Mississippi blues to be preserved

Fresno State creative writing professor will help cement blues legend B.B. King's legacy with post on museum advisory board

By Jackie Womack
The Collegian

The fertile ground of the Mississippi Delta has nurtured many writers and singers. Now a writer from Mississippi, Steve Yarbrough, is helping to create a museum that honors fellow Mississippian, blues singer B.B. King.

Yarbrough, who is the James and Coke Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing at Fresno State and the author of six novels, has been named to the B.B. King Museum Foundation advisory board.

“I felt just extreme pleasure,” Yarbrough said. “This museum is being built to honor the greatest person to ever come from our town.”

Both Yarbrough and B.B. King are from the same area, near Indianola, Miss.

James Walton, the chair of the English department, said Yarbrough’s appointment may be the first of its kind. “I’m not aware of anyone [in the department] getting that kind of distinction,” he said. “The museum is not just going to be about B.B.,” Yarbrough said. “It’s going to be about where he grew up.”

In fact, according to Connie Gibbons, the executive director of the museum, the facility’s full name is the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center. It is scheduled to open in spring 2008.

“[The museum] is about the life and music of B.B. King and about the cultural heritage of the Mississippi Delta,” she said. “We’re excited Steve’s going to be a part of this. He’s from the area, he’s got a unique perspective and he’s going to be a valuable member of this group.”

One hope for the museum is that it helps revitalize Indianola, Yarbrough said. “[But] there needs to be a B.B. King museum whether or not it ever turns a dollar,” he said. “The man is a giant.”

Yarbrough said Indianola is in the heart of blues country. If you drew a 30-mile circle around Indianola, you would cover many of the landmarks of blues history, he said. Blues man Charlie Patton is buried three miles outside of Indianola in what was an unmarked grave until singer John Fogerty paid to have a marker put up. And legendary Robert Johnson played in Indianola a number of times. “It’s at the center of it. It’s really ground zero for the blues,” Yarbrough said.

King himself helped indirectly inspire Yarbrough to pursue a career in the arts.

At age 13, he heard a record by King played in a record store. The store owner told Yarbrough that King was also from Indianola. “It was hearing B.B. King and realizing how far he had come that gave me hope that I could find a life as an artist myself,” he said.

Hearing King on a record or CD is as close as Yarbrough has come to meeting him. “I grew up in the town and I’ve never laid eyes on the man,” Yarbrough said. “I’ve never gotten to see the man in concert. It seems like every time I get close to being able to hear him play, something catastrophic happens.”

Yarbrough isn’t exactly sure what he will be doing as a board member, he said.

He just returned from one meeting about the museum in Washington D.C. and expects to attend another in two weeks.

Gibbons said Yarbrough will help the museum with its exhibits. “He’ll be participating with other scholars and people from the region to review the material we exhibit,” she said. She said that members help make sure that facts are accurate and that nothing important has been left out.

Yarbrough said one thing the museum will cover is segregation and civil rights. Telling the story of where B.B King grew up means telling the story of segregation, Yarbrough said.

He said that in Indianola, the population is 65 percent African American “but, historically, white people have owned everything.”

Things have changed some, Yarbrough said.

The civil rights era was the source of that change. “It was a very tense time, a time of fear and change for white people,” he said. “As a child, I had a feeling that things were changing around me but I didn’t understand.”

He said that growing up, it was difficult coming to the conclusion that his parents were wrong about supporting segregation.

Yarbrough said that his novels have some things in common with the blues. “It’s hard to escape the fact that [the blues] are about one group being oppressed,” he said. “I’ve always dealt with that.”

Blues is also about bad love and there’s a fair amount of that in his novels, Yarbrough said.

His sixth novel, “Prisoners of War,” featured a young blues man who left his hometown in 1943, the same year that King left Indianola but Yarbrough said his character isn’t based on King.

“Prisoners of War” was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2005.

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