The Mississippi Delta

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The flat alluvial plain of northwest Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, cleared late and worked as cotton plantation and tenant farmland by a population that was overwhelmingly Black and, after emancipation, largely tied to the land by sharecropping and debt. Its geography is the reason it functions as a musical region rather than merely a place: the soil made it valuable, the value concentrated a large Black population in a small area under severe legal and economic constraint, and the railways built to move the cotton — the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley and the Southern, whose crossing at Moorhead gave the line "where the Southern cross' the Dog" — also moved musicians and the songs they carried. Blues as a distinct practice is first documented here in the first years of the twentieth century. It is also the region from which the Great Migration drew most heavily toward Chicago, which is why the Delta and the South Side later sound like two ends of one line rather than two traditions.