American music: A river runs through it

Down in the Delta
The southern Mississippi is midwife to different musical styles, from gospel to jazz to zydeco and more. But at first blush, the culture indigenous to the river brings to mind one music. Say “Mississippi,” and “the blues” might as well be in the next breath. That music and life in the fertile Mississippi Delta are so inextricably intertwined, some might say there's no difference between them, certainly not to fans of American music.

The blues is as much process as event. That process began with the field hollers and work songs of slaves before the Civil War, continued on the plantations of the Mississippi Delta at the end of the 19th century. Its presence was more formally discovered in 1903, when bandleader W.C. Handy heard an itinerant guitar player on a train station platform in Tutwiler, Miss. Handy's “Memphis Blues,” published in 1912, legitimized the blues as an indelible cultural force.

Some of the blues' early practitioners — Mississippi John Hurt; Son House; the prolific, mysterious, peripatetic Robert Johnson; and B.B. King — were natives of the Delta region. Others moved there later in life; Mississippi Fred McDowell adopted the state as a residence and part of his professional name; Robert Jr. Lockwood, born in Arkansas, learned to play guitar from Robert Johnson in the heart of the Delta.

Mississippi Delta blues continues today, an art form whose emotional resilience tells the story of America — despite the fact that, with the relative absence of blues sales, America isn't listening.

"Blues is an unsentimental music,” said Stanley Crouch, the author, essayist and jazz musician. “It's a music of great sentiment, but it's unsentimental. That separates it from R&B, which has a quality of sentimentality. It definitely separates it from rock, which has a hysterical sentimentality, or from rap, which is a testament to the decline of music education in the public schools.”

“Blues is a lot of things: It's a sedative, a form of exorcism,” Crouch told MSNBC.com in a 2003 interview. “One achieves freedom from the blues by confronting the blues. If you can express it with a certain level of emotional and musical eloquence, you will be somewhat liberated from the thing that's hounding you.”

The hold on the soul
Like blues music, the Mississippi River's impact on some American cities runs deeper than for others; for the city of New Orleans, for example, the river called the American Nile has been an especially powerful spiritual aquifer, for generations nourishing the cultural life of the city many hold to be the literal birthplace of jazz.

‘[Louis]Armstrong, at age 14, used to play his cornet as an orphan along the river, and his first real gigs were playing on the riverboats for money.’ — DOUGLAS BRINKLEY Historian

And observing its impact on one of the city's favorite sons — Louis Armstrong — Douglas Brinkley, the author, historian and director of the New Orleans-based Eisenhower Center for American Studies, seemed to grasp the river’s place in the national imagination, its hold on the soul.

“Armstrong, at age 14, used to play his cornet as an orphan along the river, and his first real gigs were playing on the riverboats for money,” Brinkley said.

“Here’s one of the great jazz musicians — just like the Marsalis family of New Orleans and so many others — who have this deep historical bond to the river. Their art and their lives are really intertwined with it.”

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