The Delta

Mississippi Delta, 1946

Summer night in Mississippi is a humid womb. The air clings to your skin like the barber's towel before a shave It's thick, and the fireflies swim through it like so many fluorescent minnows. The crickets and katydids scream their cacophonous chorus and the frogs shout back. All is oppression, but it is Nature's oppression. It has its own logic and purity. It makes sense.

"Ain't no sense to man's oppression," muses the man on the porch (every good southern home has a porch, from the old plantation mansions to the "shotgun" houses), "you fight in the war, earn your bones, come back and it's right back to sharecroppin'. No damn money, no damn life. Mississippi sun drive you into the ground like a nail out in the fields."

"Never gonna change," he thinks and grabs his box: a pawn shop acoustic with a worn fretboard and sticky strings. He curses his mother, everyone's mother, and grabs two bottle necks. The one still attached to its bottle meets his lips. The other slides onto his finger. He begins to play. It's an old Ledbelly number but he does it different.

He pushes the slide into the chords with a sound like the rusty gates of Hell opening. His lead notes sting like wasps - all buzz and aggression. He howls the lyrics to the point of pain.

"In the pines...in the pines

where the sun never shines

I will shiver the whole night through!"

Oh Black Water

Nobody can trace the flashpoint of the Blues but it is generally agreed it began in the Mississippi Delta somewhere in the late 1800s. W.C. Handy gave himself the title "Father of the Blues" but he admitted to hearing it for the first time from a passing traveler on a train platform in 1903. He is credited for the first recorded song with "blues" in the title: "Memphis Blues" in 1912. He is also credited with promoting it to the point where it became the predominant form of Black music in the South. The Blues became one of the Black man's few means of chronicling and effectively expressing the frustrations of Southern life during Jim Crow.

"The Mississippi Delta was fertile ground for the roots of the blues. With its history of slavery, racial oppression, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow laws, plus baking heat, rampant illiteracy and poverty, the Delta was a cruel place for many African Americans well into the middle of the 20th century. The blues documented the experience of southern blacks better than any other form of cultural expression.

The songs and music of the early Delta blues were passed down orally, in written form, and later preserved in field recordings made by traveling ethno-musicologists such as the father and son team of John and Alan Lomax in the early 1940s. The earliest blues records were made in the 1920s, but very little recording took place in the Mississippi Delta area. Delta blues musicians like Charley Patton and Skip James headed to northern cities for recording sessions then returned to their homes in the Delta to continue playing juke joints, country dances, and fish fries." ¹

By the twenties and thirties, Blues legends like the immortal Ledbelly, Charles Patton and Son House had brought the art form to national attention and almost crossover status, while creating a dynamic viable subculture throughout the South. The influence of Blues was heard in Jazz and early Swing, though White audiences remained, for the most part, oblivious. The Blues remained an obscure form of ethnic folk music to most of America.

In the late 30s, a young man from Mississippi by the name of Robert Johnson recorded a series of songs that would change the face and direction of popular music for decades to come. Largely overlooked at the time, these pieces were the ultimate distillation and definition of the Delta Blues. They would also serve as its swan song. Johnson died a mysterious death shortly afterward. He would never know that he was destined to be forever known as the King of the Delta Blues.

Exodus

By the 1940s, rural Blacks, enlightened by mass media and yearning for their share of the post-WWII American Dream, began to flee the backwoods and boondocks to take their part in the new economic and industrial renaissance. They poured into Southern meccas like Memphis and made their way to points north. They brought with them bluesmen and would-be bluesmen of all levels of experience, stature and talent. The Blues had been to the city before; men like Big Bill Broonzy had spread the Word there as far back as the 20s, but things were different now.

Experienced Blues veterans like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf brought Delta Blues in its purest, most potent form. Electrified instruments existed now and Blacks would soon have the money to afford them. Blues would cease to be quaint, woodsy folk. It would speak to larger audiences in a louder, slicker voice. It would speak to the nation. It would speak to the World.

Mississippi Delta, 1946

The man on the porch has been playing for hours, for only the frogs and the crickets and the critters, but now it is time to retire. He must sleep now the black dreamless sleep of the sharecropper. Tomorrow's another day...another hellishly hot, backbreaking day.

"Shit," he says aloud to no one, "there's got to be a better way."

He has heard of a better life. He has a sister in the city. She says there's jobs there. Real jobs... with real pay. A man can have a real life there. A man can be a man there.

The man on the porch puts his beat-up box away. "This is the best thing I own," he thinks, "and it ain't nothin'."

He has made a decision. He's got a few bucks stashed away. Not much, but enough for a bus ticket.

He smiles, for the first time since he can remember.

"Tomorrow," he thinks,"tomorrow I'm goin' to Chicago."

Sources:

¹ http://www.pbs.org/theblues/roadtrip/deltahist.htmlBlues Road Trip/Mississippi Delta