123:, a system in which they leased land to cultivate, paying the owner a share of the crop. The families lived on their land and grew their own gardens. Often peripatetic blues musicians were attracted there for itinerant work and they lived in what were called the "quarters" for bachelors, known for the partying and drinking going on there. Here musicians, often drunk, played their music far into the night. The guitar was particularly suited to the rural Mississippi Delta musician.
103:. As he made more money he acquired more land; realizing that the bottom soil was rich, he cleared the trees, drained the marshes of malaria-carrying mosquitoes and began to plant cotton. It subsequently became known that Dockery needed manual labor, and he was willing to pay for it, so laborers flocked there. Eventually, Will Dockery built a large
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during their off hours, his plantation provided a particularly fertile atmosphere for musicians to gather and play their music while others listened and danced. It is difficult to know what
Mississippi music would have emerged without the musical mix of Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, and Robert Johnson.
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Although the complete history will never be known, there is a central theme to the development of what is known as the blues, and that is the plantation that Will
Dockery built outside of Cleveland. Although Dockery was unaware of the music his laborers played in their quarters at "house parties"
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which produced its own money. By the 1930s, Dockery plantation covered 28 square miles (73 km) of rich fertile river delta lowland. Will
Dockery earned a reputation for treating his workers fairly.
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The
Mississippi Blues Commission placed a historic marker at the site of the plantation in recognition of its enormous importance in the development of the Mississippi blues.
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in 1885. He left the family farm and purchased, with a $ 1000 gift from his grandmother, tracts of forest and marshland outside of
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Over the years, black laborers began to migrate to the
Dockery Plantation, to work in the fields and become
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27:(November 10, 1865 – December 29, 1936) was an American landowner who built from scratch the
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and settled in
Mississippi as farmers, but were left poor by the war's end. Dockery was born in
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is an acknowledgment of the important contribution of the plantation to the development of the
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It is difficult to find traces of the earliest blues styles, but it was in the delta, in
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314:"Articles: The Origins of the Mississippi Delta Blues — Historical Text Archive"
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A marker designating
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Dockery's parents left the
Carolinas sometime before the
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and played a significant role in the development of the
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Blues Off the Record:Thirty Years of Plue
Commentary
402:. Mississippi Development Authority. Archived from
299:"Guide to the William Alfred Dockery Family Papers"
244:"Mississippi Blues Commission — Blues Trail"
273:. Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin Books Ltd. pp.
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301:. Mississippi State University. Nov 11, 2013.
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217:"Dockery Farms and the Birth of the Blues"
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475:People from DeSoto County, Mississippi
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340:. New York: Da Capo Press. pp.
222:. Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz
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175:. Governor Haley Barbour stated:
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371:. New York: Da Capo. pp.
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143:heard a man singing a
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193:Delta Blues
93:Yazoo River
33:Delta blues
444:Categories
413:2008-05-29
342:32, Part I
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270:Deep Blues
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200:References
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