Blues in the Mississippi Night, 1947

In 1947 Alan Lomax recorded bluesmen Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson on a Presto disc recording machine at Decca Studios in New York City after their concert at Town Hall. In candid oral history and song, the three Southern-born artists, who had established their careers in Chicago, explained the origin and nature of the blues. “They began with blues as a record of the problems of love and women in the Delta world,” Lomax wrote. “They explored the cause of this in the stringent poverty of black rural life. They recalled life in the Mississippi work camps, where the penitentiary stood at the end of the road, waiting to receive the rebellious. Finally, they came to the enormities of the lynch system that threatened anyone who defied its rules.”