Backwater Blues

Today I want to highlight a blues song that became important for me while spending time in Nicaragua.  While spending a weekend in a community called Nueva Esperanza I learned of a flood that had devastated the area.  The natural disaster had unnatural undertones riddled with racism and classism.  The impoverished rural community was struck harder and received inadequate resources and aid in the aftermath of the devastating flood.

It reminded me of a blues song written and recorded by Bessie Smith in 1927, Backwater Blues.  Smith's song is the story being affected by a great flood while living in the lowlands of Mississippi.  Bessie Smith was very popular and the highest paid blues singer of her time, and her song became especially popular during a massive flood that hit the delta region that same year.  Called the "greatest flood in history,"  the natural disaster of 1927 devastated the cotton-growing delta region of Mississippi.  Ten feet of water drowned over a million acres of land causing widespread panic.

The natural disaster highlighted the turmoil of the delta region's racial undertones by disproportionately affecting black plantation workers who lived in the floodzone.  Political upheaval came about when white politicians and plantation owners were faced with a decision of evacuating African American residents whose homes had been lost.  Cotton farms require large amounts of physical labor.   Plantation owners worried that evacuating their black laborers would result in an exodus to northern cities like Chicago, where personal and economic opportunity for people of color was greater.

Tension over racial inequality arose in many facets of the Mississippi flood of 1927.  Black plantation workers were paid low wages forcing them to live in the lowlands that were more likely to flood.  Camps, formed to house the victims of the flood who had lost homes, unequally favored whites with more plentiful supplies of food and better conditions.   The fallout of this great flood played a role in what became known as The Great Migration, when six million African Americans moved out of the South toward Chicago and other northern cities.

It's no wonder that Bessie Smith's, Backwater Blues, became an anthem of that great flood and all of its deep historical and political impact.  As we continue to see modern day examples of natural disasters that bring racial and socioeconomic tensions to light, Bessie's song still strikes a chord.

http://youtu.be/mRTHHkeQ8sE