Delta River Mudcats

Scholars, academics, and blues enthusiasts have argued for years about the origins of the music called ‘The Blues’.  Theories abound that the music dates back to ancient African rhythms or ‘call and response’ chants of slaves working in the southern, Confederate fields.  Regardless of where it started, this music is distinctly American.  The seeds of the blues took root and prospered in the rich and fertile soil of the Delta, the 220 mile stretch of land from Memphis to Vicksburg east of Mississippi River.      

Originally, the music was simple, an impassioned vocal coupled with an acoustic guitar and oftentimes something used for a slide, such as a pocketknife, to slur the guitar notes. The early bluesmen confounded our western scales of music when slurring notes, and slurring is standard fare is most genres of music today.  Back then, the music was folksy and oftentimes was referred to as “country blues”.  The music had a spirit all its own.  Preachers began to call the blues “the devil’s music” because of the effect it had on listeners, especially the ladies in the audience.  The early bluesmen, performing in the depression-era 1930s, oftentimes succumbed to the vices of the day thus furthering the reputation of the blues as the devil’s music.            

Persistently falling cotton prices and new technology enabling farmers to pick cotton with machinery at much lower prices displaced the cotton picker thus causiong black workers to search for different work and better wages up north.  As field hands migrated north to factory jobs, the music spread beyond Memphis to Chicago and Detroit.  Electrified instruments came along after World War II, and the Delta country blues morphed into different styles with Muddy Waters leading the way in Chicago, John Lee Hooker in Detroit, and Howlin’ Wolf in West Memphis.             

 Detractors will tell you the blues is only about anguish and despair.  Its genesis might be found there, but one has only to listen to the first stanza of Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy’ and realize there is a message of hope, perhaps even joy, in this music.  To hear Muddy sing “Everythin’ gonna be alright this mornin’”, one feels that things are, fact, going to be all right.  Desegregation was under way in America in the 1950s, and the blues was beginning to become something more–it was becoming defiant, rebellious, and proud.  But a funny thing happened in the late 1950s and early 60s. That seed which had taken root in the rich, Delta soil blew across the ocean.  

Precious 45s, carried across the Atlantic, found their way to young British musicians, who had been turned onto a new style of music by Elvis Presley (a Delta native).  They began to research the roots of the music, and it led them to the Delta…it led them to the blues.  Suddenly, in the famous words of Muddy Waters, “the blues had a baby, and they named it rock ‘n’ roll.”  The early rock ‘n’ roll of the 1950s co-opted the structures, guitar work, and defiant and rebellious attitude from electrified blues.  During this time, the blues temporarily went underground.  It could still be found, but it was overshadowed by its precocious offspring.            

British musicians like Alexis Korner and John Mayall could be found in local UK pubs playing Delta blues for excited British teens. Those blues inspired bands, such as The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Yardbirds, Cream, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, and later The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin. These bands followed The Beatles over the Atlantic in what was called the British Invasion of the 60s, and with them they brought the blues back home. Suddenly the white kids in the suburbs of America were grooving to songs by Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf.

Those early British blues rock bands had such a massive influence on American music, and it spawned a blues revival. Old acts like Muddy, John Lee Hooker, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and others suddenly found broad audiences embracing their style of music back to the country blues days.  Every band that has come since that time has carried some influence from the Delta.  Even Nirvana covered ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’, an old Leadbelly song, on its ‘Unplugged’ album.            

The blues casts a powerful spell, and this spell caused the musicians of the Delta River Mudcats to come together in Denver, Colorado.  It wasn’t simply to spread the good word of the blues to Denver and its surrounding environs. It was to revive, honor, and further the musical seed that was planted in the rich, Delta soil that gives this band its name.  In the music of the Delta River Mudcats, one can hear the timeless and primitive beat and guitar slurs that have been handed from Charley Patton to Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters to England and back again.  It is a primal, down and dirty blues, played with the same attitude heard over 100 years ago in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It sounds good and feels even better.  Some may ask us “Why do you have the blues?”  A better question is, “Why don’t you have the blues, too?”

By Kenneth Corsini, Jr. and Todd Kirsch