the Mississippi Sheiks’ Walter Vinson is buried in Chicago. There is an apartment complex named after Walter Vinson in Bolton….I assume the one buried in this cemetery.

It’s sad to walk through some of these cemeteries.

With the identification worn off of some of the markers, no one, except maybe some of the families still in the area, would even know a lot of these folks, or where they were buried. It’s basically the same as having an unmarked grave, and if someone hadn’t had the foresight to stick those letters to Ezell Chatmon’s grave, we might have never known the location of the Chatmon family plot. Ezell’s headstone sits next to several unmarked stones, which, very likely, hold forever close the remains of family members. Henderson Chatmon died in Bolton in the mid-1930s, and Alonzo Chatmon passed away sometime after 1950 in Hinds County.

I plan to locate more graves in the future.

In fact, I plan to visit the final resting place of K.C. Douglas in northern Madison County, and I also hope to find the grave of Richard “Hacksaw” Harney’s in Raymond. Being only a few miles south of Bolton, it seems the most natural future target for my field research.