Music
The Delta is strongly associated with the origins of several genres of popular music, including the Delta blues and rock and roll. The rich music came out of the struggles of mostly black sharecroppers and tenant farmers whose lives were marked by poverty and hardship.
Gussow (2010) examines the conflict between blues musicians and black ministers in the region between 1920 and 1942. The ministers condemned blues music as "devil's music". In response, blues musicians satirized preachers in their music, as for example in the song, "He Calls That Religion," by the blues group Mississippi Sheiks. The lyrics accused black ministers of engaging in and fomenting sinful behavior. The black residents were poor, and the musicians and ministers competed for their money. The Great Migration to northern cities, beginning before World War I, seriously depleted black communities and churches, but it led to the growth of jazz in Chicago, for instance, as musicians moved north.
Read more about this topic: Mississippi Delta
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Good music is very close to primitive language.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more,”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The music stopp’d, and I stood still,
And found myself outside the Hill,
Left alone against my will,
To go now limping as before,
And never hear of that country more!””
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)