Guru
July 25th, 2008, 04:38 AM
http://www.ddtonline.com/articles/2008/07/24/news/news2.txt
DOCKERY - Saturday used to be payday at Dockery Farms. That was the day when, early in the 20th century, Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Pops Staples and others would play an emerging new kind of music on the front porch of the plantation's commissary.
By the 1930s, more than 2,000 people lived at Dockery Farms and worked the land that Will Dockery began transforming from wilderness to cotton fields in 1895. It was a largely self-contained world, with its own schools, churches and post office. On payday, hundreds of sharecroppers used to gather around the old commissary to buy food and dry goods, to talk with their neighbors, to take a break from their wearying work, and to hear the sounds the world would one day call the blues.
Musicologists have traced the early development of the blues to Dockery Farms and those sessions on the commissary porch. No one knows for certain if Dockery was the “birthplace of the blues,” as some have claimed; but historians of the genre generally agree that Patton's guitar-playing (which he learned as a boy from Dockery farmhand Henry Sloan), his 29 early blues recordings, and his influence on the other musicians at Dockery were instrumental in the blues' beginnings. In 2006, Dockery Farms was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in April a Mississippi Blues Trail marker was dedicated at the plantation.
DOCKERY - Saturday used to be payday at Dockery Farms. That was the day when, early in the 20th century, Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Pops Staples and others would play an emerging new kind of music on the front porch of the plantation's commissary.
By the 1930s, more than 2,000 people lived at Dockery Farms and worked the land that Will Dockery began transforming from wilderness to cotton fields in 1895. It was a largely self-contained world, with its own schools, churches and post office. On payday, hundreds of sharecroppers used to gather around the old commissary to buy food and dry goods, to talk with their neighbors, to take a break from their wearying work, and to hear the sounds the world would one day call the blues.
Musicologists have traced the early development of the blues to Dockery Farms and those sessions on the commissary porch. No one knows for certain if Dockery was the “birthplace of the blues,” as some have claimed; but historians of the genre generally agree that Patton's guitar-playing (which he learned as a boy from Dockery farmhand Henry Sloan), his 29 early blues recordings, and his influence on the other musicians at Dockery were instrumental in the blues' beginnings. In 2006, Dockery Farms was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in April a Mississippi Blues Trail marker was dedicated at the plantation.