What's Up?
“My mission is to organize and promote the blues from within.”
Life & Work
Bio:
After a successful 13-year advertising/marketing career in Corporate America, "Mad Man" Roger Stolle moved to Clarksdale in 2002 with a mission to "organize and promote the blues from within." He owns Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art ("Mississippi's Blues Store"), co-founded multiple festivals (Juke Joint Festival, Clarksdale Film Festival, Clarksdale Caravan Music Fest, Cat Head Mini Blues Fest, etc.), writes for Blues Music Magazine and Poland's Twój Blues magazine, is a contributing editor to Delta Magazine, authored "Hidden History of Mississippi Blues" and "Mississippi Juke Joint Confidential" (History Press/Arcadia), has contributed to blues radio shows (XRDS.fm, Sirius-XM BB King's Bluesville, WROX, KDHX) and co-produced award-winning films like Hard Times, M for Mississippi and We Juke Up in Here.
He is co-creator (with Jeff Konkel, Broke & Hungry Records) of the web series Moonshine & Mojo Hands. He produced three acclaimed albums on Big George Brock and has assisted other blues record labels. He's also toured Mississippi bluesmen to at least 8 foreign countries. Mississippi Book Festival panelist (2016, 2019).
Stolle has received a Blues Music Award (Blues Foundation), Keeping the Blues Alive Award ("Retail" category), Early Wright Blues Heritage Award (Sunflower River Blues Assoc.) and Small Business of the Year (Clarksdale Chamber of Commerce). His Cat Head store was called “one of the 17 coolest record stores in America” (Paste mag), is included in the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (Workman Publishing), and is listed in Lonely Planet, Blues Traveling and other travel guides.
An authority on Delta blues and tourism, Stolle is a frequent speaker at events and has been quoted by The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, PBS Newshour, NPR and Travel+Leisure.
He is current president of Clarksdale/Coahoma County Tourism Commission plus a present or past board member with non-profit organizations including Clarksdale Downtown Development Association, Rock & Blues Museum and Clarksdale Revitalization Inc.; Black Prairie Blues Museum (advisory board). He was also a Mississippi Arts Commission 2020 Folk Arts panelist. Stolle graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1989 (English Literature/Journalism).
Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art store is open 7 days a week at 252 Delta Avenue in historic Clarksdale, Mississippi — 662-624-5992, www.cathead.biz. Stolle can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Other affiliated web sites include www.mformississippi.com, www.wejukeupinhere.com, www.moonshineandmojohands.com and www.jukejointfestival.com.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).