1/5/2024 0 Comments Missisiper early bluex musicLil Wayne, Big Krit, Jay Electronica, and other Southern rappers from cities devastated by horrific storms have continued to respond with songs of grief and anger, just as gravel-voiced Charley Patton and his 1920s counterparts did. Nearly a century after the flood, hurricanes from Katrina through Ida continue to leave their own indelible, mud-stained mark on popular culture and the Southern landscape. Elegiac chronicles of collective physical crisis became the stuff of music legend, removed from their true history. But while blues singers initially created these songs in part as ways of testifying and remembering, subsequent musicians have appropriated, sampled, and remixed the suffering of Southern Black communities into new works of art, divorcing the lyrics from the historical events which gave birth to them. The power of these flood records was understood both by audiences of the day and generations of musicians after, from Bob Dylan to Beyoncé. Blues singers, capturing not just the events but the emotion behind them, penned perhaps the truest record of that era's deadly flood. Some songs were eyewitness accounts, some secondhand, but nearly all were connected to the pain they described. In the wake of callous and indifferent government response to the devastation facing them, Black musicians from the Delta produced their own deluge: An outpouring of songs testifying to the destruction wrought up and down the Mississippi. Stranded in flood zones, they were left to fend for themselves without food, exposed to the bitter elements. The impact of the disaster fell disproportionately among the poorest Black Americans of the Delta region. Hundreds died, and 700,000 people were displaced from their homes. In spring of 1927, unprecedented rains fed a swollen Mississippi River, causing widespread levee failure from Indiana all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. ![]() Almost 100 years ago, the United States saw one of the worst flood events in its history.
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