mississippi delta blues hill country bluex

People would come from miles around to listen to his grandfather play, Cedric said. Others, hearing the music, would wander over and join in song or beat a tambourine, dancing alone or grabbing a partner to move to the rhythm. Burnside, who has been playing professionally since he was 13-years-old, followed in the family footsteps of his drummer father Calvin Jackson and grandfather RL Burnside, whose music saw major success worldwide late in his career. Take a ride: These are Mississippi’s Top 10 Blues Trail markersĬedric Burnside, a third-generation hill country blues artist, outside of his Ashland, Mississippi home on Tuesday, Sept. Jazz also influenced blues music, especially in the early 20th century with female artists including Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith and Ethel Waters shaping another root structure of the blues. The genre at this juncture began to evolve from the hardships of slavery, imprisonment and poverty. More than a century before Lomax tracked Waters down in 1941, minstrel shows of the late 1820s became a popular form of entertainment, evolving into Vaudeville acts and musical theater, which eventually created another path to the blues of the 20th century. “Some of that was ‘field hollers’, people singing to themselves to help pass the time when they’re doing monotonous work out in the field, picking cotton, planting corn or whatever, he said. “Some of those melodies and contours people were singing sort of developed into work songs, which would be like the field hollers but involving more than one person.”

For many here in the South, the blues is more than a musical genre, it is a way of life.Īnd like its roots, this genre's branches spread far and wide with a new generation of artists shaping its future. His music stands as a link between rural blues and rock music, influencing The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton.īut while the music spread and evolved in the decades that followed, the roots of the blues remain firmly entrenched in the Delta's fertile soil. Within a few years Waters was playing clubs in Chicago, where he electrified his sound. Muddy Waters, as he soon became known, started his set with “Country Blues.” His guitar style, at once both soft and violent, accompanied a voice so powerful that it propelled him to international stardom. “Nickname: Muddy Water, Stovall’s famous guitar picker.” “Name: McKinley Morganfield,” their subject said in a recording released decades later. They found him, set up recording equipment in his flat-top wood shack and started the tape. Work and Lomax were looking for a sharecropper whose singing and guitar playing made him famous across the region.

Muddy Waters' cabin on Stovall Plantation, about nine miles from Clarksdale.

Mississippi delta blues hill country bluex