Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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acres of rich farmland that would not have been usable otherwise, as Mattie Delaney
Some peoples on the Tallahatchie done lost everything they had
Some people in the Delta wondering what to do
The huge man-made levee that holds back the Mississippi river is higher and longer than
the Great Wall of China. It flanks the river from Cairo, Illinois to south of New Orleans,
with thirty-foot-high earthen walls on either side. The levee was built with the hard
are known for being stubborn, but people who know mules say that they are really just
The levee was built by hauling dirt up its steep muddy slopes in wheelbarrows or in carts
drawn by mule teams. Many men and mules were injured or killed when they lost their
footing and tumbled down the embankment.
The Mississippi levee was begun piecemeal in the early 19th century when individual
planters piled up small dykes to protect their fields from spring floods. By 1833, levee
commissions had organized countywide efforts, but that all went to hell during the Civil
War. After the war, levee boards were created to coordinate efforts to build one huge
levee and claim the fertile land of the Mississippi Delta for Southern farmers. Smaller
levees were built to contain other rivers in east Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
The levee camps- where the workers lived in tents- drew thousands of freedmen looking
for work.
While they worked they improvised levee camp hollers to spur on themselves and their
mules. These work songs had the seeds of the blues in their calls and refrains. Some
researchers have noted that their melodies closely parallel the Muslim morning call to
prayer. Sylviane Diouf, a researcher at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in
emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter's vocal chords. Dramatic
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Scholars estimate that roughly thirty percent of
the West Africans taken to the American colonies between the 1600s and the mid-1800s
were Muslim.
By the mid-1920s, working on the levee was the subject of numerous blues that
expressed fear of the unsafe conditions on the levee and anger at being forced to work on
1927, told the story of African American men threatened with jail if they refused the
dangerous work:
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