The "Great Migration"

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1) Read about Muddy Waters and answer the following questions in groups.

ESSENTIAL QUESTION

How did the Great Migration spread Southern culture, helping to give the Blues a central place in American popular music?

OVERVIEW

In 1941, Alan Lomax and John Work, both musicologists, visited the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Working for Fisk University and the Library of Congress, the scholars were traveling throughout the Mississippi Delta to interview locals and survey musical cultures in rural communities. One of the musicians they recorded at the Stovall Plantation was McKinley Morganfield, an African-American sharecropper who also went by the name “Muddy Waters.” Though Muddy worked full-time on the plantation, he also sang and performed the Blues as a solo acoustic guitar player. The songs he recorded for Lomax, with titles such as “I Be’s Troubled” and “Burr Clover Farm Blues,” came out of a folk tradition through which songs were passed along orally and changed from generation-to-generation.  Several of Muddy’s songs addressed the worries and struggles of black life and a determination to escape to someplace better. Two years after that first field recording, in 1943, Muddy left his home on the Stovall plantation to live in Chicago. Within a decade of his arrival, he had launched one of the most significant careers of any American Blues artist. Between 1950 and 1958, Muddy Waters had 14 top ten songs on the Billboard R&B chart and was packing nightclubs with what was by that time an electrified band. In 1963, pianist Otis Spann would introduce him onstage as “the man who brought the Blues from the country to the city,” pointing to Muddy’s substantial contributions to the evolution of the Blues tradition.

Muddy Waters and a multitude of African Americans in the twentieth century left their homes in the South for urban centers across the Northeast, Midwest, and West. This internal dispersion, known as the Great Migration, is the largest internal movement of a population in U.S. history. Between the 1910s and 1970, over six million African Americans from the South headed towards cities including New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago, in search of a better life. There were plenty of reasons for leaving, one of which was the prevalence of the sharecropping economy in the rural South. Since Reconstruction, the sharecropping system of agriculture had saddled poor farmers with debt burdens from which they had little hope to recover, keeping many African-American families entrenched in poverty. Meanwhile, as northern cities grew, a range of jobs emerged in factories, service industries, and domestic work. The work was usually hard and unglamorous, and old racial prejudices reappeared in different forms includingde facto segregation, through which segregation occurred even without legal mandate. Still, these cities seemed far-removed from a region long-connected with generations of virulent racism.

Because of American slavery, African Americans had lived as a displaced people. In some ways, the experience of the Great Migration continued this displacement story. The Blues articulated the troubles people faced when uprooting their lives, and allowed migrants a means to connect as they struggled to survive in northern cities. When Muddy Waters sang “I Feel Like Going Home,” one of the first songs he recorded in Chicago, or when Howlin’ Wolf bellowed “Smokestack Lightnin’,” a song built around the image of a moving train, their audiences were familiar with the longing and imagery expressed in the songs. Oftentimes, listeners felt a shared sense of community when they heard the music; they had watched the same trains pass through the country towards new opportunities in the North. African Americans who migrated often reflected back on the places from which they had come, and the Blues served as a link between their old homes and their new urban lives.

When Phil and Leonard Chess, two Polish immigrants living in Chicago, began to search for artists to record on their Chess record label in the late 1940s, they decided to focus on Blues artists whose music appealed to the emerging urban African-American community. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Chess recorded artists including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Dixon, in addition to Blues-influenced artists such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, who crossed over into Pop. Like Muddy Waters, most of these musicians had migrated from the South.

The repercussions of the Great Migration are far-reaching. Today, much of the restlessness and struggle that the Blues helped to articulate in the Migration era remains central in other forms of American music, including Hip Hop. In this lesson, students look to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as case studies that illustrate why African Americans left the South in record numbers and how communities came together in new urban environments, often around the sound of the Blues.

a) What were several of Muddy’s songs about?

b) How did Otis Span describe Muddy?

c) Describe the “Great Migration.”

d) Why did people move north?

e) Why did black folks in the north relate to the blues?

f) Who were Phil and Leonard Chess?

g) Who did they record?

2) Display photos of plantation workers taken near Clarksdale, MS in 1936 and a sharecropper’s cabin on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1939. Muddy Waters lived just outside Clarksdale.

Ask students:

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       a) What are your first impressions of the photograph on the left? How many people do you see, and how would you describe the way they look in this photo? What relationship do you think these people might have to each other?

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       b) What are your first impressions of the photograph on the right? How would you describe the size of the house?

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       c) Notice the proximity between the house and the cotton pile. What might this proximity suggest about the relationship between work and home life for someone working as a sharecropper? How much leisure time do you think a sharecropper living in this cabin had?

3) Display photos of “juke joints.” Explain to the students that during much of the 20th century, juke joints were places where many southern African Americans came together during their limited off-hours from work to relax, gamble, dance, and hear music. Private living quarters often doubled as juke joints. Some historians argue that even Muddy Waters’s cabin on the Stovall Plantation, where he entertained guests by playing the Blues on his guitar, doubled as a juke joint.

In his 1955 article “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” Muddy Waters says that when he first started playing in Chicago, people called his songs “sharecropper music.” Begin the class with a brief review on sharecropping. Discuss as a class:

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         a) How did the sharecropping economy in the southern United States function, and how did the system keep sharecroppers stuck in a cycle of poverty?

Note to teacher: After assessing what your students already know about sharecropping, you may refer them to the handout on sharecropping from the Blues: The Sound of Rural Poverty lesson.

·         b) How would you describe the mood of the juke joint patrons in the photo on the left? How does the mood in this photo compare to the mood in the photo of the plantation workers?

·         c) Why do you think so many African Americans living in rural communities found music to be a source of relief in their everyday lives?

·         d) Where else do you think music provided relief for struggling populations of African Americans in the South? (In church, and even at work, in labor songs.)

4)  Display a page from the 1940 U.S. Census. Explain that a census is a process of recording information about a population. This page is a record of the people who lived on a plantation outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, and was taken around the same time as the photographs we previously examined.

Help students navigate and interpret the data contained in the form. If the image is too small to read on the board, you can access a high-resolution scan of the full census page here.)

Discuss as a class:

·         a) What kind of information is collected on this census form? Guide students to the top row of the table for possible answers, which include name, gender, race, age, etc. Point out that that under the Race category in column 10, “Neg” delineates “Negro” and “W” delineates “White.”

·         b) What race are most of the people who live on the plantation? Can you find anyone who is not a member of that race? Answer: Most people are listed as “Negro,” except for three people, who are listed as “White.”

·         c) Direct students to column 28, which lists “Occupation.” What is the reported occupation for most of the African Americans on this list? What is the reported occupation for one of the white people on the plantation?Answer: The African Americans are all reported as farmers, while the white occupant is reported as a manager.

·         d) Direct students to column 7, which lists the names of the plantation’s inhabitants. Locate the name “McKinley Morganfield.” Remind students that this was Muddy Waters’ birth name. What sort of information does the census tell us about Muddy Waters in 1940? Answer: Follow the information recorded in row 68 to learn that he was 27, born in Mississippi, and working full-time as a farmer.

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            e) Based on the materials discussed thus far, what are some general conclusions we can make about the lives of many African Americans living in Mississippi around 1940? Why do you think so many African Americans were determined to leave the South?

5) Distribute Handout 3: Letter to the Chicago Defender. Ask a volunteer to read the handout introduction to the class, then discuss as a group:

·         a) How did the Defender reach African Americans who didn’t live in Chicago?

·         b) What kind of content did the Defender publish to persuade African Americans to leave the South?

·         c) How might northern business owners have benefited from having the Defender distributed throughout the South?

6) Display image of a newspaper clipping titled “‘The Defender’ Banned.” Ask a volunteer to read the article aloud to the class. 

·         a) What does this article suggest about the risks people encountered for distributing the Defender in the South?

7) Return to the handout and ask another volunteer to read the letter aloud to the class. Discuss as a group:

·        a)  How does the author of the letter describe his life in Lutcher, Louisiana in 1917?

          b) What is he trying to achieve by writing to the Defender?

·         c) Why does the author ask for the newspaper not to publish his letter?

·          d) The distance between Lutcher in southern Louisiana and Chicago is over 900 miles. What mode of transportation might have been ideal for such a long trip if you did not own a car?

8) Play video clip of Howlin’ Wolf performing “Smokestack Lightnin'” in 1964.

Ask students to follow along with the lyrics. (Note: Howlin’ Wolf first recorded the song in 1956. The song reached No. 11 on the Billboard R&B chart, a chart geared towards African-American listeners.)

To help make sense of the lyrical imagery, read the following quote attributed to Howlin’ Wolf: 

“We used to sit out in the country and see the trains go by, watch the sparks come out of the smokestack. That was smokestack lightning.”

·         a) Why might someone living “out in the country” be captivated by the image of a train?

           b) Why do you think a train is such a potent symbol in Blues music?

·          c) Why do you think “Smokestack Lightnin’” encapsulated feelings relating to the Great Migration so effectively?

           d) How does the song connect to the idea of “displacement”?

·          e) How might you connect the lyrics of “Burr Clover Farm Blues” to “Smokestack Lightnin’”? 

           f) What story might these two songs tell us when looked at together?

Like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf was born in Mississippi. He later migrated to Chicago, where he recorded “Smokestack Lightnin’” for Chess Records, a company with a focus on recording Blues musicians including Muddy Waters and others.