The Agriculture & Blues Connection
The Mississippi Delta is the heart of where the blues began. The blues began in the fields. They originate from the days of sharecroppers. Before that the slaves sang spiritual field hollers while they worked. American blacks in the early part of the century sang their stories. These stories evolved into what we know today as the blues.
While traveling to the Delta for a sponsored trip (thank you Visit Clarksdale) we began our immersion into the blues at the Gateway to the Blues Museum. Next to the museum is the Tunica Visitor’s Center. Stories begin with greats like W.C. Handy on to more current musicians. Thanks to our friend Logan Elliott (who creates amazing cigar box guitars) for telling us about this amazing stop.
Downtown Tunica
The blues music was heard in the fields and in the juke joints. A placard at the Gateway to the Blues Museum defines a juke joint. “Blues found its voice and developed its repertoire and style not in auditoriums or performance halls, but the dimly lit, nailed together wooden shacks in the backwoods of the Delta called Juke Joints. …Usually, located close to the plantation where blacks worked the fields, the juke joint became a refuge, a world unto itself…”
The music was heard in juke joints and houses.
Before heading to Clarksdale, we stopped in Tunica’s downtown. There is more to Tunica than casinos! We enjoyed shopping in a former Whittington Wholesale building. This began as a commissary in 1922, offering wholesale groceries and feed to local patrons. Today the business owned by P, K. Miller and her husband Ed is A Little Off the Square Lumber and Liquidation Etc. A fun place where you can find gifts, flowers, and lots of lumber!
P.K. directed us to the Blue & White where we had a great dinner. We came back for a fun breakfast before heading south!
International Harvester’s Mechanical Picker
Cotton harvest was changed forever. It changed with the invention of International Harvester’s cotton picker. We traveled to Clarksdale’s Hopson Plantation. Today it is the site of the fun Shack Up Inn. Here we stayed in a former sharecropper cabin. Music is live most nights in the former Cotton Gin. This is a place where cotton history lives on through its connection with the blues.
The Hopson Plantation on October 2, 1944, in front of three hundred onlookers was the place where an International Harvester mechanical harvester harvested the first cotton crop totally without the use of hand labor. This would forever change the face of harvest. Eventually this development would end the sharecropping system with mechanized planting, cultivating and harvesting. The result was a migration of African Americans and white sharecroppers to the industrial north.
Blues musicians worked on the plantations.
There is a lot of connection between many of the famous blues singers and the agricultural past. One of the tractor drivers at Hopson Plantation was blues pianist Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins. Pinetop Perkins had been inducted in the Army in June of 1943. The Hopson’s were able to remove him from a bus of draftees, as tractor drivers were deemed essential to the war effort. He later played in the Muddy Water’s band and enjoyed a successful solo career. You can even stay in Pine Top’s cabin!
Muddy Waters was born on the nearby Stovall Plantation. During a tour we took with Chilly Billy Howell of Delta Bohemian Tours, we stopped by the former birthplace of Muddy Waters.
His cabin can be viewed today in the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. No pictures are allowed so I can’t show you what it looked like.
Besides Perkins, other bluesmen served as tractor drivers during World War II. This included B.B. King, Son House, and Muddy Waters, although we don’t know for sure which plantations they worked at except for Muddy Waters who was a tractor driver at Stovall Plantations. Howard Stovall of Stovall Plantation who plays in the Stone Gas Band said he believed that Muddy Waters drove a Farmall M.
Music is everywhere along with cotton history.
Music is everywhere in the stores, the diners and juke joints. Blues can be heard almost every day of the week and all hours of the day and evening in this Mississippi Delta town. At the Bluesberry Cafe owned by Carol and Arthur Crivaro music is offered on both Saturday and Sunday morning.
While there for breakfast, we had the honor of meeting one of the all-time great musicians, Bill Watermelon Slim Homans, so named because of a time when he worked in the watermelon fields in Oklahoma. This Vietnam war veteran and protester is an award-winning musician.
The Delta is a place where the blues and agriculture merge together as easily as a guitar and drums. Have you visited the Delta? Did you see for yourself how the histories combine?
