Posts

Mound Bayou and Cotton

, ,

What is: Cotton Gins at Mound Bayou, Mississippi

What was: Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta was founded in 1887 by former slaves, with a vision to be a self-reliant, autonomous, all-black community.  For decades, it thrived and prospered, becoming famous for empowering its black citizens. The town also became known as a haven from the virulent racism of the Jim Crow South.

Annyce Campbell was born in Mound Bayou in 1924, the town was thriving. “You name it, we had it!” she told NPR  “We had everything but a jail, to tell you the truth!”  She told NPR about the town’s heydays, when Mound Bayou was home to dozens of businesses, three cotton gins, a sawmill, a cottonseed oil mill, a bank — all of them black-owned.

Mound Bayou was initially prosperous and known worldwide for its quality of cotton.  Mount Bayou became the place Delta farmers, including white farmers, brought their cotton to get ginned and for shipment. There was the Montgomery Gin, Farmer’s Gin, McCarty Gin, Mound Bayou Gin Company, Planters Gin, Presley Gin and Thompson Gin.

For farmers, receiving the Mound Bayou stamp on their cotton allowed them to increase the prices of their cotton bales. As the town continued to grow, residents annually produced 3,000 bales of cotton (5000 bales in 1908)and 2,000 bushels of corn on 6,000 acres of farmland. For a time, Mound Bayou was the third-largest cotton-producing town in the South. (source: Jackson Free Press and https://ourmissmag.com/uncategorized/remembering-mound-bayou-mississippis-black-wall-street/).

In 1912, at the only black owned cotton seed oil mill opening, attended by 15000 people, one attendee is reported to have stated that cotton was king, and blacks were one step closer to the throne now. (Source: New York Tribune, https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1257&context=caps_thes

/0 Comments/by

King Cotton

, , ,

What is: fields and fields and fields of cotton…some growing, some harvested, some planted.

What was: “Cotton is King” In the years before the Civil War—American planters in the South continued to grow tobacco and rice but Cotton emerged as the antebellum South’s major commercial crop. Cotton was one of the world’s first luxury commodities, after sugar and tobacco. By 1860, the southern states were producing two-thirds of the world’s cotton.

In 1793, Eli Whitney revolutionized the production of cotton when he invented the cotton gin, a device that separated the seeds from raw cotton, rather than requiring all manual labor. The cotton gin allowed a slave to remove the seeds from fifty pounds of cotton a day, compared to one pound if done by hand. After the seeds had been removed, the cotton was pressed into bales. These bales, weighing about four hundred to five hundred pounds, were wrapped in burlap cloth and sent down the Mississippi River.

Nearly all the exported cotton was shipped to Great Britain, fueling its burgeoning textile industry at the time. They also shipped to mills in the northern US. The South’s dependence on cotton was matched by its dependence on slaves to harvest the cotton. Some southerners believed that their region’s reliance on a single cash crop and its use of slaves to produce it gave the South economic independence and made it immune from the effects of industrialization that were occurring in the North. Between the years 1820 and 1860, approximately 80 percent of the global cotton supply was produced in the United States. Source: http://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/ ushistory/chapter/the-economics-of-cotton/

/0 Comments/by

Cotton Gin Outside Clarksdale, MS

, , ,

What is: Cotton Gin near Friars Point, Mississippi. Abandoned cotton gin between Clarksdale and Friars Point, MS.

What was: Founded in the 1830s and continuing to operate into the 20th century, the King and Anderson Plantation was an enormous spread of seventeen thousand acres just northwest of Clarksdale and reputed to be the largest family plantation in Mississippi. It was located near this Cotton Gin.

Originally, large plantations had their own private cotton gins. Over time, the increasing number of smaller farms, the emergence of sharecropping after the civil war and new technologies led to the rise of public gins. By the early twentieth century, large, public facilities that not only ginned cotton but also sold seeds to cottonseed oil firms, populated nearly every town and county in the state’s cotton belt.

In addition to the economic function, public gins served a social function. “Trips to the gin provided farmers living in the far reaches of Mississippi’s counties with breaks in the tedium and solitude of toiling on small, isolated farms. The same gins served black and white farmers, and gin operators made no efforts to serve whites before blacks. While waiting in line to gin their cotton, farmers of both races came together to discuss pests, weather patterns, and prices. As shared public spaces, therefore, gins offered brief respites from the stifling confines of Mississippi’s racial caste system.” Source: https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/cotton-gins/.

/0 Comments/by

The Delta Blues and Dockery Plantation

, , ,

“If you had to pick one single spot as the birthplace of the blues, you might say it all started right here,”

said the late and great B.B. King standing at the Dockery 

The Blues: Blues music is rooted in several musical genres and then it spins off as the roots of rock and roll.  Blues Music originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s by African-Americans from roots in African-American work songs and religious spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to the end of slavery and, later, the development of juke joints. It is often associated with the acquired freedom of the former slaves and their challenges. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908.

The main features of blues include: specific chord progressions, a walking bass, call and response, dissonant harmonies, syncopation, melisma and flattened ‘blue’ notes. Blues is known for being microtonal, using pitches between the semitones defined by a piano keyboard. This is often achieved on electric guitar using a metal slide for a whining effect. As a result, blues can be heavily chromatic. Originally the lyrics utilized a call and response component.

Dockery Farms: The Dockery plantation at its peak in the mid 1930s consisted of 18,000 acres and extended over 28 square miles of rich fertile lowland along the Sunflower River. It had its own currency and general store, a physician, a railroad depot, a dairy, a seed house, cotton gin, sawmill, and three churches. There was also a school for the 1,000 to 3,000 men, women, and children who worked during the farm’s busiest times as either day laborers or as sharecroppers. The workers’ quarters included boarding-houses, where they lived, socialized and played music.  Farm workers often sang while working the fields and their music became their basic entertainment.

In the 1900s a young Charlie Patton’s parents took up residence at the Dockery Farms. Charlie took to following around guitarist Henry Sloan to musicals performances.  Charlie would become his own musician, and considered the father of the Delta Blues.

Charlie Patton and other bluesmen, drawn to Dockery by its central location and sizable population, used the plantation as their home base. When at the Dockery they often played on the porch of the commissary and at all-night picnics hosted by Will Dockery for residents. He and the others also traveled the network of state roads around Dockery Farms to communities large enough to support audiences that loved the blues. In the 1920s he could make about $25 for a performance at a party.

It was Patton’s live performances in the area that inspired and influenced fans such as Robert Johnson (who sold his soul to the devil to play blues), Bukka White, Ed “Son” House, Chester Burnett (also known as “Howlin’ Wolf), and Roebuck “Pop” Staples (as in the father and inspiration behind the Staples Singers). These important artists in blues history either lived at or passed through Dockery Farms.

 

 

/0 Comments/by