The background

Stovall Plantation, nr Clarksdale Ms

The homeland of the Delta blues stretched from Vicksburg, Mississippi in the south, to Memphis, Tennessee in the north and from central Mississippi in the east to the Ozark plateau of Arkansas in the west. This land was previously uninhabited, but in the 1830s, white planters began to move into the Delta, and they brought their slaves with them. Cotton grew well in the fertile soil of the Delta, and the lumber industry boomed as well. After the slaves were freed, blacks continued to move into the region to work on the plantations, and this influx continued until World War I, when blacks outnumbered whites four to one. 

In addition to cotton plantations, the Delta had a large and notorious contract levee labour system. Levees were the sole defence from flooding in the river valley, and the black workers provided the labour for building and maintaining of them. Labour contractors hired a labour force, predominantly black, and the labourers lived on the levee site. The labourers found themselves in a situation much like that of the sharecroppers and tenant farmers. All food, clothing and entertainment was provided by the contractor at exorbitant prices. They often ended up owing the contractor money. 

The first blues artists in the Delta were part-time musicians. They worked as field hands on cotton farms in the daytime, and played the blues for tips and drinks at parties, picnics and dances. The moonlighting that these men did kept the blues closely tied to the farm community and the hardships that went with it. Labour contractors hired bluesmen to perform on the weekends and many performers who later gained fame outside of the Delta worked as weekend entertainers for levee workers.

For more information on African - American history:

The Encyclopædia Britannica Guide to Black History

The National Civil Rights Museum

The Negro Holocaust Lynching and Race Riots in the US