No. But a fascinating YouTube video nonetheless, and worth watching all the way through. The three white male investigators are Bob Santelli (a Jersey guy, former biggie in the R&R Hall of Fame), Steve LaVere (non-beloved executor of the Robert Johnson estate), and Tom Freeland (very knowledgeable RJ scholar/lawyer living in Oxford, MS), plus the Mississippian from Ruleville who came into possession of the footage. What you wouldn't know is that the famed Civil Rights pioneer, Fannie Lou Hamer, came out of Ruleville 20-25 years later and was beaten and harrassed, and fired from her plantation sharecropping gig, for the simple fact of standing up for her dignity. Ruleville was NOT a nice place.
The chief fascination for me is to see a small Delta town on a typical Saturday afternoon in early 1942. All the black men are wearing hats. Everybody is dressed to have a good time. The Delta is crowded, like a big city. The second great migration is just about to happen. Muddy Waters hasn't left the Delta for Chicago yet.....
Every small delta town looked like this on a Saturday night throughout the 20th Century. With the exception of clothes styles and automobiles you would not know what decade you were looking at. The Dorrough family who took the footage are still mainstays of that community. One son is a tremendous guitarist formally of the band The Tangents.The other teaches at Ole Miss.
I know Duff Dorrough and have played a few gigs with him. Just did one in November, in fact.
As for every small Delta town looking like that on Saturday night throughout the 20th Century: I'll politely disagree. Something called the Great Migration happened starting in the mid-1940s--the second great migration, that is--and took hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians up to Chicago, Detroit, and several other northern cities. (Wikipedia claims 360,000.) Mississippi's total population shrank between 1940 and 1950, remained flat between 1950 and 1960, and grew only 1.8% between 1960 and 1970. According to Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE, more than 33% of all the "young blacks" in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina left their states for the North during the 1940s, and I suspect that the % for Mississippi was higher than for those other states; everything I've read suggests that it was. I think your generalization is true for the 1920s, 1930s, and earl 1940s and somewhat less true for the decades after that because of the drastic population loss. In the mid-1960s, the White Citizens Councils in the Delta--what was left of them--tried to make things so miserable for the remaining black field workers that they died off or left; that's what John Dittmer writes in LOCAL PEOPLE: THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN MISSISSIPPI.
Now, I know a lot of white blues fans who WISH the Delta still hopped and jumped the way it did in the early 1940s, and they get a taste of that after 9 PM at the King Biscuit Festival in Helena, when the "strut" portion of the festivities begins.....
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying you're exaggerating in the prideful southern fashion that I admire so much. :)
Elijah Wald and Mary Beth Hamilton, in their recent blues books, both talk about visiting the Delta and associating the modern Delta, as many have over the past decades, with a lonely, even desolate landscape. Then they pause and remind themselves, and us, that the fields used to be full of workers, endless lines of workers, in the 1920s and 1930s, and that those workers, many of them, decamped in large numbers in the decades after cotton production was mechanized after the introduction of the cotton harvester in the early 1940s. That's also the point made by Nicholas Lemann in THE PROMISED LAND. I'm not saying that Saturday nights in Delta towns, especially the bigger ones, didn't still have zing in the 1950s and 1960s. I'm just saying that the sheer numbers of black folk that flooded those towns--including in the silent films I've seen of Sonny Boy playing on Delta storefronts in 1942 and 1952--weren't, couldn't, have been as large as they were in ALL the Delta towns that Honeyboy Edwards, for example, talks about busking in the 1930s.
Last Edited by on Feb 05, 2011 3:35 PM
Looking at that anonymous player, I was thinking possibly Peetie Wheatstraw by the shape of the face...but he died in a car crash december of '41. Fun mystery.
