Plumpp’s poetry reflects a love of the Blues

By Randy Bell

Sterling Plumpp, speaking at his Mississippi Blues Trail marker dedication in October, 2022.

Unlike two other Clinton natives honored with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker, Sterling Plumpp isn’t a musician. But at an early age, he was exposed to the music of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and other Mississippi bluesmen, even though his grandparents, who raised him, wouldn’t allow it to be played in their home.

“My aunt, I suppose, had some kind of contract with the devil,” Plumpp, 82, told the crowd at the marker dedication in October 2022. “[She] married a man who ran a juke joint, sold alcohol and there was a jukebox.” And that was his introduction to the blues.

Still, though, his grandparents played a role.

“I inherited their culture, coming to the church, and from that I began my love of the blues.”

At the same time, Plumpp said he was not a big, strong athlete.

“And it forced me to be introspective, and, in many ways, to live in books.”

He attended college in Kansas, where a professor called him aside, pointed to a James Baldwin short story and said, “I think you should be interested in this.” Plumpp said that was the first time he realized you could make literature out of the African-American experience.

After he moved to Chicago, he continued to enjoy the work of blues musicians, and Plumpp said he never lost his “Southern roots.”

His first book of poetry was published in 1969. His book, Clinton, won an Illinois Arts Council literary award in 1975. His 1982 work, The Mojo Hands Call, I Must Go, was awarded the Carl Sandburg Literary Prize for poetry. More recently, his book, Home/Bass, won an American Book Award for Poetry in 2014. And, in 2019, Plumpp received the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s Fuller Award for lifetime achievement.

Plumpp calls it an “extreme honor” to be included on a Blues Trail marker in his hometown.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in a three-part series featuring Clinton’s Blues Trail honorees, which include Plumpp, Eddie Cotton Jr., and Jarekus Singleton.