Mississippi Delta Blues

Music can express many emotions: joy, happiness, loneliness, nervousness, sadness. We often call music with sad themes the ‘blues’.

Southern African Americans developed blues music in the United States after the Civil War. A lot of musical traditions came with the slaves who were brought to America from Africa. Folk and popular white music were combined with African musical traditions and the blues were born.

It is believed that the blues started in the Mississippi Delta, a region in northern Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. This is a poor rural area where the most disadvantaged black people lived. These living conditions made locals feel very sad and this was expressed in the blues songs they sang. Poverty, racism, and inhumane working conditions led many black people to go to cities in the north such as Memphis, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit.

Even though many people moved away from the area, the blues did not vanish from the countryside of Mississippi. In 1978, the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival was established. It celebrates and promotes the blues and the culture of the people of the Mississippi Delta. The festival, which started out on the back of a flatbed truck, is now the oldest and biggest blues festival in the South. Over 20,000 visitors and performers appear on three stages throughout the festival.