There’s something in the water in Mississippi.
In the midst of all these supposed blues origins, our state was stirring. An active volcano of blues, the poverty and vice of the bluesman led to a Mississippi eruption.
While Handy wrote his sheet music blues and our friend Anthony Maggio dabbled in the blues during jazz-heavy tunes, Mississippi was breaking the backs of black workers and imposing her character upon them.
From her hot days of labor to her late nights of drinking, gambling, fighting and losing, Mississippi dug herself deep into the heart of the blues identity. While women constantly played on the bluesman’s emotions, only one ever had his heart, and she was Mississippi.
One certainly has to wonder how so many bluesmen — and quality bluesmen, at that — all emerged from such a concentrated area.
Within a 100-mile radius, Mississippi produced countless blues pioneers like Son House, Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Robert Johnson and Skip James. The names only multiplied as Mississippi churned out brilliantly scarred bluesmen in waves.
John Lee Hooker, Bukka White, Junior Kimbrough, Honeyboy Edwards, Muddy Waters, B.B. King. The list is endless.
What was it about this place that seemed to mass-produce bluesmen with this beautiful blues conflict between love and hate?
Perhaps it’s the eternal bond these musicians had with their stomping grounds.
Despite the oppression these men endured at the hands of Mississippi, they couldn’t abandon her; even when all else was wrong, she was always right.
Their parents and grandparents similarly channeled struggle and strife in song.
The spiritual and the camp holler often kept time as slaves pushed through their brutal workdays, and as slaves became freedmen, the songs remained.
While deeply rooted in the African musical tradition, these camp hollers developed a different character in Mississippi — a deep and gritty character only achieved by this eternal, bittersweet bond between man and Mississippi.
From this Mississippi character came the blues of the Deep South. Son House expressed this fierce loyalty to his woman in “Clarksdale Moan.”
Singing about his own home of Clarksdale, he wails, “Nobody knows Clarksdale like I do, and the reason I know it, I follows it through and through.”
Mississippi did much to create the blues, but it was an unpleasant endeavor.
Through years of slavery, followed by years of violence and prejudice, the black individual in Mississippi endured a perpetual struggle.
From this, Mississippi and her people created a unique genre: one with grit and soul and the most compelling, heartbreaking and beautiful stories ever told.
They are stories of life and ups and downs, but these stories are also ones of Mississippi.
The picture of optimism (a veiled pillar of the blues), blues music is the product of tragedy, but there is a light at the end of its tunnel.
One of the greatest contributions to music, birthed by Mississippi herself, the blues, along with its mother, serves as a constant reminder that despite all wrongs, things will be right in time, if only one follows it through and through.
