New Yorker writer Nicholas Dawidoff (mentioned earlier on the blog for a reading of his latest book, The Crowd Sounds Happy), had a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the effect of the Great Flood of 1927 on blues music.
H/t Scott Barretta at Highway 61 Radio blog. The picture is downtown Greenville during the flood.
Pseudo-scholarly nitpicking: The article dates W.C. Handy’s encounter with a blues guitarist to 1903. It almost certainly was later. The mistaken date goes back decades to an earlier writer’s uncareful reading of Handy’s memoir, in which he says he moved to Clarksdale in 1903; the book then describes the now-relatively-famous encounter as having occurred some time later, without giving it a specific date. Handy was in Clarksdale I think three years.
This matters because the 1903 date (or 1903-1906) is the earliest reference to blues. It’s a little less widely known that almost exactly at the same time (I think in 1906) a bit of sheet music was published in St. Louis that was ragtime but that has at its third theme the melody of “Buddy Bolden Blues” (aka “Funky But”), with the melody tangled up in the 10th-12th bars to allow it to be extended to ragtime’s full 16 bars.
Unrelated to music but related to the ‘27 flood, Rising Tide is one of my favorite books.
I read an article earlier this year about a movie being filmed in New Orleans about Bolden’s life…any idea when that might be finished?
No idea, ccvz
Love Rising Tide. Have read it three times. Too depressing to read it right now.
Square Books has it in the bargain bin right now.
When the daily news brings reports of devastation and disaster hither and yon, I recall author John Barry’s comments about the ‘27 flood, when it was possible to travel by boat from Yazoo City, Miss., to Monroe, La.
Damn ….