Feeling the Blues

Blues and Community
 
Few things are certain in blues music. From the identity of the masked marvel to the mystery surrounding Robert Johnson's death, a form that originated as the sole possession of the lowest rung of American society left little in the way of scholarly records and annotated histories. The music itself is uncertain, a loose formula that is tweaked and adapted to reflect its performers personal style. But one irrefutable blues truth is that the music: the method of playing, the style with which it is delivered and the experiences that inform the lyrics, collectively known today as the blues, has its roots in a triangular swath of country that encompasses the south central region of Mississippi and skirts the south eastern edge of Arkansas and the north western part of Tennessee called the Mississippi Delta. It is here that the disparate strands of African and African-American music and culture: the field hollers and work songs, the spirituals and sermons, coalesced into the single, expressive form known as the blues.
Map of the Mississippi Delta

Birthplace of the Blues

 Once a forest as far as the eye could see, the Mississippi Delta became affluent white planters goldmine with potential fertile soil and heavily wooded country. They recruited scores of impoverished African-American men, most former slaves, whose backbreaking labor cleared the way for the plantations that only perpetuated their social and economic indenture. A product of post emancipation America with conditions that lacked freedom and equality, sharecropping defined the cultural landscape of the Mississippi Delta from the 1840's to its demise around the 1970's. The strongest influence still felt within the area by this system is the incredibly polarized society- where the haves have plenty and the nots almost none and with the division almost always across racial lines. Born out of this social and economic milieu, Blues is one of America's only indigenous musical art forms.
 

"The blues started from slavery," said Memphis Slim, a noted Delta pianist, and the logging camps and subsequent sharecropping system of the Mississippi Delta replicated and enforced antebellum conditions.

Besides the Delta, other parts of the south with dense populations of African Americans possessed the musical components that fused into the blues; the call and response field hollers and work songs existed wherever African-American's toiled in the fields, and the same applies to the spirituals and cadenced sermons of African-American church services and praise meetings. The availability of progressive urban music and burgeoning recording and listening technology (the wax cylinder and the phonograph) furthered its expansion. What distinguishes the Delta is the land itself. First impressions of the Mississippi Delta The first thing one notices about the Mississippi Delta is the sheer emptiness of the place. Thanks to the work of the loggers nearly 150 years ago, the Delta is now nothing but flat, open spaces, seemingly existing ad infinitum.

Charley Patton c.1889-1934 long time resident of Dockery's Plantation. Patton is considered the father of the Delta blues. Listen to his famous song, "Pony Blues".

 

View from Muddy Water's cabin, Stovall Plantation, 1989.

 "Blues is a music of pain," said Terry "Big-T" Willaims, a local guitarist. This is a pain one can hear in the voices of Delta blues singers. Unlike the blues of the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia or East Texas, all of which played prominent roles in shaping American popular music and deserve individual recognition beyond the lump term "blues," the Delta blues drew its power from its singers intensity. It is a lyrical ferocity unmatched in any other blues style, and its emotion seems directly connected to the place from which it came. There is an old Gullah saying, "to know deh, you got tuh go deh." This adage seems tailor made for the Mississippi Delta. There is a specificity of feeling to the place, and it is this intangible feeling, whether it's the existential pain, the unyielding emptiness or just that "low-down shakin' achin' chill" that seems to answer the question of why it would be home to the blues.