Homework 3: "Dust and Blues"
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311MississippiDelta.pdf
American Landscapes: The Mississippi Delta
Between the Wars, 1920-‐1940
I. Spotlight on Geography: The Delta Region of Mississippi
Leaf shaped alluvial plane stretching north-‐ south 225 miles from Vicksburg to Memphis.
…Average of 65 miles wide east-‐west.
Famous in U.S. history as ‘the land of coSon’…
Yet the Mississippi River was an artery of life and civilizaWon since ancient Wmes…
And long before coSon plantaWons…
… home to the naWve ‘mound building’ civilizaWons, including the Choctaw people.
Thick forests of cypress and gum, oak and ash, mixed with tangled vines, swamps, and dense canebrakes…
The planWng of coSon by Anglo-‐ Americans in the early 1800s…
Required that the landscape be transformed: Deforested by loggers and smoothed out by planters.
A new civilizaWon of “land levelers” replaced the “mound builders”…
… and Mississippi coSon fed a growing global demand for manufactured texWles.
And the chief labor force was itself imported from a foreign land…
By 1835 Mississippi had a black majority
By 1850 slaves outnumbered whites 5:1 in Delta…
… and the African-‐American populaWon remained a majority into the 1900s.
Delta region remained mostly rural, with small towns,
farms, and “PlantaWons” containing its people…
Day laborers picking coSon near Clarksdale, Miss., 1939.
Dockery PlantaWon was a 10,000 acre plantaWon and sawmill, supporWng over 2,000 coSon farmers and their families in the early 1900s.
In this slice of American landscape a cultural revoluWon was raised along with the coSon crops…
…the delta Blues
II. Delta Blues and American Culture
Wherever large numbers of Africa-‐descended people gathered in the Americas…
… the cultural tradiWons of Africa mixed to create new cultural expressions.
In the Mississippi delta a tradiWon of music developed out of slavery…
… the blues were copied, taught, and learned among friends, relaWves, and travelers.
…inspired by tradiWons of African music. Sung by slaves and poor black laborers throughout the southern states, and evolved from spirituals and work songs.
“Delta blues” was known for its simplicity…
… as well for its emoWonal intensity.
Most oaen a single instrument, the guitar, and a single player/singer, though someWmes accompanied by a harmonica player, or even a fiddle, and less oaen a piano.
The Delta blues guitar style was disWncWve and raw…
Singer treated his guitar with “tough love,” not so much strumming as plucking, bending, and tearing at the strings, using a broken glass boSle neck “slide,” or maybe a knife, to quiet the vibraWon in the strings.
Son House, Sundown
Delta blues did not follow the “rules” of polite music…
…someWmes a single chord, with just a few modificaWons, was used for an enWre song. Rhythm counted for more than melody.
Mississippi Fred McDowell, Fred’s Worried Life Blues
Oaen slapped at the box, so the guitar doubled as a percussion instrument.
And the vocal style of the blues was defined by raw, emoWonal intensity…
Skip James, Hard Time Killing Floor
Hard Wme's is here An ev'rywhere you go Times are harder Than th'ever been befo'
And the people are driain' from door to door But they can't find no heaven I don't care where they go
Um, hm-‐hm Um-‐uh-‐hm Mm-‐hm-‐hm Um, hm-‐hm-‐hm
Let me tell you people just before I go These hard Wmes will kill you Just dry long slow
Um, hm-‐hm-‐hm Hm, um-‐hm Hm, hm-‐hm Hm, hm-‐hm-‐hm
Well, you hear me singin' my old lonesome song these hard Wmes Can't last us so very long
Hm, hm-‐hm Hmm, hmm Hm, hm-‐hm Hm, hm-‐hm
If I ever can get up Off a-‐this old hard killin' flo' I'll never get down This low no mo
Um, hm-‐hm Umm, hmm Umm, hm-‐hm Hm, hm-‐hm-‐hm I’ll never get down This low no mo
Yeah, you'll say you had money You beSer be sho' These hard Wmes gon’ Drive you from door to door
Umm-‐hm Hmm-‐hm-‐hm Umm-‐hm Hm-‐hm-‐hm Hmm, hm-‐hm-‐hm
Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more These hard Wmes will drive you from door to door
Blues music reflected the Delta landscape and its people…
Songs were oaen symbolic: combining the material condiWons of life with the emoWonal. For example, Robert Petway’s Co1on Pickin’ Blues
Lyrics might convey mulWple meanings.
Delta blues could reflect the hard reality of life in the racial caste of the South…
Parchman Farm, a.k.a. Mississippi State PenitenWary, est. in 1901, on grounds of a former plantaWon.
Subject of Delta blues song by Bukka White, Parchman Farm Blues
Prison songs reflected the harshness of convict labor…
Blues also painted a picture of the Delta landscape and a famous natural disaster…
Great flood of 1927: heavy rains pelted the central Mississippi river region beginning in summer of 1926, and by New Year’s Day the levees started to break.
27,000 sq. miles flooded, touching seven states, and up to a depth of 30 feet. 246 people killed and 400 million dollars in damages.
13,000 people evacuated near Greenville, Mississippi.
John Lee Hooker, Tupelo Blues
Lonnie Johnson, Broken Levee Blues
Black laborers conscripted and forced to work on rebuilding damaged levees….
The first levee on the southern Mississippi to fail was the Mounds Landing levee just north of Greenville, MS. StarWng as a small sand boil on the far side of the levee, within minutes, there was a wall of water eleven stories tall and three-‐quarters of a mile wide crashing across the desperately flat Mississippi Delta. The water came up so fast that people had to cut holes in their roofs to get out of their houses.
By the Wme of the flood, record labels were already promoWng “Blues” as an offshoot of Jazz…
But in the 1920s music promoters also looked to capitalize on a more raw edged style of blues, so-‐called ‘country blues’…
1932 Paramount Records “greatest hits” recording
AdverWsing in the 1920s “race” music featuring black musicians and singers…
Blind Lemmon Jefferson was a popular recording arWst to play the “down home” blues…
Found that sound in the Delta night clubs and juke joints…
In Indianola, Mississippi, south of the railroad tracks, Club Ebony (formerly Jones Night Spot) where local blues singers performed.
In 1925 local, white store owner in Jackson, Mississippi name H.C. Speir…
Speir approached talent scouWng as a means to promote his music-‐store business, which he had established in 1925 on North Farish Street, in the black business district of Jackson. He said he'd known for years that they ought to be recording southern talent, especially black blues, and the record companies weren't. He recorded demos upstairs on his own machine, and sent them to record companies.
H.C. Speir’s music store in Jackson, 1929
By the late 1920s Record labels taking an interest in Delta blues recordings…
Recording companies like Vocalion, Bluebird, and Brunswick paid bluesmen from the Delta for recording sessions and “pressed” 78-‐speed vinyl records.
“Victrola records”
The first Delta recording “star” was Charlie PaSon…
As a boy he lived on Dockery’s Plantation and learned to play guitar. As a performer in the Delta clubs and juke joints, Patton gained notoriety for his showmanship, often playing with the guitar down on his knees, behind his head, or behind his back. Charley Patton was only 5 foot 5 and 135 pounds, but his gravelly voice was rumored to have been loud enough to carry 500 yards without amplification. In 1929 he recorded 14 songs for Paramount records after having been recommended by H.C. Speir. His first release, “Pony Blues,” sold well. He died of heart-failure in 1934 at the age of 42.
Charlie PaSon, A Spoonful Blues
Women’s voices were in the blues…
Geechie Wiley, who resided in Natchez, Mississippi, performed in traveling medicine shows in the South and recorded six songs in 1930, before disappearing from the public record.
“Skinny Leg Blues”
Songs were marketed as “Race” music…
… unWl it was renamed “Rhythm and Blues” in the 1940s at the suggesWon of Billboard music writer Jerry Wexler.
Blues, jazz, gospel, and comedy records of the 1920s-‐1930s, targeWng African-‐Americans but also reaching white audiences.
From the Delta up the Mississippi River to Memphis, and the birth of Rock and Roll…
Mississippi-‐born Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup wrote and recorded That’s All Right in 1946. Elvis Presley covered the song during his 1954 Sun Studio recording session in Memphis. The song became a hit and launched Presley’s career.
"I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw.” – Elvis Presley
Most of the original Delta bluesmen were long forgoSen by 1960…
Although by World War II, over forty arWsts from the state of Mississippi had made records with the major labels, most of them did not conWnue recording and were quickly forgoSen. By 1960 a few collectors began looking for old 78 recordings:
“While I was going to college. I started to work for an exterminating company in Jackson, Mississippi. During my lunch hour I would knock on doors in the black neighborhoods and buy old Victrola records. I developed a pretty good selection of blues and I started listening to the records and really liked the music. That's when I got seriously into collecting blues.” � –Gayle Dean Wardlow, naWve, white Mississippian who began collecWng old
blues 78s in 1960, and later wrote a book about Charlie PaSon.
And by 1964 a “Blues revival” was in full swing, with a number of the Delta bluesmen rediscovered, recorded, and playing in front of all new audiences.
Skip James performs at the Newport Folk FesWval in Newport, Rhode Island 1964. James was first recorded by H.C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi in 1931, and had not performed live since the 1930s. He, along with a number of original Delta bluesmen, was rediscovered in the early 1960s, and were a major influence on American and BriWsh rock and roll from the 1960s to the present.
The “BriWsh Invasion” fueled by American blues music…
“That was all we listened to at the Wme. Just American blues or rhythm and blues or country blues. Every waking hour of every day was just siong in front of the speakers, trying to figure out how these blues were made.” -‐-‐ Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones
