The Delta Blues

Now our sightseeing, the vacation part of this trip could commence as we head back to Baton Rouge and then home to Texas. Our first stop-- the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, telling the stories of the various blues musicians coming out of the delta, their guitars and outfits, even Muddy Waters’s childhood house of rough-hewn timbers, a one-room place from his share-cropping days, sparse and poor, are there for visitors to see. The young woman minding the museum spoke with such a thick Mississippi accent that I had trouble understanding her. I have been away from the Deep South too long, I suppose. The downtown area shows signs of some rehabilitation as a blues destination, but it is not gentrified, still a little rough looking. Clarksdale obviously was once a real hot spot in the 1930s and 1940s as evidenced by the number of dilapidated clubs in the downtown. To listen to the music being played in the museum, on the CD that we bought, it makes you wonder how many of today’s hip hop and rap artists understand the roots of their music, the rhymes, the steady rhythm, the ever-present beat that are signatures of the blues. One of the displays was of the Koko guitar-like instrument from Africa, suggesting the deep African roots of the beat, the music. It seems from reading their stories that so many of the blues musicians were not trained; they were more self-taught or picked up the music from the folks around them. You get a sense of the pervasiveness of the music as a part of everyday life, a way of escaping, making sense of and shaping the hard lives of the Delta Blacks. Somehow I had thought the Mississippi Delta was closer to the Gulf of Mexico, but my husband explained that the area of north Mississippi-Arkansas, where the river drained, was part of the Delta that reached all the way down to the Gulf. The Delta area is flat, cultivated into large fields of cotton, rice, sugar cane, and soybeans. Silos dot the landscape and Casinos perch near the river on the Mississippi side. Despite the rich farmland and the nice looking homes of the gentry, it is still a region of poverty and isolation from the larger cultural influences. Seeing the large fields, the crop-rich land asked me to think of the labor forces of days gone by, how much labor was needed to cultivate the crops that today are managed on a larger scale by machinery. No doubt the fields before mechanized farming were smaller, but still they must have been immense for the human labor conscripted to work there and to live in poverty and misery as reward for their back-breaking labor.