Whites and blacks were tenant farmers in the sharecropping system. While the overwhelming majority of tenant farmers were black in the South, white sharecroppers were not all that rare. Every plantation had more than a few white families. This photo was taken in California in 1922 where virtually all the sharecroppers were white and not treated any better than the Southern blacks.
On the other hand, a poor black family at least had a place to live and some amount of food to eat however meager. If the Big Boss was a good man, he would build a juke joint for his farmers so they could loosen up and dance away their misery on a Saturday night. The entertainment often being other sharecroppers who knew how to play or sing up a storm. The Dockery Plantation where “the King of the Delta bluesmen,” Charlie Patton, farmed, had a brothel for the farmers to visit in case they were single or having some trouble with the missus. The Big Boss often let his farmers run stills, sell moonshine and gamble. The moonshine also stocked the juke joints. It was a good way to let them blow off steam and escape from the drudgery of their lives—at least temporarily.
The important thing for the sharecropper to always keep in mind was to never get on the Boss’s bad side. If the Boss-man liked you, you might get sent to deliver something up at the Big House where you might get an extra pie or chunk of beef or a salad—possibly even a little whiskey or Southern Comfort—from the kitchen for your troubles. If you got tossed in the clink, the Boss-man would send someone to bail you out so you wouldn’t rot in there for the rest of your life. Come Christmas, the Big Boss might invite you into the Big House and give you a crystal goblet full of his best whiskey, maybe a cigar or some firecrackers for the kids, wish you and yours a merry Christmas and then steer you to a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars and let you dig your hands in and haul away as much as you could carry in your arms. If you ran a still and the revenuers were coming, the Boss-man would send someone ahead to warn you to hide your still and your hooch quick. If the Boss didn’t like you for whatever reason, well, let’s just say that things weren’t going to be quite that good for you. But nobody on the plantation other than the Boss-man and his family had it very good.
When the tenant farmer system came to an end, civil rights workers who came to places like Mississippi found the unemployed black farmers in an unbelievably pitiful state. One such worker came upon a tiny, rundown shack occupied by a woman raising several small, naked children by herself with no job and no money. She wore a ragged shirt and nothing else being completely naked from the waist down. It was the only piece of clothing in the place.
At the Stovall plantation where the Morganfield family ended up, the Boss-man was Colonel Howard Stovall III who never let his farmers go hungry. If they had no food or money, he’d tell them to go to the plantation store and get a full share. After all, what did it matter to him? The provisions were simply tacked onto the tenant’s bill to be worked off. The Colonel could afford to be generous under such circumstances but the farmers still appreciated the gesture and many who had worked for Stovall recalled him fondly.
There really was no leisure time even for the children. As soon as they could walk, they were put to work doing something such as burning corn stumps. Many started off as a water-carrier who went about the fields serving water to thirsty hands. A hand would call out, “Water-boy!” and the lad would haul the water in his direction. The water was in a keg set on a cart and had a dipper the hands drank from. Muddy was big for his age and at eight years was put to work picking cotton which was normally reserved for older boys. Kids had no real toys other than perhaps a barrel hoop and stick. No books, no bicycles, no dolls, no nothing.
During breaks, the hands would crowd around a cheap radio and see what stations they could find. Muddy recalled that there weren’t many. If there was no radio, they would sing. As plantations became more mechanized, a boy would learn to drive a tractor. This was a coveted job which meant more pay and the work wasn’t nearly as back-breaking. B.B. King worked his way up to tractor-driver working on the plantation of Johnson Barrett and become Barrett’s best driver. In recompense, Barrett kept King from being drafted into the war.
Dockery Farms employed hundreds if not thousands of sharecropper farmers during its time in operation. Nowadays, it is a museum preserving an era of American history. It is also touted as the birthplace of the blues. Since bluesmen as Charley Patton farmed here, then undoubtedly a lot of blues was born at Dockery Farms.
There was little in the way of health care other than homemade remedies. Many sharecroppers died of easily preventable diseases because medical care was nonexistent and the sick farmer could not afford to stay in bed and would work to exhaustion while trying to shake off some disease or other when he should have been resting. This was exacerbated by the use of arsenic as a pesticide against weevils. A burlap sack of arsenic was loaded on the back of mule which was led between the cotton rows by a man who beat the bag with a stick as the mule walked causing the arsenic powder to billow up in clouds and settle on everything. The workers and animals had no protection from the arsenic, they breathed it and wore it, and it must have caused all kinds of health problems for them.
Pregnancies were rampant among the tenants but there was nothing in the way of caring for the babies and so many of them also died from preventable and treatable diseases. Domestic violence was also a staple on the plantation. Few were the nights when couples weren’t heard fighting—often viciously.
In the end, the tenant farmer had to give half of everything he grew and made to the Big Boss—the more he got, the more he had to give to the Boss—and only then were his expenses and debts extracted from his half which often left him with nothing and frequently put him in the red. He would be obliged to stay another year in hopes of coming up solvent but this was rarely the case and even when he did, he was often swindled into signing up for another year. If one had gone back to the days of slavery, one would have seen little difference between then and a plantation in the 1920s.
And cotton was king. Ol’ King Cotton, they called it. It was the South’s major cash crop. Each farmer also used part of his land as a garden to grow whatever he could and many depended on their gardens to get them through the winter. They would preserve their fruits and vegetables in jars. Since the garden was on the Boss’s land, half of everything the farmer grew went to the Boss. On the rare occasion that ice was available, they would wrap the ice in burlap sacks and then wrap the sacks in sawdust and some foods could be kept a little longer instead of spoiling and being thrown away which many a farmer could ill afford. The Delta region flooded fairly frequently and tornadoes were common. Such storms could wipe out a family’s crop and frequently did. But the majority of the land was used for cotton. And so the floods and rains were useful. Cotton wore out the Southern soil quickly and floods and rains often brought in new loam or topsoil to replenish the fields.
Cotton is a perennial plant meaning it doesn’t die in winter but will continue to grow. Left alone, a cotton plant will grow into a tree. The plantation owners did not want the cotton plants to become trees and so they had to be specially cultivated. They were planted close together to maximize profit and the fields needed to be weeded on a constant basis. The weeding process was known as “chopping cotton.”
Few people ever give any thought to what an important role cotton has played in the formation of American roots music and, ultimately, rock and roll.
Cotton truly was the king as it dictated the lives of all who grew and harvested it. The world needed cotton and nowhere on earth was more conducive to growing it than the American South and that is true to this day. Once while flying to Huntsville, Alabama, we passed over a cotton field in full bloom and it looked from above as though someone had dumped a gigantic box of popcorn over the land which was blanketed in fluffy white as far as the eye could see.
A sharecropper who was a musician had a chance to be somebody and also make some decent money. Son House picked up a musician’s guitar when he saw how much money and attention the man was getting and started playing right off and went on to become undoubtedly the best bottleneck player in the entire blues genre. Charlie Patton gave it a shot after watching Henry Sloan wow the crowd sometime around 1910. He became Sloan’s protégé and learned his blues from him. Like Sloan, Patton was a consummate showman—playing his guitar behind his head and with his teeth (and you thought Hendrix started that).
At the Dockery Plantation, Patton taught Son House and Willie Brown how to play the guitar. When House and Brown got famous, Robert Johnson began to follow them around. Johnson then taught his stepson, Robert Junior Lockwood, blues guitar and Lockwood went on to become one of the founders of electric blues.
Muddy Waters heard blues on a record as a boy and became hooked. He played a cigar box guitar and mastered the harmonica (much to his religious grandmother’s displeasure). Eventually, he took up a proper guitar and went to the juke joint to see Son House whenever he could. While everyone else danced and carried on, Muddy sat at House’s feet and watched every note he played. Even after both men became blues legends, Muddy would always ask Son to show him some bottlenecking techniques. Muddy admired Patton’s showmanship but he loved the beauty of Son House’s bottleneck
playing.
Black musicians played wherever they could land a gig. Today we think of the bluesmen as guys banging on old guitars while caterwauling in loud voices. Actually, most bluesmen were consummate musicians with large repertoires that included not only blues but rags, hillbilly, white and black dance numbers and even some Tin Pan Alley classics. The reason quite simply is because they might get hired to play at a white barn dance and had to know the kind of stuff white people danced to. Old field recordings have captured quite a number of black musicians doing country music rather than blues. Some had alternate repertoires meaning they played each and every song in a black style at black dances and a white style at white dances (although, in many cases, there was no difference). Black and white musicians traveled about constantly bumping into one another. Many struck up friendships, respected each other’s talent and taught each other songs and techniques.
The primary venue for the bluesman, however, was the juke joint (“joint” rhymes with “pint”). This was essentially a saloon or bar where people came to eat, drink and be merry—with “merry” being a euphemism for “drunk.” The city of Clarksdale had a high black population and so juke joints abounded with a different musician or band in each one every Saturday night.
The sharecropping bluesman played them all if he could. The joints in town were fairly tame because the townspeople were not about to let them get out of hand and they closed them early. For that reason, many musicians preferred the juke joints out in the country and on the plantations where they could play well into the early morning hours and make more money. These juke joints, however, were freewheeling, rough-and-tumble. People didn’t just drink there; they got plastered. They got rip-roaring “sh!t-faced drunk,” as they say. When they did, things got violent and dangerous. People were killed, stabbed, shot, beaten up, etc. in these places—including the musicians. The cops rarely if ever visited them.
To play a juke joint where there was no electrical amplification (or any electricity at all out in the rural areas), the artist had to play loud and sing loud. Since blues artists often traveled alone, he had to play like an entire band. Many took advantage of anything that gave him an edge. He would often resort to metal-body resonator guitars for more volume, would play the bass strings and higher-pitched strings independently to sound like two instruments and would stomp his foot loudly and drum his hands on his guitar for percussion. Bluesmen trained themselves to bellow out the melodies so they could be heard in a crowded, noisy room but without losing tonality in their voices. They had to shout above the crowd but still sound like they were singing and not just shouting. Consequently, when we listen to the recordings of early bluesmen, we can plainly hear the juke joint influence, especially in such artists as John Lee Hooker, Fred McDowell, Charlie Patton and Willie Brown.
John Lee Hooker - Roll N' Roll - YouTube
Juke joints in town were closely watched by the police to ensure things did not get out of hand. They closed at midnight. The isolated jukes stayed open into the early hours of the morning and could get very violent.
Colored Cafe juke joint, Mississippi, 1950.
Poor Monkey's juke joint, Merigold, MS.