Rolling Fork : Background, Blues Musicians and Photo Gallery
Background : Rolling Fork and the adjacent Issaquena County
Rolling Fork
Rolling Fork is a town in Sharkey County, Mississippi. The population was 2,486 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Sharkey County.
Samantha Vinas located here in 1828, and was the first settler in the county. Deer Creek flows through the settlement, and Chaney called the place “Rolling Fork” because of the swiftness of the water at a fork in the creek there.
A post office was established in 1848.
When Sharkey County was established in 1876, Rolling Fork was made the county seat.
A newspaper, The Deer Creek Pilot, was established in 1884.
The Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railway was built through Rolling Fork in 1883. It was later acquired by the Illinois Central Railroad.
In 1908, the Bank of Rolling Fork was established.
Rolling Fork had a population of 1,000 in 1906.
Issaquena County
Issaquena County is a county located in the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2010 census, the population was 1,406, making it the least populous county in the state and east of the Mississippi River. Its county seat is Mayersville. With a per-capita income of $18,598, Issaquena County is the third poorest county in the United States.
Issaquena County is located in the Mississippi Delta region. The Mississippi River flows along the entire western boundary of the county, and many of the earliest communities were river ports.
The county’s economy is chiefly based on agriculture, though a number of hunting camps are also located here and contribute to the economy. Mississippi’s two most recent records for the heaviest alligator taken by a hunter have both been in Issaquena County, the latest in 2012 when a 697.5 lb (316.4 kg) alligator was taken at a camp near Fitler.
“Issaquena” is a Choctaw word meaning “Deer River”. The Choctaw people were the first inhabitants of the county, and were removed from their land in 1820. Non-Native settlers began arriving in the early 1830s.
Issaquena county was established on January 23, 1844, from the southern portion of Washington County. The first county seat was located in Skipwith, and then moved to Duncansby (both communities are now ghost towns). In 1848, the county seat moved to Tallula, and in 1871, to Mayersville.
The county lies entirely in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, and hardwood forest known as “bottomland” grows thick in the nutrient-rich, high-clay “buckshot” soil. Early settlers cleared many forests, and by the early 1890s about 50,000 acres (20,000 ha) of the county was growing corn, cotton, and oats. About that same time, the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railway was completed along a north-south route through the center of the county.
In 1876, Sharkey County was created from portions of Issaquena, Warren, and Washington counties.
Slavery
Issaquena County is notable for its participation in slavery. In 1860, 92.5% of Issaquena County’s total population were enslaved people, the highest concentration anywhere in the United States. The U.S. Census for that year showed that 7,244 slaves were held in Issaquena County, and of 115 slave owners, 39 held 77 or more slaves. Dr. Stephen Duncan of Issaquena County held 858 slaves, second only to Joshua John Ward of South Carolina. This large “value of slave property” made Issaquena County the second richest in the nation, with “mean total wealth per freeman” at $26,800 in 1860. By 1880—just 15 years after the abolition of slavery—the county had developed “a strong year-round market for wage labor”, and Issaquena was the only county in Mississippi to report “no sharecropping or sharerenting whatsoever”.
Civil War
During the winter of 1862 and spring of 1863, Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant conducted a series of amphibious operations aimed at capturing the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, located south of Issaquena County.
The Steele’s Bayou Expedition occurred on waterways within Issaquena County, including Steele Bayou, Little Sunflower River, Big Sunflower River, Deer Creek, Black Bayou, Little Black Bayou, and the Yazoo River.
The shallow waterways proved difficult for the large Union boats, and Confederate defenses were robust. The Steele’s Bayou Expedition was a defeat for Union forces in Issaquena County.
This marker for Steele’s Bayou Expedition is in southern Issaquena County.
Source: Wikipedia
Mississippi Blues Trail Marker : Muddy Waters Birthplace – Rolling Fork
This marker, about the birthplace of Muddy Waters, is at 130 Walnut Street at the Sharkey County Courthouse in Rolling Fork.
Full text:
McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, was one of the foremost artists in blues history. In the late 1940s and 1950s he led the way in transforming traditional Delta blues into the electric Chicago blues style that paved the road to rock ‘n’ roll. Waters was born in the Jug’s Corner community of rural Issaquena County but always claimed Rolling Fork as his birthplace. His birth date has been cited as April 4, 1913, 1914, or 1915.
His grandmother, Della Grant, nicknamed him “Muddy” because, as a baby on the Cottonwood Plantation near Mayersville, he loved to play in the mud. Childhood playmates tagged on “Water” or “Waters” a few years later. His father, Ollie Morganfield, was a sharecropper in the Rolling Fork area who also entertained at local blues affairs. But Waters was raised by his grandmother, who moved to the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale when he was still a young child, and his influences were Delta musicians such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Robert Nighthawk. Muddy first played harmonica with Stovall guitarist Scott Bohanner, but took up guitar under the older musician’s tutelage, and later performed with another mentor, blues legend Big Joe Williams. He also played in a string band, the Son Sims Four, and drove a tractor on the Stovall Plantation, where he ran a juke joint out of his house.
Waters did his first recordings at Stovall in 1941-42 for a Library of Congress team led by Alan Lomax and John Work III. In 1943 he moved to Chicago, and by the end of the decade he was setting the pace on the competitive Chicago blues scene. The city was loaded with freshly arriving talent from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana as southern farm workers continued to migrate to the alleged “promised land” of the north. Many of the finest musicians, including harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs, pianist Otis Spann, and guitarist Jimmy Rogers, worked in the seminal Muddy Waters Blues Band, which virtually defined the Chicago blues genre. Both through his recordings on the Aristocrat and Chess labels and through his sensual and electrifying live performances, he not only became a blues icon but a godfather to generations of rock ‘n’ roll bands, as he expanded his audience from the African American clubs of Chicago’s South and West sides to Europe and beyond. The Rolling Stones recorded several of his songs and took their name from one of his early records, “Rollin’ Stone.” Jazz, R&B, country & western, and hip hop artists have used his material as well.
Other Muddy Waters classics, many written by Vicksburg native Willie Dixon, include “Got My Mojo Working,” “Manish Boy,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “I’m Ready.” Waters returned to visit or perform in Mississippi on occasion, and appeared at the Greenville V.F.W., the Ole Miss campus, and the 1981 Delta Blues Festival. A recipient of multiple Grammy awards, charter member of the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame, and 1987 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Muddy Waters died in his sleep on April 30, 1983, at his home in Westmont, Illinois.
Source: http://msbluestrail.org/
Photo Gallery
‘Welcome’ to Rolling Fork
The Sharkey County Courthouse
Muddy Waters memorial gazebo on the Sharkey County Courthouse square
Mural to the left of the Sharkey County Courthouse featuring the history of Rolling Fork
Mural on Hicks Avenue featuring animals, buildings, people, and events special to Sharkey County.
