Bridport Harbour (West Bay) and Sleepy John Estes

I've been re-reading "The Marches of Wessex" by F. J. Harvey Dutton (1922).

I'd forgotten that it opens with a description of Bridport Harbour:

"The England of my dreams is of a magical nature. It appears to me as a green chalk hill, high and strong, running towards the sunset....That England is built up partly from my intimate love of one place, Bridport Harbour in Dorset, where the world for me seems to end, and partly from many walks I have taken on the Dorset hills on my way to that haven of rest...

Yet that night as I stood on the little black wooden pier at West Bay (Bridport Harbour's alias), and watched the still beauty of the moonlit sea, the conviction came back to me that there is, after all, something of true peace in an English county- some solid precipitate left after the shaking of centuries."

Sometimes one can still experience such a feeling.

Paul Nash, Shell Guide to Dorset (1936):

“Bridport: Gate to the West. A delightful town set back from a wide street of fine red-brick houses. Formerly it had a busy life and considerable importance. The making of nets and rope still goes on, and there is a slight coasting trade. The sea lies 2m distant at West Bay, which is being developed from a quiet watering-place into something different. On every side the country is magnificent. The coast rears up a shaggy orange cliff which slopes backwards in tumultuous downs, ribbed with dark hedge lines. Across the coast road, inland, downs continue ample movement, revealing many barrows and other earthworks in their course. Here and there sudden pyramids are thrown up – actually conical in form and sometimes topped by clumps of trees.”

Everyone needs a change (even from the equally magical island of Corfu).

In the immortal words of Sleepy John Estes (whom I interviewed briefly around 1964):

"Everybody ought to make a change sometime".

It's a profound song, also recorded by Taj Mahal and Eric Clapton. Check it out on YouTube. Sleepy John's version goes more or less like this:

"Now-
Change in the ocean,
Change in the deep blue sea,
Take me back baby
For there's some change in me:
Everybody, they ought to change sometime,
Because sooner or later,
We have to go down to that lonesome ground."

Sleepy John Estes died in June 1977, in a sharecropper's shack which was put on display in a parking lot in Brownsville, where I later visited it. It reminded me of another of his songs, which I'd discussed with him back in 1964 ("Rats in my Kitchen"; see ISIS 28 November 1964):

"You know those rats are mean in my kitchen, I've ordered me a mountain cat, (x 2)
You know the way they've destroyed my groceries, I declare it's tight like that".

We could use a few mountain cats back in Mandouki.

Sleepy John, a great blues poet, signed his photograph (in the American Folk Blues Festival programme) with a simple cross.

On recently released Sleepy John material.