DAY 3: Memphis to Tunica ... into the Delta

Beale Street at Night

I spent last night on Beale Street.  The picture captures it... bright lights, music.  Heard some good blues/jazz at the Tap Room.  It's a special place for me, because I played there for the 2010 International Blues Challenge.

Rolled out of Memphis this morning, down 3rd street, which becomes Highway 61 south of town.  I was expecting to stop for a picture at Sun Studios.  The place was smothered in tour busses, so I just kept on going.






The Delta really begins in the southern suburbs of Memphis.  After about 15 miles on the modern Hwy 61, I turned off to find Old 61, which is the road the bluesmen traveled and sang about.  The city drops back, and the flat rich alluvial floodplain of the delta takes over.  They're setting out cotton now, tight green shoots already a foot high, reaching off to the horizon.  (Apparently, the lady that swore this was cotton had me pegged as a city boy.  When I got to Greenwood, they showed me cotton, looking more like the brown, scraggly sticks you'd expect as this time of year.)

The plantations in the delta may the first of what we would call agribusinesses today.  Beginning with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became the staple of the delta.  Extraordinarily rich soil of the delta of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers allowed huge plantations to rise up.  Where Jefferson and Washington, who were wealthy men, had 300 slaves working and perhaps a thousand acres, Delta plantations were 10,000 acres, land granted by the government in the 1830's by the square mile.  And, though the land was fertile, it was forested.  Big plantations had 5,000 slaves to work 10,000 acres. 
In this technological age, we city folks don’t often think about the fact that farms were the first places automation changed lives and productivity.  By the 1920's and 30's, that productivity had driven many of sharecroppers off the land.

By the 1980's Tunica county was the poorest in the United States.  Tunica came up with a solution, one which shocks the eye after experiencing the miles and miles of cotton fields.  Tunica now advertises itself as the third-largest casino area in the US, after Las Vegas and Atlantic City.  To see this rising out of the farmland is, well, amazing.

Kind of reminds me of my cousin Gamble's description of Disney World:  "A 500 million dollar juke box in the honky-tonk of life.