Not far from here are the banks of the Mississippi, and later that afternoon I am driving across the water, listening to Big Bill Broonzy singing his Mississippi River Blues: "Mississippi River/ Is so long, deep and wide/ I can see my good girl/ Standin' on that other side." Broonzy was a Mississippi boy who, like many musicians of his generation, headed upriver to Chicago in the 1920s in search of opportunity. He has a clear, rounded voice, and a teaky guitar style that fills the car. As we roll across the bridge, the water jostling about high and spirited below, I am filled with the strange sense of reverence that proved elusive at Congo Square.
I love the Mississippi. I have travelled on it and over it and around it; I have seen it sulky and grey, curling its lip at the Louisiana sky; spied it winking out from behind the trees in the state of Mississippi, and speckled with rain in Illinois. I have sat on its banks and watched enormous grey tankers drift by; I have stood on its levees and listened to tales of young men's bodies dredged from its silty depths; heard stories of giant catfish, lamprey and meat-eating bladderwort. I have been told, too, of the legend of Jazbo Brown, who sailed up and down the river playing the clarinet, reputedly gave jazz its name, and was immortalised in Bessie Smith's Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town as "the playin'est fool/ On that Memphis boat."
There is something about the Mississippi's very nature, its wilfulness, and its sheer size - 2,320 miles long, from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and at its widest point 4,500ft across - that demands veneration. And indeed, the Mississippi is a river that has been sung about often - by Janis Joplin, the Hold Steady, Hank Snow, Mavis Staples, Jimmie Rodgers and many others. It's been the "Ol' Man" that "jus' keeps rollin' along" for Paul Robeson, and it has shined "like the national guitar" for Paul Simon. There is, meanwhile, a song on Smog's 1999 album Knock Knock, a track named River Guard, that makes me think more than any other of the Mississippi - of the sense of independence and freedom the river has come to symbolise in song, in literature, and in our minds. It is the story of a jail guard who takes his prisoners swimming.
"I love to watch them floating on their backs," he sings, "Unburdened, and relaxed." The river, he concludes, is "a way to be free".
To me, the Mississippi is a river inextricably tied to song - to blues and to jazz and to rock'n'roll; I look at the Mississippi and I feel the same sense of magnitude and awe, the same feeling of sheer uncontainability and possibility, as when I think of music. And I listen to, say, the voice of Billie Holliday, or the trumpet-playing of Louis Armstrong, or the guitar of Chuck Berry, and feel not unlike Huckleberry Finn, plunged into the Mississippi as a steamboat crashes into his raft: "I dived - and I aimed to find the bottom, too, for a 30ft wheel had got to go over me and I wanted it to have plenty of room."
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