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"You might say, it all started right here," said B.B. King, standing near the Dockery Farms Seed House (pictured below), while narrating the documentary film Good Morning Blues. This plantation community in the Mississippi Delta was established by Will Dockery in 1895 to produce cotton, America's most important export of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. |
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The migration of whites and blacks to the Delta to cultivate cotton created a culture which in turn gave birth to the Blues. By the 1920's Dockery Farms had grown to a community of several thousand workers and it was home to a number of Blues pioneers, among them Henry Sloan, Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, and Roebuck "Pop" Staples. It was at Dockery that these musicians lived and learned from one another. They played in the boarding houses and commissary at Dockery, and in the juke joints of neighboring towns where they were joined by Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Howlin' Wolf. They left Dockery on the plantation's Pea Vine Railroad and traveled north to record. Their songs would influence the development of popular music all over the world. |
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