(🇺🇸 version)
# be-BOP and the Blues
Do you know the connection between be-BOP and the blues?
Sure — bebop is a genre that came out of swing jazz, a cousin of the blues. But that's not all of it.
"Blues Boy" B.B. King, one of the three "Kings" of the blues, had a manager (Sidney A. Seidenberg) to handle his contracts. But to stay focused on his music and take care of the other practical aspects of his life and his tours, B.B. King already had a Bebop, back in 1951. Seventy-two years before we launched our project, Willis Edwards Jr. was running the entire logistics of the King's life. Thanks to him, the King could focus on his music. Everyone called him Bebop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29wMp2nnx_0---
They say that a writer always puts a little of themselves into what they write. In a past life, I wrote books, and I still work in IT. Those two lives qualified me — but I have a third one that takes up most of my days: music. And I poured a great deal of that passion into be-BOP.
When I designed be-BOP on the basis of the brief Lionel handed me in early 2023, I already had a vision in mind — one that stuck very tightly to music.
Between 2016, 2017, and 2018, in between freelance IT contracts mostly in e-commerce, I spent nearly six months in Louisiana and Mississippi, doing historical and visual research to write a fiction universe weaving together blues, voodoo, and Prohibition. I mainly spent time in three towns: New Orleans and Lafayette in Louisiana, and Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Clarksdale — a modest town of about 15,000 souls, founded in 1848 — is known in folklore as the place where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for the gift of music. Historically, Clarksdale has lived through the collapse of its cotton industry, a tragic episode of the Red Summer of 1919, a visit from another "King" (Martin Luther, in 1958 and again in 1962), and above all the birth or passage of countless bluesmen — from Son House to John Lee Hooker, by way of Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, and "Big" Jack Johnson. At the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, just a stone's throw from the Ground Zero Blues Club (co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman), you could occasionally find "Lucille" on display — one of the legendary guitars of Indianola's prodigal son.
And recently, you may have heard of Clarksdale — or even caught a glimpse of its surroundings: several scenes from the 2025 film *Sinners*, directed by Ryan Coogler, were shot there.
In 2017, I met some of the staff at "Visit Clarksdale," the local tourism office, along with someone from city hall. They confided in me about the town's challenges: orphaned by its industry, it was surviving mostly thanks to music tourism — a true economic lung that drew most of its oxygen from the Juke Joint Festival, held every April, which mobilizes the entire town.
In fact — not content with having my book *Tales of the Deep South* (written in French) find a home at the Delta Blues Museum — I was even invited in 2020 and 2021 to host a stand there. A childhood dream I never knew I had.
Was it good? No idea. Two weeks before I was due to leave, a tiny little virus from Asia paralyzed the entire planet… Goddamn covid. But still.
What had stuck with me about Clarksdale was:
- the Ground Zero Blues Club, a true musical Mecca with bands paid by passing the hat
- the timid presence of credit cards — and, when actually deployed in a shop (like at the Delta Blues Museum), the connection issues
- those bars where artists' paintings were for sale right next to their blues albums
- the Shack Up Inn, with its old grain silos converted into B&B rooms, plus a bar, concerts, and music workshops
- those strange ATMs with the orange B logo from LibertyX and CoinMe scattered here and there
- musicians like Watermelon Slim, who'd play the Ground Zero Blues Club or Red's one night and the Bluesberry Café — a bed-and-breakfast/café/bar/concert venue — the next
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8_WDNZ-znwWatermelon Slim — Bill Homans in everyday life — is quite a story: Vietnam veteran, conscientious objector, truck driver, occasional collaborator with John Lee Hooker, Robert Cray, even Henry Vestine (guitarist of Canned Heat). The "working-class singer," as he was nicknamed, narrowly escaped a heart attack in 2002. He decided to dedicate the rest of his life to his music, in Clarksdale, after decades of wearing two — sometimes three — hats, juggling music with day jobs to make ends meet.
Watermelon Slim shone mostly locally at first, but eventually broke through across North America, racking up awards and nominations. And then one day, the improbable: thanks to a visitor passing through Clarksdale, his music crossed the Atlantic. He played Paris, he played London — even though Europe had refused him a solo career back in the '90s. He is now a recognized international artist.
https://www.franceinfo.fr/culture/musique/jazz/golden-boy-watermelon-slim-la-voix-de-lamerique-authentique_3364967.htmlOver a bottle of cognac in Clarksdale, he confided in me his outrage at the laughable royalties paid by Spotify, and at the obscene margins taken by online concert ticket services.
Something was clicking in my head back then. The gears were turning hard. Today, I see it more clearly.
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Clarksdale is:
- tips
- pay-what-you-want
- concert tickets
- music sales
- event tickets
- time-slot bookings (for music lessons)
- overnight bookings
- shoeboxes pooling the cash from tips, bar tabs, and album sales
- donation drives for organizations working to preserve and promote local culture, like Clarksdale Culture Capital (fun fact: they're the reason *Sinners* was actually screened in Clarksdale after being filmed there — a special event, because Clarksdale didn't have… a cinema)
- local artists known all over the world, because the people lucky enough to see them live only needed a bit more visibility to send them international
In fact, when Lionel laid out the foundations of be-BOP for me, that's what I had in mind: Clarksdale. Clarksdale, citadel of music, carried by a federated be-BOP run by the city. Every musician with their own web storefront, every band with their own shop to sell without middlemen, every hotel and every restaurant with its own POS — all of them able to offer online slot bookings or event tickets independently, without ever having to switch tools.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGuEo7ecFN4It was a beautiful vision.
be-BOP exists today, and does all of that — or close to it (we're still working on the Federation piece) — but it's not in Clarksdale yet. Local culture is like free software and open source: it pays badly. In the end, it may be in Tahiti or in Goma rather than Mississippi that be-BOP grows up.
But still, still… what a vision, what a dream.
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So B.B. King had his Bebop, seventy years before we did. How many new "Kings" could break out beyond Coahoma County? When will there be a be-BOP for Watermelon Slim, Super Chikan, Lala Craig, or Steve Kolbus?
One day, maybe… I believe it.
> "The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you." — B.B. King
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8hOvsg_AiY
