Dockery Plantation

Okay. Here it is. The birthplace of the blues. Charlie Patton, the first man to record the blues, worked here on this plantation. There were 2,000 sharecroppers, a doctor, a store, a church. The sharecroppers worked all year, charging their meat, meal and molasses at the company store. Once a year, there was a reckoning. And usually the plantation owner reckoned that he was owed more than the sharecropper had earned.

It was a hard, hard life. I haven't been able to express yet just how hard it was. But at least it was a way of life. A sharecropper could raise a family this way, and many people in the Delta now can't provide anything for their families.

Charlie played the blues, and he went to Memphis and recorded. He came back and played the blues at night and fooled around with other men's wives during the day. There was a romance to being a blues man that sharecropping couldn't match, and almost all the early bluesmen had lots of women troubles for that reason. That, and they fact that they played at night and were hanging around the shacks by day when the other men were in the field.

It is pretty well assumed that the blues began with field hollars: While working in the fields, a man sings out "I'm gonna get up in the morning and leave this place." A man a few rows over replies "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna get up in the morning and leave this place." Others join in, and they have a blues song, with the mournful sound it deserves and a hint of the African rhythms they've carried with them.

In the days before mechanical cotton pickers, the Dockery Plantation couldn't have survived without the sharecroppers. (It's said it takes a man and a mule for every acre of cotton.) And the blues wouldn't have been created without the Dockery Plantation.