Themed Photo Gallery : Drew and Parchman Farm
History
Drew is a city in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The population was 2,434 at the 2000 census. Drew is in the vicinity of several plantations and the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a Mississippi Department of Corrections prison for men.
When the Yellow Dog Railroad (Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad) was extended through what is now Drew, the post office was moved from the Promised Land Plantation to the Drew location. The settlement and Post Office for Miss Drew Daniel, daughter of Andrew Jackson Daniel.
A school called the Little Red Schoolhouse was built by matching funds from the Rosenwald Fund in 1928. In the 21st century it received a grant for renovation of the large school.
In the 1920s, a man named Joe Pullen was lynched near Drew after killing 13 members of his lynch mob and injuring 26 of them.
One historian wrote that the white residents of Drew had “traditionally been regarded as the most recalcitrant in the county on racial matters.” The author wrote that whites in Drew were “considered the most recalcitrant of Sunflower County, and perhaps the state.” He also claimed that Drew’s proximity to the Mississippi State Penitentiary made Drew “a dangerous place to be black”, and claimed that during the 1930s and 1940s many police officers arbitrarily shot blacks, saying that they appeared to look like escaped prisoners. That historian also claimed that during the Civil Rights Movement, when attempts were made to move Fannie Lou Hamer’s movement for poor people from Ruleville to Drew, the organizers “faced stiff resistance”. Mae Bertha Carter, a major figure in the area civil rights movement, was from Drew.
Source: Wikipedia
Recommended reading for blues traditions in Drew and surrounding area: Big Road Blues
“Big Road Blues: Tradition And Creativity In The Folk Blues” by David Evans, published by Da Capo in 1987.
“This book centers on a study of the Blues traditions of the Drew, Mississippi area and takes the song “Big Road Blues” identified with Drew musician Tommy Johnson and recorded in 1930 by the Mississippi Sheiks as “Stop and Listen” as the center of that study. Along the way, Evans provides a history of the development of the blues and a history of the development of analysis and study of the blues up to the point of publication of his book as well as a final chapter with suggestions and questions that his study poses to the general methodology of Folklore”.
Extract of a review: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Road-Blues-Tradition-Creativity/product-reviews/0306803003
The Staple Singers
Full text:
Roebuck “Pops” Staples, who lived on the Dockery plantation near Drew in the 1920s and ’30s, was the founder of the Staple Singers, one of America’s foremost singing groups. The group included his children Cleotha and Pervis Staples, who were born at Dockery, and Mavis and Yvonne, who were born after the family moved to Chicago in 1936. Among the Staple Singers’ gospel, rhythm & blues, and pop hits were the No. 1 pop records “I’ll Take You There” and “Let’s Do It Again.”
The Staple Singers, who brought messages of love, hope, and peace to audiences for half a century, built their distinctive sound on gospel and blues traditions from the Drew area. Family patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples (1914-2000) was born near Winona and around 1923 moved with his parents and siblings to Will Dockery’s plantation near Drew, an important breeding ground for Delta blues. Staples was inspired to take up guitar by local blues artists Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf, Dick Bankston, and Jim Holloway, and was soon performing at local juke joints. By fifteen he was singing with gospel groups, and continued to do so after moving to Chicago, where he formed the Staple Singers in 1948. The group initially featured his children Cleotha (b. 1934), Pervis (b. 1935), and Mavis (b. 1939) and first recorded for Pops’ own Royal label in 1953.
The group gained national attention with the 1956 hit “Uncloudy Day” on the Vee-Jay label, and in the early ‘60s were refashioned as a “folk gospel” group. They became active participants in the civil rights movement, recording anthems including “Freedom Highway” and “Why (Am I Treated So Bad),” a favorite of their close friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1968 the Staples signed with Stax Records, where they had numerous hits with positive message songs including “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself.” Pervis left the group to pursue artist management and song publishing and was replaced by sister Yvonne (b. 1937). The group’s last major hit was the Curtis Mayfield-penned “Let’s Do It Again” (1975). Both Mavis and Pops later had successful solo careers.
Artists who lived in the Drew area in the post-World War II era include guitarist Boyd Gilmore (c. 1910-1976), whose early ‘50s recordings for Modern featured Ike Turner on piano and included covers of Robert Johnson songs. Gilmore also recorded for Sun and later moved to California. Drummer Kansas City Red (Arthur Lee Stevenson, 1926-1991) played with Robert Nighthawk before moving to Chicago, where he led bands and ran nightclubs. Singer James Kinds, born near Drew in 1943, began singing blues at one of Red’s clubs and later recorded several albums in Dubuque, Iowa, and Chicago. Local fiddler Sylvester Davis founded the Lard Can Band, which included his children James (“Boo Boo”) on drums, John on guitar, Sylvester, Jr. on bass, and Clara on vocals. The siblings also played with local bluesman “T-Bone Walker” Joe Louis in the ’50s and later performed together in East St. Louis as the Davis Brothers Blues Band. Vocalist-pianist Homer Harris (1916-2000) is best known because Muddy Waters appeared on his lone 1946 session for Columbia in Chicago, while Charles “Guitar” Friday (1934-2003), a veteran of the Memphis blues scene, recorded a 1966 single for Excello, and schoolteacher-keyboardist Jesse Gresham (b. 1947) recorded for the Jewel label in 1971 before becoming a pastor in Drew.
Source: http://msbluestrail.org/
Parchman Farm
Full text:
The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman has inspired many songs, including “Parchman Farm Blues” by singer-guitarist Booker “Bukka” White, who was once an inmate here, and “Parchman Farm” by jazz singer-pianist Mose Allison. Folklorists from the Library of Congress and other institutions also came to Parchman beginning in the 1930s to document the pre-blues musical forms of field hollers and work songs, which survived here due to the prison’s relative isolation from modern cultural influences.
Parchman Farm In 1900 the state of Mississippi began buying parcels of land near this site for a penitentiary and soon accumulated about 16,000 acres, over half of which had been owned by the Parchman family. For decades the prison operated essentially as a for-profit cotton plantation; prisoners grew their own food, made their own clothing, raised livestock, and even served as armed guards or “trusty shooters.” The harsh working and living conditions made “Parchman Farm” notorious, but the state was later able to improve Parchman’s image by implementing prison reforms.
Folklorists Alan Lomax, his father John A. Lomax, Herbert Halpert, and William Ferris found Parchman to be a rich repository of older musical traditions. Prisoners had little access to radio or records and, to help pace their labors and pass the day, often joined in work songs that had survived from earlier decades. Alan Lomax observed that such songs “revived flagging spirits, restored energy to failing bodies, [and] brought laughter to silent misery.” The Lomaxes first visited Parchman in 1933 and returned numerous times to record blues, work songs, spirituals, and personal interviews with inmates. The unaccompanied vocals by female inmates recorded in the prison’s sewing room in 1936 and 1939 have been cited by blues scholar Samuel Charters as an invaluable document of the way blues must have sounded in its earliest stages. Other notable recordings include a 1939 session with bluesman Booker “Bukka” White and a 1959 recording of James Carter’s gospel song “Po Lazarus,” which later appeared on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
White also recorded several memorable songs about his imprisonment, including “When Can I Change My Clothes” and “Parchman Farm Blues” in 1940, shortly after his release from Parchman. Other blues artists who served sentences here include R. L. Burnside, John “Big Bad Smitty” Smith, Terry “Big T” Williams, and, reportedly, Aleck “Rice” Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2), while songs with Parchman themes were recorded by Charley Patton, Wade Walton, and others. Mose Allison, who grew up in nearby Tippo, first recorded his “Parchman Farm” in 1957, and many artists including John Mayall and Johnny Winter later recorded it. Former rockabilly singer Wendell Cannon organized a prison band program here in 1960 and took groups consisting of trusty inmates to perform across the state for several decades. Blues artists who participated in the band program included David (Malone) Kimbrough, Jr., and Mark “Muleman” Massey.
Source: http://msbluestrail.org/
Click here for a comprehensive Wikipedia article on Parchman Farm.
Blues Inmates
Son House – served two years of a 15 year murder sentence.
Click here for a Wikipedia arrticle on Son House.
Bukka White – served time for assault. He wrote ‘Parchman Farm Blues ‘based on his experiences there.
Click here for a Wikipedia article on Bukka White.
Photo Gallery
