Winter Blues by Henry Lewi, Mississippi Sipping Bourbon

  Late December 1951, Winter Blues had remained top of the US Billboard Charts for the last ten weeks and looked likely to remain so.  The mystical Blues song by the Blues Guitarist Careful Saint Luke had come from nowhere.  The song originally played in the local radio station by the blind and barefoot blues guitarist had spread like wildfire from its original home in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood, to the whole of the United States.  Once heard the mystical blues melody and words remained burned into the brain of all those who heard and listened, and the records were in hot demand.  Record Producers from all over the US had made their way to Greenwood Mississippi in the hope of signing Careful Saint Luke to their record label, but he was nowhere to be found.   

  The mystery was made all the more pressing by an article that had appeared in the Delta Leader in late October 1951 which claimed that the Blind Black Blues Guitarist Careful Saint Luke, like Robert Johnson before him, had met the devil at the very same Crossroads and sold his soul for musical success. The story was picked up firstly by the Biloxi Herald, then by the Clarion-Ledger, and was then reprinted in the bigger and more influential newspapers such as The New York Times, The Boston Herald and the Washington Post.  

  Throughout the US, the Blues song grew and grew in popularity, the population mesmerized by the haunting tones of the song, and now additionally fuelled by this supposed link with the Devil; but the blind musician Careful Saint Luke, was nowhere to be found, and not a word was heard from him. The record producers aided first by the Local and State Police and then by the FBI searched high and low for Careful Saint Luke, but he remained lost, hidden or elusive.

 During December 1951 the streets throughout the US remained quiet, factories and shops remained empty as people stayed at home listening to Winter Blues as it was played endlessly on all the local and national Radio stations; the country now ground to a halt, seemingly mesmerized by the bottleneck blues song. The newspapers screamed “Communist Plot; Reds Amongst Us,” and even “The Devil’s Music, Stop It Now.” Meanwhile the Temperance Movement and the Southern based Klan organised marches against the playing of Winter Blues, and all the while the population stayed at home listening to the music of Careful Saint Luke.   Congress and the Senate discussed and debated the issue, urging the President to sign a Presidential Order banning the playing of Winter Blues but this stalled, as it would have meant the withdrawal of the First Amendment and revoking the much protected Freedom of Expression; meanwhile the people stayed at home and listened, spellbound by the music. 

  On Christmas Eve 1951, a Distinguished Professor of English at Harvard, wrote a column in The Boston Globe about the story of Careful Saint Luke and his song Winter Blues, and declared that the name Careful Saint was indeed an anagram of Satan Lucifer, he finished with the words “need more be said?” 

About the author  

Henry is a retired surgeon and member of the Canvey Writers Group. He has published a number of stories on the CafeLit site. Did you enjoy the story? 

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