The Landscape of the Delta
He Said:
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above “Have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please” -Crossroads Blues -Robert Johnson
Just past Yazoo City, the land falls away. A hilly shoreline of Mississippi piney woods yields to the Delta: flat fertile watershed of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers that drew sharecroppers after the Civil War, lit the fuse of the Civil Rights movement, and gave us the blues.
The land looks today much as it did in 1925: mile after mile of plowed cotton and corn latticed with country roads; silvery silos and isolated stands of trees the occasional breaks in the overwhelming horizontal-ness of this place. U.S. Highways 49 and 61 run south to north, intersecting at their mythologized crossroads in Clarksdale, where the blues has grown into something of a cottage industry.
Sometimes the cliché is simply accurate: the land has made the music. The murky origins of the blues include the call and response of workers in the fields passing the time, and this phrasing evolved into the country blues of Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, and others. Open tuning bottleneck songs with names like Pea Vine Blues, Banty Rooster Blues, and Traveling Riverside Blues, refined in juke joints that were nothing more than shacks in the countryside. We passed through Greenwood, Indianola, Drew, Ruleville, Money, Sunflower, Tutwiler, and other spots in the road. Small towns surrounded by empty spaces, great stretches of time capsule only lightly touched and homogenized by the 21st century. Much of the Delta is breathtakingly ramshackle and poor. Not poor in a ‘this is a temporary downturn’ way, but a poor in the roots, in the bones. An agricultural salesman told us that the area had actually not been much affected by the Great Recession. ‘After all, farmers farm,’ he said. With a few exceptions things here are much as they’ve always been, and the anthropology of the blues feels strikingly present. Immersive. Continue reading
