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.
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Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.”
—Bill Cosby (b. 1937)
“I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“See where my Love sits in the beds of spices,
Beset all round with camphor, myrrh, and roses,
And interlaced with curious devices
Which her apart from all the world incloses!
There doth she tune her lute for her delight,
And with sweet music makes the ground to move,
Whilst I, poor I, do sit in heavy plight,
Wailing alone my unrespected love;”
—Bartholomew Griffin (d. 1602)