Blues Music
The railroad - or its predecessor, the Yazoo Delta Railway (Moorhead-Ruleville) - appears in a number of blues songs as the Yellow Dog Railroad. According W. C. Handy, locals assigned the words "Yellow Dog" to the letters Y.D. on the freight trains that they saw.
The Mississippi Blues Commission placed a historic marker at the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad depot site in Rosedale, Mississippi, designating it as a site on the Mississippi Blues Trail. The marker commemorates the original lyrics of legendary blues artist Robert Johnson's "Traveling Riverside Blues" which traced the route of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad which ran south from Friars Point to Rosedale among other stops, including Vicksburg and north to Memphis. The marker emphasizes a common theme of blues songs of riding on the railroad, which is seen as a metaphor for escape.
Read more about this topic: Yazoo And Mississippi Valley Railroad
Famous quotes containing the words blues and/or music:
“The blues women had a commanding presence and a refreshing robustness. They were nurturers, taking the yeast of experience, kneading it into dough, molding it and letting it grow in their minds to bring the listener bread for sustenance, shaped by their sensibilities.”
—Rosetta Reitz, U.S. author. As quoted in The Political Palate, ch. 10, by Betsey Beaven et al. (1980)
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)