Delta Blues

Abstract

This chapter describes how Fannie Lou Hamer's family endured crushing poverty and hunger during the hardest years of the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit Mississippi hard. As the Depression worsened, both Black and white rural non-landowning farmers suffered, but African Americans received fewer relief benefits and financial support. Farm owners flat out refused to pay competitive wages and instead found ways to thwart President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Black Mississippians fought back by organizing local branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Unsurprisingly, rural membership was low in Mississippi-affiliation with civil rights and Black nationalist organizations brought risks and threats of violence from white employers, police officials, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and other white supremacist organizations. The chapter then looks at how bootlegging-the illegal manufacturing, sale, and distribution of alcoholic spirits-became a significant cash business during the Depression for some rural Mississippians, ushering in the emergence of speakeasies and juke houses that supplied venues for the new and increasingly popular music genre, the blues. Hamer's legendary voice, conditioned and shaped by hymns and gospel music at church, matured with the emotional lived experience that inspired the blues. Indeed, Delta blues singers captured and articulated the voices of the Black community.