April 27, 2002

There exists in the black communities in the Mississippi Delta—and throughout the South—a need for academic research. Below, I describe some research projects I believe worthy of grant money. Any of these projects would make a fine master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation.

I'm sure the reader's first thought is, Well, why don't you do it, Junior? The answer is, My health is too bad, and I'm perfectly satisfied with an occasional blues bumming expedition, thank you. But I will give all possible help.

Near Newellton, Louisiana, and still maintained. The dim road to the right is dirt.

#1: Vanished Communities: In the edges of cotton fields all over the South you will find little white frame churches sitting alone in the middle of nowhere. (See my Mt. Pilgrim page.) Many times you find only evidence that a church once stood there—a few scattered tombstones hidden in weeds. As the years pass, those churchless cemeteries slowly become part of the surrounding cotton fields. One year a tractor tire knocks over a tombstone. Another year, a tractor tire runs over it, breaking it and pushing it into the ground. Year by year, the tombstone becomes more fragmented and deeper in the ground. Then one year the grave beneath the tombstone becomes part of a row in a cotton field, a cotton field now three feet closer to another tombstone.

Near Hollandale, Mississippi, and now used only for burials.

Black communities once lined the edges of those cotton fields and surrounded those churches and the spots where churches once stood. When mechanization and chemical weed control came in the early 1950s, thousands of black people lost their livelihoods and left the edges of cotton fields for the inner cities—The Great Migration, it is called.

One by one their empty shotgun houses fell down or burned down or were moved by slumlords to the inner cities and rented to the same black people who once lived in them rent free. Today there is no evidence of thousands of communities except lonely churches and cemeteries and glimmering shards of glass in freshly-plowed cotton fields.

To my peers in the social sciences I say this: we know more about antebellum plantation slaves than we know about the same people during the period of 1865 — 1960. Free, they moved from slave quarters behind the Big House to shotgun houses in little communities along the edges of cotton fields. From those now-vanished communities they moved to town. Therein lies my suggested project: a combined oral history and mapping project. Many of those people are still alive and living in a city near their original rural homes. Let us record their stories and get them to show us where they lived. Let us film them standing on the spot where they once lived and telling us how it was to live there. Let us map that spot for future archaeologists. As social scientists, let us learn how those isolated little communities functioned, clasped in the grip of poverty and encircled with racism.

Imagine the stress inside those communities as the peoples' already meager income dwindled to a pittance and finally became nothing. Think of the elderly as one by one their friends and families moved away. Were they the last to go, surrounded by empty houses? Think of the pressure surely put upon those unfortunate people by the landowner, once in need of them but now greedily eying the few acres of land beneath their steadily-emptying shotgun houses.

It would be easy to find those people and record their stories of how they handled the stress and pressure. If a church is still standing and being maintained, the people who once lived in the vanished community around it maintain it and probably still use it. Many of them, like my Mt. Pilgrim congregation, live in cities miles away, but they hold services in the old church at least once a month. So to find the people, find the church, then find and talk to the preacher. When he understands what you want to research, he'll think God sent you.

New Port Baptist Church

It is impossible to study all of those vanished communities. There are thousands in just Mississippi and Louisiana. But some of them are significant. For example, the vanished community along Steel Bayou near Rolling Fork, Mississippi, the community wherein was born a child named McKinley Morganfield. There's another one south of Lexington, Mississippi, near the New Port Church, the community wherein was born a child named Elmore James. There's another one near Itta Bena, Mississippi, around the house of Robert Johnson's mother, described so emotionally in Alan Lomax's The Land Where The Blues Began.

I believe grants—large grants—to study almost any of those vanished communities could be easily obtained. For a fact, the black communities of today would overwhelmingly support such studies.

A word of caution. If the researcher listens only to church people, the researcher will get only 1/2 of the vanished community's story—the religion side. Those communities had either semi-clandestine bootlegger joints or wide open juke joints. So get the sin side of the story. You might find it the most interesting.

A word of complaint: recent articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker about Fat Possum records and its artists portrayed the Delta as a dangerous, gin- and crack cocaine-soaked land of uneducated social deviants and welfare cheats. Those publications and the writers of the articles should look out their own back doors. If they want to write about my back door, I ask them to please have the decency to include writings about people like those who maintain lonely churches in cotton fields all over the Delta.

#2: Holmes County Mississippi and Elmore James: During the nearly two weeks I spent in Holmes County researching Elmore James—born and buried there—the support given to me by the black people of Holmes County was unbelievable.

Click the added red text to visit those Holmes County pages.

In more than six years of bumming around the Delta, I've never experienced anything like it. The mayor of Durant, James T. Wiley, made phone calls for me and always had time to talk to me. His lovely daughter spent an afternoon showing me old juke joints. A cop drove me around in his squad car and introduced me to people. Everyone treated me special. Some even showed up at my campsite with old newspapers for me to read. It was like being a celebrity.

When I visited the Holmes County Library in Durant, I understood why those black people were so accommodating. I think it amazed them that an academic-type researcher was interested in them. The reason I think that is because of the reference material I found in the library. I assumed the hometown library of Elmore James, one of the founding fathers of American music—the founder of rock ‘n' roll, I believe— would contain lots of information on that person. Well, the library contained probably four feet of shelf space devoted to Holmes County history, but in all those books and pamphlets I found not one word about Elmore James and only 1/2 of one page in one pamphlet devoted to the black history of Holmes County—a list of high school janitors. I was stunned.

Holmes County is and always has been predominately black. But according to the written historical record, it must be 99.999 % white. So a half-dozen or so janitors were the only black people of consequence to ever live in Holmes County Mississippi?

Unusual circumstances made Holmes County one of the birthplaces of rock ‘n' roll. First, Elmore James lived there and was a young guitar player when Gibson introduced the first successful electric guitar—the EL-150. Second, Elmore had plenty of places to play. Holmes County was a wet oasis surrounded by dry counties. When a road or highway reached Holmes County, it was lined with juke joints and honky tonks.

The gracious people of Holmes County are full of juke joint and honky tonk tales, including the time the governor called out the National Guard to raid the juke joints and honky tonks.

It's a hell of a story; someone go there and write it.

#3: Itinerant Gospel Singers: A man recently informed me of a circa 1960 passenger train ride and the meeting of a black itinerant gospel singer on the train. It seems the singer, an old black man in a worn black suit, carried a ragged leather valise, an acoustic guitar, and a Bible. He traveled from town to town singing in churches for food and pocket change.

What a great subject for research! I'm betting there were dozens of itinerant gospel singers.