The Most Southern Place on Earth: Music, History and Culture in the Mississippi Delta

8:00 Delta State University, Cleveland, MS.

This morning I sit in a room of 37 teachers from around the country. We are all here as recipients of a National Endowments for the Humanities (NEH) Scholarship. The focus of NEH sponsored activities is generally for research and education in the humanities, but all teachers are welcome to submit applications. There are about 30 courses to choose from and competition is stiff as all expenses are generally covered. I am honored to have been chosen.

We have come here to study The Most Southern Place on Earth: Music, Culture and History in the Mississippi Delta. Our agenda is packed and I can’t wait to meet everyone through this week’s journey. This is a particularly special experience for me because, like many of the people whose stories we will hear and whose lives were influenced by the Delta, my story of Mississippi begins here. My father’s mother’s family tamed their swampy forested parcel in the late 1860’s and began to farm the land which my family still visits when time allows. No one lives here anymore and they haven’t since the 40’s when my great-grandmother passed away, but my 6 siblings and I retreat here every Thanksgiving with our families. Otherwise, the boys hunt here during the winter and I’ll convince a few adventurous friends to visit whenever someone expresses interest – usually for the music. Mostly, the place is quiet except for the fields, busy with machines during the day and the hum of the pumps at night. We come for the quiet. It’s a place to retreat to, and once there, it’s easy to spend days working through a pile of books and magazines one doesn’t have time for at home.

I’ve returned this time, not to retreat to the family farm, but to try to understand more how this place fits into the context of the Delta in place and time. I’ve been to a few Juke Joint Festivals, eaten at Lusco’s and visited the B.B. King Museum, but I haven’t pulled together the story or my story of the Mississippi Delta. I went prepared to grasp the darkness of Emmett Till’s world as well as the kaleidoscope of cultures this alluvial soil has fed.

About the Workshop

This 2019 workshop will educate participants about the important role that the Mississippi Delta has played in American history, a role that sometimes is overlooked. Our approach is highly experiential and engages Delta residents and members of the Delta diaspora in telling heritage stories in the places where they happened. Major themes include rivers, cotton agriculture, the Blues, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, foodways, spirituality, and diverse ethnic influences on the region's culture.

NEH Website 

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov. @NEHgov

The bibliography for the readings is extensive. Fortunately, I’d already tackled The Percys, Rising Tide, Dispatches from Pluto and the others pictured below. I select three more to read while there but haven't finished them at the time I write this.

Cobb, James. 1992. The Most Southern Place on Earth: the Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity.

Lemann, Nicholas. 1991. The Promised Land: An Account of Sharecropping Families in Their Journey from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago

Willis, John C. 2000. Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War. I have attached the full list in the event anyone else is interested.

Oh – the fox

I also got to pick up my fox. Found dead on the side of the road and still fresh enough to preserve, it's finally ready!

I won’t be covering all we saw and heard, it’s just too much so here is the full itinerary of the week's events.

We first watch an insightful documentary, LaLee’s Kin, on the reality of the Delta school system circa 1990. Specifically, we witness the struggle of one family and the reality of what it would take to break the cycle of poverty. The school systems are underfunded and mismanaged from, what seems, both internal issues and many external they have no control over. It’s a problem that, 20 years later, appears to have still found no solutions in most of the small Delta towns. Reggie Barns, featured in the documentary, met with us following the movie and provided some illuminating and inspiring insight into his struggles and many successes in his term as superintendent of the Tallahatchie County School System. During his term he fought hard to pull the school system off the failing schools list. He succeeded against many odds. I wonder though if his efforts were lasting and if enough people continue to find the energy he had to keep the schools honest and functional.

Following a tour of the Levees, we head to airport grocery for a fried catfish dinner where we are entertained with some true Delta Blues performance by Keith Johnson, great nephew of Muddy Waters.

Religion in the Delta

Loading a bus we headed to Greenville while watching a film on the history of Jews in the Mississippi Delta. Pulling up to the Chinese cemetery, I’m surprised to see Raymond stand up and introduce himself in a southern voice. I hadn’t noticed Raymond Wong on the bus. He is second generation Chinese and one of the few Chinese still in the Delta. There is an article by NPR – The Legacy of the Mississippi Delta Chinese where you can learn more about the cemetery. Raymond grew up behind the grocery store his family ran until they opened the first Chinese restaurant in MS in 1978. His dad, he explains, worried it was a risk and was delighted when the people of the Delta showed appreciation for this new Chinese cuisine. Wong tells a story about when his dad wanted to by a house in the white neighborhood, transitioning them out from behind the grocery store. When the whites heard about it, the family began to experience glass bottles and other loot being thrown at their current home. The family stayed and built a larger home behind the grocery. It’s not certain who will maintain the cemetery when the last of his relatives leave. If I understood correctly, it’s down to just he and his sister. Everyone is leaving the Delta, they don’t seem to be finding much reason to come back either.

Walking up the road we come to the African American cemetery where Holt Collier is buried. He’s the fella that tied up the “Teddy” bear for Roosevelt to shoot.

We stop at the jewish temple which is also a museum filled with Jewish Deltan memorabilia dating back to the temple's foundation in the 1880s. The collection includes one of the restored holocaust torahs. Benjy Nelken, a Delta Jew who operates the Greenville History Museum and curates some of the material showcased in the synagogue provides a fascinating perspective on the Jewish dilemma during the Summer of Freedom and more.

N Next door is the 1927 Flood Museum which we toured on our own. I’d read both Mississippi Rising and Lanterns on the Levee so this was a treat to see original boats and other artifacts from the time. Headed back to Cleveland we pass Stein Park, site of the first Steinmart and Uncle Ben’s Food (Rice) who knew? But, mostly Greenville seems to be going the direction of most of rural Mississippi, another fading Mississippi Delta town.

On the drive back we stop at a few Blues Trail markers but pass more than we stop at. There’s so much, too much for a week.

Bill Abel has been playing the blues with greats since he was a boy. He’s one of the only guys left that can really play and more importantly, understand the blues. He plays for us between stories and it’s hard to tell where the story ends and the song begins. I realize that’s the point. Blues tell a story, a true story. Here’s a nice documentary on Bill. https://www.cityofclarksdale.org/documentaries/bill-abel-portrait-artist/

Dockery Plantation is a place I’ve probably passed a dozen times without realizing its significance as the birthplace of the blues. Not really that there is one place, the blues came from all over the Delta but it was here that many brought their new soultry sound on weekends. Early Juke Joints were the first private places African American workers could go and socialize after a long week in the fields. Many of the early juke joints were located at a cross roads or in a converted field house. There wasn’t much control over who came and went. This made it hard for a musician to who was wanting to be paid for his work. Dockery was different. sDockery’s weekend joint was positioned on the other side of a bridge, money could be collected as people crossed the bridge. It was for this reason that Charley Patton, Howlin Wolf, Son House and Robert Johnson all came here to play in the early 1900’s.

http://www.dockeryfarms.org/blues

The Crossroads, one of three, where Robert Johnson is supposed to have sold his soul to the devil is just across the street at the site of the old train tracks leading to Dockery.

Mound Bayou was founded in 1887 by former slaves, with a vision that was revolutionary for its time. it was designed to be a self-reliant, autonomous, all-black community. Here, 840 acres of dense hardwood forest was cleared by Isaiah T. Montgomery and his cousin, Benjamin T. Green. Soon the town of Mound Bayou was home to dozens of businesses, three cotton gins, a sawmill, a cottonseed oil mill, a bank — all of them black-owned. For decades, Mound Bayou thrived and prospered, becoming famous for empowering its black citizens. The town also became known as a haven from the virulent racism of the Jim Crow South. Now it’s no different than the other empty Delta towns with over half the children living below poverty level. It’s citizens having taken their skills and knowledge to the cities.

A short stop at the last remaining rural juke joint - Po Monkey's. Now closed forever.

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse where Emmett Till’s murder trial took place has been preserved as a museum, with the interpretive center across the street helping to tell the story. I take a seat in one of the courtroom chairs and look on my phone for old photos showing the inside of the courtroom and it looks much the same. We are joined by a panel of three who sit on the other side of the railing. They are Till’s cousin Wheeler Parker, author Devery Anderson and Rev. Willie Williams. Wheeler, who came down with Emmett from Chicago, begins the discussion with the details of his cousin being kidnapped from the home they were staying in. We learn for all three that there are still many discrepancies in the case and media’s portrayal of the event.

Heading home via Greenwood we stop in Money, MS at the site where teenage Emmett allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Now the actual building is closed and overgrown with vines, making it a little creepy. The gas station next door has been restored.

We complete our days drive with a stop at one of Robert Johnson's gravesites. The most likely.

Memphis

Our final full day of the workshop is spent in Memphis. Both cotton and music came here from the Delta. Appropriately, our first stop is the cotton museum followed by the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

I wasn’t exposed to much soul music as a kid, but I do recall Soul Train being a regular part of my Saturday morning. My daughter recently inherited her grandmother’s 1970’s collection of vinyls which includes a good collection of southern soul in it. I grab her a few more from the museum’s gift shop and t-shirts for my other daughters after a tour of the collections.

I don't know what the future of the Delta is but happy to see it's past being kept alive. Still so much that's hard to comment on. I hope I captured enough to make a few of my readers visit one day.

A Bibliography for The Mississippi Delta

Ambrose, Stephen. 2002. The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation. Washington D. C. National Geographic Society.

Anderson, LLC. 2002. Separate, But Equal. New York: Public Affairs.

Black, Patti (ed.). 1980. Mules and Mississippi. Mississippi Dept. Archives and History.

Black, Patti and Barnwell, Marion. 2002. Touring Literary Mississippi. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi

Barnwell, Marion. 1997. A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives. University Press of Mississippi.

Barry, John M. 1998. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. New York: Touchstone.

Brent, Linda. 1973. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Boardman, Eunice (ed.). 2002. A Journey of the Blues. Mississippi Valley Blues Society. Accompanied by a CD.

Buchanan, Minor Ferris. 2002. Holt Collier: His Life, His Roosevelt Hunts, and the Origin of the Teddy Bear. Centennial Press of Mississippi.

Campbell, Will D. 1992. Providence. Georgia: Longstreet Press, Inc.

Clay, Maude Schuyler and Lewis Nordan. 1999. Delta Land. University Press of Mississippi.

Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. 1959 and 1975, DeCapo Press.

Charters, Samuel. The Poetry of the Blues. 1963. Avon Books.

Charters, Samuel. The Roots of the Blues, and African Search. 1981. DeCapo Press.

Cheseborough, Steve. 2001. Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues. University Press of Mississippi.

Clark, Eric, for the Mississippi Legislature. 2001. Mississippi Official and Statistical Register. State of Mississippi.

Cobb, James . 1992. The Most Southern Place on Earth: the Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cobb, James C. 1995. The Mississippi Delta and the World: the Memoirs of David L. Cohn. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.

Cohn, David L. 1948. Where I was Born and Raised. London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Cohn, Lawrence. 1993. Nothing But the Blues. Abbeville Press.

Colletta, John Philip. 2000. Only a Few Bones: A True Account of the Rolling Fork Tragedy and its Aftermath. Direct Decent.

Cowdrey, Albert E. 1996. This Land, This South: An Environmental History. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky.

Cox, James L. 2001. The Mississippi Almanac. Computer Search and Research.

Crowe, Chris. 2003. Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. Dial Books.

Curry, Constance [et al.]. 2000. Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Georgia: The University of Georgia Press.

Curry, Constance. 1995. Silver Rights. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Daniel, Pete. 1986. Breaking the Land: the transformation of cotton, tobacco, and rice cultures since 1880. University of Chicago Press.

Daniel, Pete. 1997. Deep’n As it Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood. Oxford University Press.

Daniel, Pete. 2000. Lost Revolutions: the South in the 1950s. USA: Smithsonian Institute.

Davis, Francis. 1995. The History of the Blues: the Roots, the Music, the People: From Charley Patton to Robert Cray. New York: Hyperion

Dollard, John. 1949. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Dunbar, Tony, Patty Still and Anthony Dunbar. 1990. Delta Time: A Journey Through Mississippi. Pantheon Books.

David Honeyboy Edwards, Janis Martinson, and Michael Robert Frank. The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards. 1997. Chicago Review Press.

Egerton, John. 1994. Speak Now Against the Day: the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.

Faulkner, John. 1942. Dollar Cotton. A Hill Street Classics Book.

Faulkner, William. 1993. Absalom, Absalom!. New York: Random House, Inc.

Faulkner, William. 1995. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]. Vintage International.

Ferris, William. 1978. Blues From the Delta. New York: Da Capo Press.

Field, Claire T. 2002. Mississippi Delta Women in Prison. NewSouth Books.

Gates, Henry Louise Jr. 1995. Colored People. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc.

Hamilton, Mary. 1992. Trails of the Earth. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

Hermann, Janet Sharpe. 1999. The Pursuit of a Dream. Banner Books.

Hightower, Sheree, Cathy Stanga, and Carol Cox. 1994. Mississippi Observed. University Press of Mississippi.

Holditch, Kenneth and Leavitt, Richard. 2002. Tennessee Williams and the South. University Press of Mississippi.

Holley, Donald. 2000. The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South. University of Arkansas Press.

Holland, Endesha Ida Mae. 1997. From the Mississippi Delta. Simon and Schuster.

Holloway, Joseph E. 1990. Africanisms in American Culture. Indiana University Press.

Huffman, Alan, and Florence West Huffman. 1997. Ten Point: Deer Camp in the Mississippi Delta. University Press of Mississippi.

Hudson, Winson, and Constance Curry. 2002. Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter. Palgrave-MacMillan.

Hurt, R. Douglas (ed.). 2003. African American Life in the Rural South. University of Missouri Press.

Imes, Birney. 1994. Partial to Home. Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.

Imes, Birney and Richard Ford. 2002. Juke Joint. University Press of Mississippi.

Jesse Jackson (Foreword), Mamie Till-Mobley, Christopher Benson. 2003. Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America . Random House.

Kap, Stann, Diane Marchall and John T. Edge. 1998. Deep South. Lonely Planet Publications.

Kirkpatric, Marlo Carter. 1999. Mississippi Off the Beaten Path. Old Saybrook, CT.

Kubik, Gerhard. 1999. Africa and the Blues. University Press of Mississippi.

Lemann, Nicholas. 1991. The Promised Land: An Account of Sharecropping Families in Their Journey from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. Pan McMillan.

Lemann, Nicholas. 2006. Redemption: the Last Battle of the Civil War. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lomax, Alan. 1993. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

McDowell, Fred and Dan Bowden. 1996. Fred McDowell The Voice of Mississippi Delta Blues Guitar. Mel Bay Publications.

Mathur, Anuradha and da Cunha, Dilip. 2001. Mississippi Floods. Connecticut: Yale University Press.

Mastran, Shelley S. 2002. Your Town: Mississippi Delta. Princeton Architectural Press.

Mauskopf, Norman, and Randall Kenan. 1997. A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta. Twin Palms Publishing.

Metress, Christopher. 2002. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. University Press of Virginia.

Morris, Willie. 2002. My Mississippi. University Press of Mississippi.

Moye, J. Todd, 2004. Let the People Decide: Black freedom and White resistance movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. University of North Carolina Press.

Miles, Jim. 1994. A River Unvexed: A History and Tour Guide of the Campaign for the Mississippi River. Rutledge Hill Press Civil War Campaign Series.

McMillen, Neil R. 1990. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Nall, Hiram. 2001. From Down South to Up South: An Examination of Geography in the Blues. Midwest Quarterly 42(3): 306- 313.

Nelson, Lawrence J. 1999. King Cotton’s Advocate: Oscar Johnston and the New Deal. The University of Tennessee Press.

Newman, Mark. 2004. Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi. University of Georgia Press, not yet released.

Nicholson, Robert. 1998. Mississippi: The Blues Today. London: Blandford.

Oliver, Paul. 1968. Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc.,

O’Neal, Jim and Amy van Single. 2002. The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine. Routledge.

Oshinsky, David M. 1996. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow. New York: The Free Press.

Owens, Harry P. 1990. Steamboats and the Cotton Economy: River Trade in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. University Press of Mississippi.

Palmer, Robert. 1981. Deep Blues. New York: Penguin Books.

Payne, Charles M. 1995. I’ve Got the Light Freedom. California: University of California Press.

Percy, William Alexander. 1968. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.

Powdermaker, Hortense. 1967. After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Rankin, Tom. 1993. Sacred Space. University Press of Mississippi.

Saikku, Mikko. 2001. The Evolution of Place: Patterns of Environmental Change in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from the Ice Age to the New Deal. Renvall Institute Publications, University of Helsinki.

Saucier, Roger. 1994. Geomorphology and Quaternary Geologic History of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Mississippi: U .S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station.

Sayre, Maggie. 1995. ed. By Tom Rankin. Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

Shearer, Cynthia. 2005. The Celestial Jukebox. Shoemaker & Hoard.

Schweid, Richard. 1992. Catfish and the Delta: Confederate Fish Farming in the Mississippi Delta. Ten Speed Press.

Segrest, James, and Mark Hoffman. 2004. Moanin' at Midnight : The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf, Pantheon Books.

Taulbert, Clifton. 1995. When We Were Colored. New York: Penguin Group.

Taylor,William Banks and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. 1999. Down on Parchman Farm: The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta. The Ohio State University Press.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. 1981. Bantam Classics.

Vollers, Maryanne. 1995. Ghosts of Mississippi: the Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith and the Haunting of the New South. Canada: Little, Brown & Company Limited

Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 2004. Amistad Press.

Wardlow, Gayle Dean. 1998. Chasin’ That Devil Music. California: Miller Freeman Books.

Welty, Eudora. 1979. Delta Wedding. Harvest Books.

Welty, Eudora. 2003. Some Notes on River Country. University Press of Mississippi.

Work, John W., Lewis Wade Jones and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. (Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, Eds.). 2005. Lost Delta Found. Vanderbilt Univ. Press.

Stephen J. Whitfield. 1991. A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Willis, John C. 2000. Forgotten Time: the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War. Virginia: The University Press of Virginia.

Woods, Clyde. 2000. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso Books.

Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. 2003. American Congo : The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Harvard University Press.