3 More Great Songs About the Flood
1. "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues" by Barbecue Bob (Columbia, 1927). Would that we all could pull up a stool at Tidwell's Barbecue north of Atlanta and eat some pulled pork served by Barbecue Bob and then hear him strum his "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues." Over a million people were displaced during the flood and the song focuses on two of them. He sings, "I'm in Mississippi, with mud all in my shoes/My girl in Louisiana with those high water blues." Of course, the displacement the flood wrought was only partially due to Mother Nature. When it became clear that the flood would likely scrape off an entire level of topsoil, and with it an entire year's earnings, many of the poor sharecroppers headed north as part of The Great Migration. So many sharecroppers left, in fact, that white landowners got nervous that no one would be left to pick the cotton once the land recovered, and so evacuation for the poor blacks was ended. Instead, many were forced to stay in makeshift refugee camps along the riverbanks and sandbag the levee for a quarter a day, under the watch of National Guardsmen with rifles. The situation was dire, as Barbecue Bob relates: There was "nothing but muddy water, as far as I could see," and precious little comfort to be found. "Listen here, you men," sings Barbecue Bob, "one more thing I'd like to say/Ain't no womens out here, for they all got washed away." The song would be played just a few years later at Barbecue Bob's funeral; he died at twenty-nine of influenza.
2. "Back Water Blues" by Bessie Smith (Columbia, 1927). Although the song most closely associated with the great 1927 flood is Bessie Smith's "Back Water Blues," Smith had actually written it about the Nashville flood of 1926 and released it just prior to the Mounds Landing crevasse. Nevertheless, the lyrics became an anthem for the people of the Delta who witnessed the effects of a wall of water three-quarters of a mile wide and over one hundred feet high, more than double the volume of a flooding Niagara Falls, according to John M. Barry in the seminal text Rising Tide. The "back waters" that Smith sings of are old riverbeds that were deliberately flooded to take pressure off the main channel's levees. "Back water blues done call me to pack my things and go," she sings; "'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more."
3. "High Water Everywhere" by Charlie Patton (Paramount, 1929). If you have a hard time making out the lyrics to Charlie Patton's "High Water Everywhere," you're not alone—even Son House (who, along with Howlin' Wolf, was influenced by Patton) found Patton's lyrics at times unintelligible, though in the end that might have been beside the point. Patton was most interested in making music that got folks dancing and provided them with a lively show (Patton would, at times, play his guitar behind his back, or between his legs, or throw it up and catch it and keep playing, or use it merely for percussive pounding). "High Water Everywhere" features Patton's beating-on-the-box, guitar-slinging signature and is charged with an increasing sense of the flood's danger. First, "Back water done rose at Sumner," sings Patton, "drove poor Charlie down, down the line." Then we see the water rising at Leland and Greenville, then Rosedale and Vicksburg, then Sharkey County and Stovall. Patton would "go to the hilly country" for safety, he sings, "but they got me barred." 1927 was still the era for the three-minute single, which explains why this longer song was recorded in two parts. Check out the R. Crumb comic, found here, which graphically illustrates Patton's life, much of which was spent on Dockery Plantation in the Mississippi Delta, as well as Bob Dylan's 2001 tribute, "High Water (for Charley Patton)."
Part 1.
Part 2.
