Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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The intense post-Civil War effort created a new economy and a new society in the Delta
and years you had whites and blacks living next door to each other in the same
them would sleep together, which you can understand when you see the different shades
When Joel Slotnikoff interviewed musicologist and Mississippi native Gayle Dean
eenville, places on the river, were
already open in the 1890s. But by the early 1900s they started clearing a lot of the
swamps in the Delta. They started planting cotton. Well, this meant jobs in the Delta. A
lot of people moved out of the hill country where they made very little money if any. I
remember [H.C.] Speir said you could make three or four times picking cotton in the
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According to Speir, a sharecropper in the hill country beyond the Delta region could earn
about a quarter a day, whereas in the Delta he could make a dollar or more a day.
one time or another most of the great bluesmen wound up in the Delta because of the
money that could be made there during the fall cotton harvest.
Cotton pickers who came during the fall often went home, packed up their families, and
moved to the Delta to sharecrop year-round. Giant plantations like Dockery Farms had as
many as two hundred and fifty families living there at once. Many people came to work
Dockery Farms was home on and off to the blues musician Charlie Patton, who was an
countless parties, picnics, and fish fries in the tenant quarters at Dockery. 153
Wolf moved down to the Dockery plantation in 1929 not only to work, but to be near
Patton and learn everything he could from him.
Patton began working on the plantation in 1906 at age fifteen but developed a stormy
relationship with the overseers. He was hired by Will Dockery to entertain the field
hands, according to blues historian Steve LaVere. 154 Although by 1916 Patton had been
working on the plantation for ten years, and was considered one of the best guitarists in
the county, he was dismissed from the workforce after a family argument got out of hand.
Patton came back in 1918, but he was kicked off again in 1921 and went to make his
living in the regional jukes and barrelhouses. He returned to Dockery Farms in 1925 and
in 1934.
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