By Cédric Vernet 
From Memphis to New Orleans, photographer Pierre Grasset travelled the roads of the blues, from Beale Street through Mississippi and on to Louisiana. With The Blue Devil’s, Idées noires, musique bleue, he has created a 204-page travel journal in which encounters, landscapes and photography tell the story of a music that is still very much alive in the American Deep South.
The title provides the first clue. The “blue devils” are those dark thoughts from which the blues takes its name. Pierre Grasset uses them as the starting point for a journey that does not simply follow in the footsteps of Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Elvis Presley or Muddy Waters. What interests him is what remains of that history today, in the places, the faces and the people who continue to play this music.
Blues Actu wanted to give him plenty of room to tell his story. Working from questions prepared by Cédric Vernet, Tibo Degraeuwe met him to look back on how the project began, his fifteen days on the roads of the South and, above all, the encounters that left their mark on him. More than a presentation of the book, this interview is an exceptional account of Pierre Grasset’s journey into the heart of blues America, from Memphis through Mississippi and on to Louisiana.
🎥 Face Caméra: Pierre Grasset recounts his journey through blues America
It all began with an unexpected change of plans…
The story begins far from Mississippi. In 2022, Pierre Grasset was due to embark with SOS Méditerranée to produce a photo report. The trip was cancelled at the last minute, leaving the photographer suddenly free, at a time in his life he describes as difficult. Rather than dwell on the disappointment, he turned to a passion that had always been part of his life: music.
“I really didn’t want to stay stuck on something negative. I thought: I’m going to find a subject that really matters to me, music. I’ve always loved music. It’s one of the most important things in my life.” He got into his car, switched on the radio and heard Black Pumas. “It was like a revelation. I thought: I’m going to New Orleans and I’m going to do a story about the blues. But the birthplace of the blues is actually further upstream, around Memphis and Mississippi. So I thought: I’m going to Memphis. The next day I bought my plane tickets, and fifteen days later I was on my way.”
The project became what he describes in the book as “an intimate travel journal with the blues”. The Blue Devil’s combines photography, first-person storytelling, encounters and detours along the roads of the Deep South.
From Memphis to Clarksdale, in the heart of the Delta blues
The journey begins in Memphis, on Beale Street. Pierre Grasset knows the pitfalls of places that have become tourist attractions and fears finding a reconstructed, artificial version of the blues. Instead, he discovers the opposite. “I’ve travelled to tourist areas where people tell you: this is the blues street, and very quickly everything can start to feel a bit fake. But over there, it really is living blues.”
What strikes him most are the musicians who play for hours, sometimes in front of only a handful of people. “You have bands playing sets that last at least eight hours every day. To me, they’re music workers. When they get on stage, even if there are only ten people in front of them, they play as if their lives depended on it. Musically, I had rarely seen anything so powerful.”
The economic reality is far more fragile. The musicians largely rely on tips from the audience. For Pierre Grasset, the contrast says something essential about this music: “When you know there are seven or eight of them on stage and they’re going to split the meagre amount collected in the bucket after eight hours of playing… there’s something beating inside them. It’s vital. Your life is being played out on that stage.”
Memphis also provides a journey through history, from the Lorraine Motel and the National Civil Rights Museum to Sun Studio and Stax. But the book takes on another dimension when the photographer leaves the city behind. Along Highway 61, major roads give way to cotton fields, isolated houses and small Mississippi towns. “You cross these huge expanses and everything is empty.”
In Clarksdale, the legendary birthplace of Delta blues, Pierre Grasset meets Mississippi Marshall, for whom “the blues is a way of life, a passion, the truth”, and Lucious Spiller at Red’s. He also visits the Crossroads associated with Robert Johnson and his legendary pact with the devil. The myths are there, but his camera is primarily interested in the Mississippi of today.
Photographing the blues, a music you cannot see
The project raises an obvious question: how do you photograph music? Pierre Grasset chooses to capture its effects on bodies and faces. “It’s a strange subject for a photographer, taking an interest in something as intangible and immaterial as sound or music. I would actually put music above every other art form, including photography.”
To explain his approach, he compares sound to the wind: “You can’t make the wind itself visible. The only thing you can show is its effect on things. I became interested in the expressions musicians make when they play, because they are really living what they are playing. And also in the way the audience moves. You can see the sound through what it produces in people.”
This approach is closely connected to his work in social and documentary photography. His subject goes beyond the concert itself: it also encompasses the places, living conditions and history that gave birth to the blues.
Teddy’s Juke Joint, an unforgettable encounter in Louisiana
Of all the encounters during the journey, meeting Teddy holds a special place. Near Zachary, outside Baton Rouge, Pierre Grasset’s GPS sends him down a pitch-dark track. “Honestly, I was scared. I had no idea where I was going. I drove about 200 metres into the woods and arrived at something that looked more like an abandoned shack than anything else. Except that inside this shack, there was a blues club.”
Teddy’s Juke Joint operates on almost nothing: around twenty people in the room, six musicians and a few customers eating on site. Yet when the concert begins, Teddy does not stay behind the bar. “He takes his wooden rocking chair and puts it right in front of the band. He’s the owner. And there is absolutely no way he is going to miss a single second of the concert. That’s where you see the beauty of it.”
During the break, Teddy plays instrumental versions of blues standards before picking up the microphone. “That was when I really felt I was living the blues. Not observing it, not looking at it, not being a spectator. I was living it. To me, this music really is alive. There’s a whole civilisation around it. It isn’t simply a concert, it’s a way of life.”
The memory remains one of the strongest of the entire trip: “That man really moved me deeply. You realise that only people with that kind of passion can live like that. I could have made the whole journey just for him.” That evening, Sam Joyner is on stage. He describes the blues as a “musical medicine for the mind and body”.
The blues, a music inseparable from Mississippi
The further Pierre Grasset travels through Mississippi, the broader his subject becomes. The blues cannot be separated from the land where it was born, or from its social and racial history. “What interested me about the blues was everything it generated in terms of a whole civilisation. The blues wasn’t born there by chance. When you are there, you understand that.”
He continues: “For me, the blues isn’t only the music, it’s the place where it was born. Of course I went to clubs and listened to the music, but above all I went to the places people talk about in blues songs. Through those songs, they were telling the story of the lives they lived in the Deep South of the United States.”
His gaze also turns to the racial divisions that still run through this part of the country. He says he was struck by the paradox of a society deeply marked by racism while at the same time being profoundly nourished by African American culture. “How do you explain that anti-Black racism can be so deeply rooted in relationships, while at the same time this is the population that feeds you spiritually and literally through food? How can you take pleasure from the hands and voices of people whom you otherwise look down on so much? To me, the blues also tells the story of that paradox.”
From Lafayette to New Orleans
The Blue Devil’s does not stop at traditional forms of the blues. In Lafayette, Pierre Grasset almost accidentally comes across the filming of music videos by BlowaBagJay and then GT Ransom. The detour into hip-hop ultimately extends the same line of enquiry: observing the new forms taken by African American musical expression.
The final major stage of the journey leads to New Orleans, after more than 1,500 kilometres on the road. On Frenchmen Street, guitars increasingly give way to horns and brass bands. The “second line”, rooted in the city’s funeral processions, tells in its own way the same story as the blues: beginning with mourning and pain before moving towards dance and celebration.
Turning sorrow into beauty
Perhaps this is the thread running through the entire book. In his introduction, Pierre Grasset quotes a line that stayed with him: “This music heals all the sorrows of the world because it transforms them into beauty.” It is an idea that connects directly with his own understanding of both the blues and photography.
“The sorrows of the world interest me as a photographer. I’m interested in people who suffer because I want to bring their suffering into the light. And for me, the blues has this completely poetic quality: by expressing things that are sad, you transform them into something incredibly joyful and beautiful. It is a way of confronting everything ugly in our world through music and turning it into beauty.”
For him, this is also what gives the blues its universal power: “You can play this music to anyone, anywhere in the world, and it goes straight to the heart. It carries this desire for transformation, to turn everything that is shit into something immensely beautiful.”
The Blue Devil’s, Pierre Grasset’s book
Portraits, concert scenes, weathered façades, empty roads, bars, churches and ordinary passers-by: The Blue Devil’s photographs the world surrounding the blues as much as the people who keep it alive. Some pages are almost silent, while others combine several photographs, a few lines of text or handwritten notes. The book therefore retains the character of a travel journal rather than that of a conventional historical work.
The final pages also provide a soundtrack to the journey, bringing together Charley Patton, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, Son House, Nina Simone and B.B. King alongside Fantastic Negrito, Leon Bridges and Vieux Farka Touré.
After failing to find a publisher, Pierre Grasset eventually published The Blue Devil’s himself. “I knocked on quite a few doors, but I think the doors of publishing are fairly closed these days. It isn’t always easy and there were some serious moments of discouragement. In the end, I published it myself.”
By the end of the journey, one conviction stands out: the blues is not simply a music whose historic landmarks can now be visited. It remains a living music, inseparable from a place, a history and the people who live there. And that is precisely what Pierre Grasset chose to put into pictures.
Listen to the soundtrack of The Blue Devil’s
Pierre Grasset’s journey also has its own soundtrack. From Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters, from Bessie Smith to Nina Simone, listen on Deezer to the 56 tracks that accompany The Blue Devil’s and extend the roads travelled in the book through music.
📖 Order The Blue Devil’s
The Blue Devil’s, Idées noires, musique bleue
· Pierre Grasset
204 pages · €35 · Self-published
The book is available directly from Pierre Grasset, who will provide you with information about ordering, payment and shipping.
Order the book