Civil Rights & Delta Blues Music

New Book "Sucks the Romance" Out of the Mississippi River

2010-11-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, this review of a Mississippi River book got my attention:

Admit it: At some point in your life you got a little misty-eyed over the Mississippi River. Maybe it was your first trip to its shores, maybe it was a youthful infatuation with Mark Twain. Maybe you just really love floating, depressing casinos. But even today, when the river that symbolically divides America between East and West can be easily traversed by hundreds of bridges and whose whims are tamed by a series of locks and dams, people still get romantic about the mighty river...Maybe you should be reading Lee Sandlin’s new book, Wicked River (Pantheon, $26.95), as an antidote.

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(You can find Sandlin's book at Amazon...)

Here is a little more on this book: (from the author's book description):

A riveting narrative look at one of the most colorful, dangerous, and peculiar places in America's historical landscape: the strange, wonderful, and mysterious Mississippi River of the 19th century.

Beginning in the early 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Wicked River brings to life a place where river pirates brushed elbows with future presidents and religious visionaries shared passage with thieves. Here is a minute-by-minute account of Natchez being flattened by a tornado; the St. Louis harbor being crushed by a massive ice floe; hidden, nefarious celebrations of Mardi Gras; and the sinking of the Sultana, the worst naval disaster in American history. Here, too, is the Mississippi itself: gorgeous, perilous, and unpredictable. Masterfully told, Wicked River is an exuberant work of Americana that portrays a forgotten society on the edge of revolutionary change.

And here's an excerpt provided by the publisher, Vintage:

The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild

An excerpt

To the tourists, the passing landscape was pure monotony; the British travel writer Frances Trollope wrote that the Mississippi was “dismal,” “wearisome,” “a huge and turbid river with a low and slimy shore,” and complained that there was nothing to the scenery but “forest – forest – forest.” But a voyageur learned to see every stretch of the river as unique. He needed only one glance at the banks to tell where on the thousands of miles of its course he was. Some didn’t even need to raise their eyes to the banks: they could tell their location from the color of the river surface alone. There were even some connoisseurs who boasted they could do it with their eyes closed, just from how the water tasted.

The river was sky-blue near its headwaters, in the white-pine forests of the far north. The pines came down to the banks and their roots tangled there in fantastic thorny profusion, and they gave the water a clean pungent tang of pine oil. A little to the south the water became a deep blue-green as the pines gave way to densely overgrown woodlands of oak and elm and maple. The banks grew more lush: in the marshes and along the sloughs and streams were waving fields of cattails and goosefoot and buttonbrush, and below the water surface in the shallows were mile-long beds of mussels. The marshes were crowded with countless squabbling crowds of wading birds. The river was busy with fish, with catfish and gar and bowfin and buffalo fish and bluegill and walleye; they were so abundant that people claimed there were places where you could cross the river by walking on their backs.

By the time the river reached the sandstone bluffs and prairies of Iowa and Illinois, it had become an olive green with hints of brown. Here and there were long wine-red stains trailing along the shallows; the color was from the tannin that had leached from ancient bogs. By that point the forests on either side had thinned out, and the land had opened up. The river ran for hundreds of miles through the long-grass prairie. The voyageurs would see nothing but the ruffled grass rising and falling in slow swells all the way out to the horizon. In the spring the prairie was a riot of gorgeous wildflowers, endless washes and shoals of white asters and black-eyed Susan and pink phlox and sky-blue spiderwort. In the summer the grasses were ten feet high and were swarmed by game animals like antelope and deer and bison; there were black ragged clouds of passenger pigeons so numerous that a single swarm could take days to pass overhead. In the autumn the grasses turned brittle, and were easily set ablaze; after a thunderstorm there’d be a pall of smoke hanging over the horizon marking the spots where the lightning had started fires. Sometimes at night there was a brilliant line of flame edging down a distant hillside, below a titanic churn of smoke underlit by the glare. Now and then the fires swept down to the riverbank, and the voyageurs would be whisked unwillingly along an interminable billowing curtain of smoke and flame. They would be choking and coughing the whole way, and frantically checking the boat to make sure that the burning cinders and tufts of blown grass weren’t threatening to stampede their livestock or torch their cargo.

At the southern edge of the prairie was the confluence with the Missouri. The Missouri was a furious torrent bright red with the clays of the Great Plains. Its water was sour and gritty, “too thick for soup but too thin to plow;” its current was so strong that for miles south of the junction it flowed beside the Mississippi in the same bed without mingling, a swift narrow plume of reddish cream next to a wider swath of greeny murk. Gradually they churned together into an odd pale soup that looked like yellow ash stirred into dark oil. The forests closed in again on either bank. These were some of the densest and lushest woodlands in America. The marshes and canebrakes were tangles of starflower, bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild ginger, and may apple; there were matted beds of maygrass, wild bean, sumac, arrowhead, knotweed, little barley, hickory, and goosefoot. The trees were scrub willow and cottonwood, pin oak and green ash, hackberry and persimmon, black willow and sycamore and honey locust and box elder and pawpaw. They towered up in countless pillars more than a hundred feet tall; the leaf canopy was a remote web of green and black almost up to the clouds.

Then the Ohio glided in from the east. It was wide and placid, and its blue water was so rich with topsoil that in some lights it looked black. Its taste was velvety; it was said that if you drank enough of it your sweat would be as sweet as dew. It, too, held aloof from the main current for many miles. But gradually it blended in, and the result was a rich, murky, chocolaty gold. This was the characteristic color that travelers came to associate with the river. It wasn’t very appetizing to drink; the fastidious travelers in the lower valley made a habit of letting the water stand for at least a half an hour, to allow the grit and filth a chance to settle out. The hardcore river people didn’t bother. They’d just dump a bucket into the current and guzzle it down straight. They liked to claim the river silt was good for you. They called it “the true Mississippi relish.”

Meanwhile the forests were growing more tropical. Water oaks and water maples were interspersed with catalpas and wild cherries and tupelo gums; there were palmettos unfolding their green spearlike fans and vast stands of gloomy cypress. Along the water’s edge were endless tessellations of Chinese lotus, and the marshlands were radiant with orchids and passion flowers and hibiscus. Beaver and otter splashed in the sloughs and creeks; the woods were haunted by wolves and panthers; and the air was a deafening riot of millions of songbirds.

The river unfolded into the delta, and the sloughs and bayous and marshes and swamps thickened all around it. The water became at times a pale luminous green that reminded some travelers of lime soda. Its taste was like bitter mildew. On either side the banks were marshy and gloomy. Water moccasins and alligators seethed through the mud; the deep green of the swamp forests was spangled with crossvine and trumpetvine, cinnamon fern and Cherokee rose, silverbell and blue lobelia, lilies and hyacinth and hydrangea and yellow jasmine. The river glided on past endless receding processions of cypress shrouded in Spanish moss; here and there were silent lagoons in perpetual gloom. The river meandered among orange groves and stands of magnolia so pungent the smell made some travelers sick.

Then the great swamp forests began to dwindle. The banks on either side melted away into indeterminate ooze that deepened and widened into borders of reeds and cattails more than a mile wide. The last solid land broke up into a maze of little peninsulas and islets and isthmuses dense with rustles of seagrass and sedge, swarmed by countless pelicans. The water shone from thousands of brackish ponds and lagoons and lakes. There was no firm line between the river delta and the salt estuaries. But in the end the last islets fell away, and the great freshwater flood of lime, gold, and brown went streaming serenely out into the blue salt of the Gulf.

***

Boom Boom by John Lee Hooker; Civil Rights & Delta Blues, Mississippi

2010-10-25T10:48:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSnQ0bdHW0s&feature=youtu.be

Enjoy the music of this Delta Bluesman...John Lee Hooker.

2010-10-20T17:26:00.001-07:00

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Story of Stagger Lee Crosses Over to The Mississippi Delta Blues

2010-03-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

Stagger Lee Portrait

It all went down on December 25th, 1895. Stagger lee Shelton was an African American cab driver and pimp convicted of murdering William “Billy” Lyons on Christmas Eve, 1895 in St. Louis,Missouri. Why is this story so important to the Delta Blues?

...Because Good old Stagger Lee had many a song written about the incident, writes this delta blues blogger...

Staples Singers Inducted Into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 1999

2010-03-04T00:02:00.000-08:00

The Staple Singers have been called “God’s greatest hitmakers.” Steeped in the music of the church, this singing family from Mississippi crossed into the pop mainstream without compromising their gospel roots. Fronted by patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples, the Staple Singers have left an imprint of soulful voices, social activism, religious conviction and danceable “message music” across the decades since the release of “Uncloudy Day” in 1956.

Inducted: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1999
More --
* * *

Clarksdale, Mississippi Blues Museum Features Muddy Waters Cabin

2010-02-24T02:58:00.000-08:00

The remains of the cabin from Stovall Farms where Muddy Waters lived during his days as a sharecropper and tractor driver are displayed in the gallery. Musicologist Alan Lomax recorded Muddy on the front porch of this shack for the Library of Congress in 1940....

Take a look.

Join the Revelator - Blind Willie & Son House

2010-01-03T13:07:00.000-08:00

Blind Willie Johnson - John the Revelator. From an Anthology of American Folk Music

Well, he wasn't from the Delta but--

Blind Willie Johnson was born in 1897 near Brenham, Texas (before the discovery of his death certificate, Temple, Texas had been suggested as his birthplace). When he was five, he told his father he wanted to be a preacher, and then made himself a cigar box guitar. His mother died when he was young and his father remarried soon after her death.

Johnson was not born blind, and, although it is not known how he lost his sight, Angeline Johnson told Samuel Charters that when Willie was seven his father beat his stepmother after catching her going out with another man. The stepmother then picked up a handful of lye and threw it, not at Willie's father, but into the face of young Willie.

* * * * *

Now, here's Delta Bluesman Son House doing this song--

Son House was born two miles from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Around age seven or eight, he was brought by his mother to Tallulah, Louisiana, after his parents separated. The young Son House was determined to become a Baptist preacher, and at age 15 began his preaching career. He taught himself guitar in his mid 20s, after moving back to the Clarksdale area. House was inspired by the work of Willie Wilson and began playing alongside Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Robert Johnson and Fiddlin' Joe Martin around Robinsonville, Mississippi, and north to Memphis, Tennessee, until 1942.

House spent time in the Delta's infamous Parchman Prison after killing a man, allegedly in self-defense, in approx. 1929. H was playing in a juke joint when a man went on a shooting spree. Son was wounded in the leg, and shot the man dead. He received a 15-year sentence at Parchman Farm prison.

Son House recorded for Paramount Records in 1930 and for Alan Lomax from the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942. He faded from public view until the country blues revival in the 1960s when he was "re-discovered" in June 1964 in Rochester, New York, where he had lived since 1943.

House had been working for the New York Central Railroad and was unaware of the international revival of enthusiasm for his early recordings. He went on to tour extensively in the US and Europe and recorded for CBS records.

House played at Newport Folk Festival in 1964, the New York Folk Festival in July 1965, and the October 1967 European tour of the American Folk Festival along with Skip James and Bukka White.

Son House can be seen in the documentary "The Howling Wolf Story". House and Howlin' Wolf (also from the Delta) had been close early in Wolf's career. In the summer of 1970, House toured Europe once again, including an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival; a recording of his London concerts was released by Liberty Records.

In 1974 he retired once again, and later moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he remained until his death from cancer of the larynx. He was buried at the Mt. Hazel Cemetery.

Take a Delta Blues Trip to "Where the Blues Began"

2009-11-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

Rosedale Juke, photo by Susan Klopfer

I stroke it to the North, I stroke it to the South... (Clarence Carter)

"Junior" is a cultural anthropologist who lives in the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana side, and spends lots of time in Delta juke joints. His popular link allows blues lovers to take a trip inside the places where the blues began.

"I'm not talking about white people blues bars filled with college students. I'm talking about edge-of-a-cotton-field juke joints filled with real Delta folks," he says.

Here's his link -- Junior's Juke Joint

Filmmaker calls on public, FBI to solve Emmett Till's murder & other cold cases

2009-10-08T06:42:00.000-07:00

Keith Beauchamp speaks to an audience in Philadelphia, Miss., about the 1964 murders of Michael Schwerner, Paul Goodman and James Chaney. Only one man, Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen, of potentially dozens of suspects, was ever convicted for the crimes.

Kelly Peters, reporter for the Daily Orange, writes that when Keith Beauchamp saw the photograph of Emmett Till's brutally beaten face, run ran on the cover of a 1964 Jet Magazine, he became a civil rights activist.

"Till, a black boy from Chicago, Ill., was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. His mother insisted on an open casket to show the world the brutality in his death.

"Today, Beauchamp is still an activist, but Till's murder has yet to be solved. Beauchamp said he is committing his energy to solving Till's and other murders of the time."

Peters's story continues ...

Robert Johnson, Delta Bluesman

2009-10-08T01:19:00.002-07:00

I went to the crossroad, fell on my knees ... Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please."

Robert Johnson's first recording session, November, 1936 -- speculation remains about that session and where it took place.

The Delta Blues: Robert Johnson Recording Set Up and Location

2009-09-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

Robert Johnson, Delta Bluesman

I went to the crossroad, fell on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell on my knees
Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please."

+ + + + +
We all know that good old Robert Johnson had his first recording session that faithful day in November, 1936. But still, a lot of speculation has recently emerged about that session.

Of course, there are the rumors of turning his back to the audience (the next group of musicians to record), and now there is peculation as to where this recording was actually done.

Continued, The Delta Blues --

Odetta, civil rights inspiration, dies at 77: 'I never knew I had a voice that could sing.'

2008-12-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

Image from M.C. Records

Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in quest of an end to racial discrimination.

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, has died. She was 77.

Link to Odetta video ...

Read more about this famed singer ...

Remembering the Past While Celebrating the Present

2008-11-14T09:45:00.000-08:00

Let Freedom Sing: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement on January 27, 2009

FAIRFAX, Va., Nov 14, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Let Freedom Sing: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement
It is one of the most inspiring stories in American history. Within a generation, Americans of African descent overturned several hundred years of slavery and brutally enforced segregation to win their Civil Rights. Civil Rights wasn't the first movement in American history to generate memorable songs, but it was the first in which music not only reflected the movement but drove it. The songs of the Civil Rights movement are the subject of a stunning new 3-CD set from Time Life Music that will be released during Black History Month 2009.
Let Freedom Sing--The Music of the Civil Rights Movement traces a seventy-year journey with songs that reflect the thoughts and feelings of those at the forefront affected by the movement as well as those simply trying to make sense of a troubled period in our history. Some of the songs are well-known (Respect, Change Is Gonna Come, Blowin' in the Wind, We Shall Overcome, Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud, People Get Ready, Get up--Stand up, and many more) but the set also includes extremely rare recordings such as Brother Will Hairston's account of the Montgomery bus boycott, The Alabama Bus, and Nat King Cole's unreleased protest song from that era, We Are Americans Too.
The story begins with Go Down Moses ("let my people go"), one of many spirituals that led African Americans on their quest for Civil Rights. It continues with a bitter indictment of the lynchings that plagued the South after the Civil War (Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit) and an equally bitter indictment of the treatment of African Americans in the armed forces during World War II (Josh White's Uncle Sam Says). No Restricted Signs and Black, Brown and White protested the segregation that greeted returning servicemen. The call for change became more clamorous during the 1950s with the bus boycotts, the lynching of Emmett Till, the enforced integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the lunch counter sit-ins. All were etched memorably in song.

Continued --

Teacher Offers Civil Rights Music Collection

2007-08-21T19:01:00.000-07:00

Hi Susan,

My name is Dave Mort and I'm a History teacher living in England. I
always use music in the classroom to teach, particularly post war American history and especially Bob Dylan. I have written historical novels before but my latest work details the rise of the civil rights movement and anti Vietnam war protests in 50's and 60's America.

To this end I have chosen sixty songs from the period that chart the progress of both and relate the story through them. If you go to my website

www.playitagainunclesam.com

you will be able to read the intro.

Fairly soon there will be an interactive jukebox installed where you will be able to hear the 60 tracks and see some pictures.

Your comments would be appreciated.

Regards and respect
Dave Mort

Home of the Blues; Yazoo-Mississippi Delta

2007-07-24T00:26:00.001-07:00

View Album

Get your own

This IS the home of the blues. Here are some pictures to enjoy. Susan

Blog Across the Mississippi Delta Civil Rights History Tour

2007-05-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Bloggers Set to Revisit Mississippi Delta Civil Rights People and Places

Mount. Pleasant, Iowa (USA), May 29, 2007--Two friends from Cleveland, Mississippi and Mount Pleasant, Iowa, are spending ten days roaming and blogging the Mississippi Delta while visiting civil rights people and places. Their pictures and stories will be placed daily at http://mississippimurders.com on the Internet. (Photo at left, courthouse in Belzoni, home of the Rev. George Lee who was murdered in 1955.)

Margaret Block, an early civil rights advocate, and Susan Klopfer, author of Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, plan to roam the Mississippi Delta starting June 1, visiting people and places of the modern civil rights movement. “We'll be traveling in and out of the Delta for ten days as we photograph important spots and talk about the region's history,” Klopfer said.

“We plan to visit the towns of Money, Drew, Glendora, Greenwood and other spots connected to the murders of Emmett Till, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett and Cleve McDowell, among others who were killed for their civil rights activities or just for being black.”

Block, an early SNCC volunteer, spent her first years out of high school in the small town of Charleston where they will kick off their blogging venture by attending a program June 1 honoring Keglar. The NAACP leader was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966 on her way home from a Jackson meeting with Sen. Robert Kennedy. Keglar once saved Block’s life by moving her out of Charleston in a hearse from the funeral home that Keglar managed.

“We have very few scheduled stops, but we will also leave the Delta to attend the funeral of Mrs. Chaney, James Chaney's mother in Meridian,” Block said. The two also plan to visit with Unita Blackwell, Mississippi’s first black woman mayor, and will take pictures as they roam the historical Brooks Farm, Parchman penitentiary, and Clarksdale, home of Aaron Henry, an early civil rights leader who Block also knew.

The two women met when Klopfer was researching a book on the civil rights movement, “Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited.” Klopfer was living on the grounds of Parchman at the time, where her husband was the chief psychologist.

...Contact:
Susan Klopfer
775-340-3585 (cell) sklopfer@gmail.com
http://mississippimurders.blogspot.com
http://themiddleoftheinternet.com

# # #

Blog Across the Mississippi Delta Civil Rights History Tour

2007-05-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Blog Across Mississippi Civil Rights History Tour

On June 30, I'm leaving for the Mississippi Delta to visit Margaret Block, Unita Blackwell and others involved in the modern civil rights movement. We'll be traveling in and out of the Delta for 10 days as we photograph important spots and talk about the region's history. You are invited to "travel" along on this blog. We have very few scheduled stops, but here are the first two:

June 1 - Charleston, Miss.
Margaret Block and I will attend the program honoring Birdia Keglar, civil rights advocate, who was killed in 1966.

June 2 - Meridian, Miss.
We will attend the funeral of Mrs. Chaney, James Chaney's mother.

Other points we'll be visiting:

Rolling Fork (home of early Delta bluesmen), Drew (home of the Staples family and other blues musicians), Ruleville, the Brooks Farm, Parchman, Clarksdale, Glendora, Holly Springs, Cleveland ...

Stay tuned.

Susan

A Lesson in Music, History; Betty Jackson Cotman Ahead of Her Time

2007-05-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

In 1929, some 26 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, young Betty Jackson was one of only three black students enrolled at Washington. The other two were prominent athletes, she recalls.

Today, at a still young 84, Betty remembers many of her teachers and friends. "We all got along. There weren't any problems," she said last Friday at A Place for Grace, her former church which sits adjacent to Washington School.

Last week, Betty was a special guest of Hillsboro philanthropist Mary Brown Turner. Betty had the honor - actually, she honored us - of playing the final chords on an 1865 Decker Brothers piano that has been part of the former Wesleyan Methodist Church since the 1930s.

The church never sounded so good in all its 133 years.

Before playing, Betty winked at her small, but enthusiastic audience, and said "Never get old."

Continued ..

Music of perseverance and hope ...

2007-04-25T16:08:00.000-07:00

Margaret Block

Mississippian Margaret Block was a young woman just out of high school when she became one of the first SNCC volunteers. She was sent to nearby Charleston, Miss., to go door-to-door trying to register voters. Margaret remembers singing freedoms songs with her cohorts when times were frightening; the slow-paced chant of the music would help her to maintain focus and peace within.

Those were the bad old days, when restaurants, hotels, bathrooms and even drinking fountains were divided by race in the segregationist South, when African-Americans marched for basic freedoms and were assaulted with police clubs, water cannon and attack dogs.

Now Margaret often meets with youngsters to teach them the songs from those days and I always enjoy watching and listening as she brings back the music for others.

I just received Mavis Staples' new CD of Freedom songs and began listening this afternoon. I thought of Margaret immediately as Staples' haunting music was playing.

The Staples Singers, like Margaret, were on the front lines back then, along with the Freedom Singers.

Here's a list compiled by Kim Ruehl of About.com of some of the most popular songs of that era, "songs of perseverance and hope in the face of debilitating odds."

1. "We Shall Overcome"
This spiritual tune was originally called "I Shall Overcome," but when Pete Seeger learned it and started spreading it around, the "I" became "We." This song has since been sung during pretty much every struggle when people have stood up for their rights, but it was particularly inspirational during the civil rights movement because of its deep roots in the African-American community.

2. "When Will We Be Paid For the Work We've Done?"
This Staple Singers classic brings to light the entirety of African-American history until that point, including slavery, the construction of the railroads, and highways, and demands payment and reparations for the horrors and exploitation of the working class African Americans. "We fought in your wars ... to keep this country free for women, children, man ... When will we be paid for the work we've done?"

3. "Oh Freedom"
This song also has very deep roots with the African-American community, as it was sung by slaves dreaming of a time when there would be an end to slavery. On the morning preceeding Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C., Joan Baez started the day's events with her rendition of this tune, and it quickly became an anthem of the movement. "Oh, Freedom! Oh, Freedom over me! Before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave ..."

4. "I Shall Not Be Moved"
This spiritual was adapted to anthemic status during the antebellum slave liberation movement, and again during the civil rights movement in the 1950s & 60s. Like many of the period's great protest songs, it sings of the refusal to bow to the powers that be, and the importance of standing up for what you believe in: "Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved."

5. "Blowin' In The Wind"
This Bob Dylan tune was performed by folksingers like Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary. The song raised a series of important questions, beginning with the signature civil rights issue: "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?"

6. "This Little Light of Mine"
This old spiritual tune talks about the importance of unity in the face of adversity. Its refrain sings of the light in each individual and how, whether standing up alone or joining together, each little bit of light can break the darkness. The song has since been applied to many struggles, but was an anthem of the civil rights movement at the time. "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine ... let it shine over the whole wide world, I'm gonna let it shine."

7. "Going Down to Mississippi"
Phil Ochs was a songwriter with a fierce cannon of protest songs. But this one in particular resonated with the civil rights movement, because it talks specifically about the struggle that was happening in Mississippi. Ochs sings, "Someone's got to go to Mississippi just as sure as there's a right and there's a wrong. Even though you say the time will change, that time is just too long."

8. "Only a Pawn In Their Game"
Bob Dylan's song about the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers talks about the greater issue at hand in Evars' murder. Dylan honed in on the fact that the murder of Evers wasn't just an issue between the assassin and his subject, but was a symptom of a greater problem that needed fixing. "And he's taught how to walk in a pack, shoot in the back, with his fist in a clinch, to hang and to lynch ... He ain't got no name, but it ain't him to blame. He's only a pawn in their game."

9. "Strange Fruit"
When Billie Holiday premiered this song in a New York club in 1938, the civil rights movement hadn't approached its ultimate velocity. The song was so controversial that Billie's record company wouldn't release it. Luckily, it was picked up by a smaller label and preserved to this day. "Strange trees bear strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

10. "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize"
This song set to the tune of the old folk song "Hold On" talks about enduring any struggle for the sake of the ultimate objective: freedom. "The only chain that a man can stand is the chain of hand in hand. Keep your eyes on the prize and hold on."

Mavis Staples; From the Land of Emmett Till

2007-04-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

Mavis Staples

Mavis Staples has a new CD. The Drew, Miss. (now living in Chicago) throaty singer's latest CD, "We'll Never Turn Back,"

....takes "freedom songs" from the days she spent in the thick of the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s and delivers them with a flinty edge guaranteed to jar anyone who thinks they know these pieces well. Classic betterment songs like "Eyes on the Prize," "On My Way" and "We Shall Not Be Moved" might easily have sounded pale and antique today. But as produced by Ry Cooder, they have the kick and spontaneity of punk-soul. Staples and Cooder chiseled a brutal sound, using just a four-piece, rock-edged band to back Mavis' guttural wonder of a voice.

Staples - best known for the early-'70s pop hits like "I'll Take You There," recorded with her family group the Staples Singers - says the way she and Cooder worked ensured the music's verve. "We didn't have any rehearsals," the 66-year-old explains. "I never knew what I was going to do in the studio until the day of the recording. Then we would go in. Ry would start playing guitar, and I would start singing."

(from The New York Daily News, 4/22/2007)
* * * * *

Welcome to the civil rights music blog -- and what a way to start! With the music of Mavis Staples.

I'm a writer and learned about Staples when working on a book about civil rights in the Mississippi Delta—the northwest portion of Mississippi, wedged between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, with some of the most fertile soil on the planet.

"Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," is the story of the Delta and how the region brought great wealth to white planters and industrialists who built their Southern society on the exploitation and impoverishment of African Americans.

But the Delta is also the home of a rich Blues tradition, running from Charlie Patton on through Pops Staples who originated the Staples Family Singers.

Roebuck “Pops” Staples had learned to play guitar from Charlie Patton in the late 1920s. I learned this from blues historian Marvin Flemmons who still lives in Drew where he once owned a blues record store.

Flemmons says that in the 1930s, Staples moved away from Drew to Chicago and with his children formed The Staple Singers, an internationally known gospel group. Blues lovers in Drew later hosted a Pop Staples Festival annually until funding was no longer available. Flemmons, however, would like to see the tradition return and keeps contact with Mavis Staples.

Flemmons, in collecting history about early Delta musicians,learned from Staples that musicians were plentiful in Drew, all learning from each other.

“Some of [them] had as much talent as those doing recordings. They chose not to leave for a recording career but were content to entertain at the house parties and small juke houses.”

The best house party Flemmons said he ever attended took place one summer during the Staples festival when “so much hail fell down we had to move the festival into a house. Each musician and his band took different rooms to play their music.”

Flemmons has created a list of many blues players of the Drew tradition that numbers “nearly thirty but is not complete.” His information comes from “front porch interviews conducted with blues researcher and the author of a biography on Howlin’ Wolf, James Segrest of Notasulga, Alabama. Often these interviews included a front porch concert.”

Flemmons list includes:

Mott Willis, who moved to Drew in 1919 from Crystal Springs and “played many instruments in Henry Bailey’s Minstrel Show at the age of eighteen or nineteen.”

Tommy Johnson, also from Crystal Springs, who lived in Boyle around 1915 and then moved to Drew with his brother LeDell in 1921. “They lived on the plantation belonging to Tom Sanders, also from Crystal Springs. Johnson was a major Mississippi blues singer for more than thirty years.”

(From "Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited.")

Please post your comments and stories. Thanks, Susan

I'll be returning to the Delta in May to do some research and work on a documentary. While there, I'll blog and put up photos.