by Danny Colman
originally published on Rock On! This Week’s Sound Bites…12/4/2025
“Yes, Delta Avenue and we’re glad to have you, “ said Roger Stolle, owner of the store affectionately known as “Cat Head” as he warmly welcomed all who entered his fantastic establishment located on Delta Avenue in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Stolle, like so many others, fell in love with the Mississippi Delta and its music, people and environment after his initial visit but as he states on his website, “I never set out to own a record store or art gallery or souvenir stand (or whatever the heck this thing is) I set out to fulfill a mission.” Well, whatever the heck it is, his Cat Head store and brand has become symbolic with Clarksdale, The Delta and blues music/musicians far and wide.
As stated, Roger was a visitor and now, nearly 24 years later he and his store are such an integral part of the community; which was no accident by the way, it was more like a calling of sorts.
“This is the real deal,” he said with a slight laugh. “I’m from Dayton, Ohio originally and I got into music when I was young; it was actually when Elvis died in 1977, I was 10 years old and that was the first music I paid attention to. I started buying little 45 RPM records with my allowance and as it turns out, I now knew blues and R&B cover songs. So, I got into blues through the back door. I was self-educated through the years, I went to college, got out and went into advertising which eventually, in February of 1995, took me to St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis of course had a great blues scene at the time because a lot of the great migration blues men from Mississippi that didn’t make it to Chicago, they stopped there. So, it was a great scene but being only five hours from Mississippi, I decided that I was gonna go down and do the dead man blues tour. I thought it was all gone, I thought, I’ll see the gravesites and birthplaces; at that time there was one blues museum and it was super small and it was upstairs in the Carnegie Public Library here in Clarksdale. That trip was basically that but I did get to talk to a lot of people and realized that you could luck into live blues experiences but they just weren’t as common as they once had been. My second visit I did luck into a juke joint experience up in Chulahoma, Mississippi. It was in the middle of nowhere, it was Junior Kimbrough’s place, an awesome juke joint that looked like nothing on the outside. It was an old brown building, clearly built without the aid of an architect (Laughs). They say it was a former church, I don’t know but he ran it on most Sunday nights and once inside, you stepped in the door and every square inch had folk art painted on the walls, the ceiling, these crazy colorful murals and sparkles. There was moonshine getting passed around, R.L. Burnside and his kids and grandkids, Junior Kimbrough and his kids and grandkids were there and they all played, a total local African-American audience and it really just blew my mind, it was like an Alan Lomax moment; like stepping into a history book. I just couldn’t get that out of my head because it showed me that it still existed in its real, true Mississippi form but it just wasn’t happening every night, it wasn’t always on a schedule, it wasn’t really advertised and so, through the years I kept visiting and looking for those experiences. I got to know musicians so that I could visit them at home like T-Model Ford and those kind of characters but I kept thinking, if you could make this reliable; I’m a blues fan, I was a tourist, I know there are bands all around the globe, if we can make it reliable we could be that town. I honed in on Clarksdale, Mississippi, it had the music most nights, we’ve ended up having music 365 nights a year now but even most nights; then we could be the stop between Memphis and New Orleans. Now I say between Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans although, 23 years ago when I moved here, people weren’t really talking about Nashville to be honest. So, fast-forward and after working with Red Paden at Red’s Lounge; informally, not like I had a job but I did a lot of work (Laughs) and getting him to be reliable and then working officially and formally with Ground Zero Blues Club for seven years and getting them up to four nights a week live blues and always blues, we started to cover off the weekend with no problem. Then others like me started moving here and opening Hambone for example, the Bluesberry Cafe` and eventually The Bad Apple Blues Club and those were folks who were willing to take the odd days and the odd hours to cover us off. Now, if you look at last year, we had live blues every night in Clarksdale plus many days, typically Wednesday through Sunday, there was something during the day. We also went from one festival a year back then which is still a great festival, The Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival in August if you want to come here when it’s hot, we still have that but now we have 15 other festivals of various size and scope. The biggest of which will celebrate 23 years this April is The Juke Joint Festival and folks who are interested can go to jukejointfestival.com. There are over 100 blues acts with names like Monkeys Riding Dogs Herding Sheep; there you go, the Delta in a nutshell. Bubba O’Keefe, our tourism director, often tells people that we have more characters than Sesame Street and it really is true. There are so many characters here and we mean that in the best way. There are really interesting people, musicians and artists and of course we have all of the history and culture that is inherent to this place, the food and all of that stuff but to be able to offer the live blues experience on a regular basis like we do just really brings it all home. We have really cool places to stay. We have unique lodging on top of traditional lodging; everything from an award winning hostel to old shacks, to luxury lofts to a Hampton Inn so, come on over.”
The aforementioned “Bubba” and even Roger himself are two of the “Characters” that make up the fabric that is Clarksdale and his Cat Head brand has been seen on television, in movies and documentaries; how did he come up with “Cat Head?”
“Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art, Inc.” is 23 years old and I named the store Cat Head originally for three reasons. The least of which would be after Cat Head Biscuits a Southern biscuit the size of a cat’s head and kind of a quasi local food item. The middle of the three reasons I guess would be blues record labels that have animal names, there are so many of them. Blind Pig, Fat Possum, Alligator, Armadillo, Rooster, Catfish; Earwig isn’t actually an animal but it’s something I guess and looking at all of that, I fit well with that as a blues store which is what I am with a lot of music. I have CDs, records, even tapes, DVDs but the main reason I call it Cat Head is the so-called drawings of Pat Thomas. Unfortunately, he has passed on recently but he was a Leland, Mississippi bluesman, folk artist and character who inherited his father, James “Son” Thomas’s musical and artistic styles. One of the things Pat did was draw cats and cat heads. He never wrote cat head but he called anything with a cat, “Cat Head.” I’m telling you, he did tens of thousands of these basic line art folk drawings through the decades. If you ever met him, he was just such a special guy, such a character, he never met a stranger but he was also crazy in a good way. He didn’t travel around or tour a lot but he was amazing and part of the inspiration for my store name. There is also now in Mississippi and 30-some states with distribution, there is a Cat Head Vodka. That is not my brand but the name was inspired by my store so if you see a bottle of that, it has a cat head on the label and that is one of Pat’s drawings.”
“Basically,” he continued, “This is the store that I’ve always wanted to walk into but could never find. It is all the blues, folk art and Mississippi stuff that is sort of pulled into one space because A) it is what I love and I can kind of showcase to people and B) It also attracts folks to come in the door and then I can try to trick them into spending the night had they thought they were only gonna spend two hours in Clarksdale and head on down the road. I can be like well, there is live blues at three o’clock at The Bad Apple and at five o’clock the Delta Blues Alley Cafe or hey tonight at Red’s and Ground Zero, that kind of thing.”
The Jersey Shore Jazz & Blues Foundation has formed a partnership with Clarksdale and its tourism board of which Solle also sits on. Each year, a delegation heads to the Delta and then The Delta comes north months later. Stolle seems genuinely thrilled when he explains how this came to be.
“Christine Zemla is a longtime visitor to The Delta, to Clarksdale and to my store Cat Head and just like you and I are having a conversation on opposite sides of the counter, her and I did as well and I think it was something to the effect of, “Wow, I wish I could bring what I’ve experienced here back to New Jersey because this is so special.” I said, “Why can’t you?” That is the thing, the real deal musicians who grew up here in this environment with juke joints and house parties learning from their older blues mentors; they don’t play one show here and a whole different thing when they go somewhere else, they bring Clarksdale to you. You get as much as that experience as you can from the stage and of course, Big A for those of you who were at the show, you may remember, he brings it out to the audience because that’s what you do at a juke joint, it becomes real interactive.”
With more than 20 festivals averaging out to an event approximately every one to two weeks, Clarksdale has risen from a historical stopover enroute to New Orleans or Memphis to a large destination for music enthusiasts worldwide, something that keeps Stolle very busy.
“I spend thousands of hours, I don’t even know a year working on The Juke Joint Festival, I’m on the tourism board, I have the store, I have a radio show on a San Diego station, KSDS, “The Crossroads Delta Blues Hour” on 88.3 or you can go to jazz88.org and hear archived shows. It is just a one hour show that is about here; that was the deal when I agreed to do it, it’s about here. I talk about the events here, the history here, the musicians here; most of the music is from Clarksdale, Delta, Mississippi and vicinity. I’ll reach out a little bit and do a birthday special or something like that but it’s really trying to promote and get people to visit here. I put on some smaller festivals like a film festival for example, I write a column for Blues Music Magazine, I’ve written some books and I’m working on another project right now, so I keep busy.”
To discover more about Roger Stolle and Cat Head, please visit www.cathead.biz and to find out more about Clarksdale, Mississippi and tourism, please go to www.visitclarksdale.com