[78-L] Mississippi Mud and the Mississippi Flood of 1927 - Your Location ??

[Rodger J. Holtin]

I am about 90 miles due east of Memphis, Tennessee.

For many years I have driven interstate 40 between here and Little Rock, Arkansas and always marveled as I crossed the bridge going west that Memphis was certainly on a high bluff. In fact, some call it The Bluff City. And as you drive into West Memphis, Arkansas one is immediately struck by how flat everything is on that side of the river, come paired to the rolling hills of western Tennessee.  During the flood of 1927 Arkansas was underwater from the Mississippi to within 12 miles of Little Rock, that’s nearly 200 miles underwater. 

I’ve only been here a little less than 50 years. Having grown up in the southern tier of New York State, I never even knew about the Mississippi flood of 1927 until I turned up a Vernon Dalhart record about it in a flea market in Missouri. That started the research. 

I was always curious why there was very little said about it in this part of the country, even though we were so close to where all of that happened. 

I had spoken to the local Historical Society (about records, of course) a couple years ago, which seemed to go over well, and when the president contacted me about doing another presentation of some kind I thought it was time for me to look up all the facts and find out what really did happen in this part of the country during the flood of 1927. What I discovered was the newspaper microfilms held by the local librarys in the area did not begin until the early to middle 1930s, so without a trip to Nashville I wasn’t about to get much first-hand information that way. The county library in Jackson Tennessee, just to our north, actually held two original papers from the spring and summer of 1927 from which I was able to learn that while we had very little flooding in this area, the farmers were devastated because of the rain. Because of the regional flooding they had difficulty transporting cotton and other seeds and everything else that they needed for planting that year. Much of that was seriously complicated by the rains that kept the ground exceptionally wet, if not slightly flooded.

The single bright spot that I found was a bumper crop of cucumbers in the summer of 1927. 

Well, since that little bit of information wouldn’t take two minutes to tell, I decided to go back to multimedia and show them pictures, record labels, and play snippets of records for them, which seemed to be a big hit anyway. So, that’s the whole story. 

Rodger Holtin
78-L Member Since MCMXCVIII

For Best Results Use Victor Needles

Sent from my sluggish old iPhone, which explainz any bad typjng, bad spellimg, nonsensical word choices, delays and all other lapses. 

> On Nov 11, 2019, at 2:52 AM, DKing <ginku_ledovec at att.net.invalid> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello Roger,
> 
> I’m fairly new to this list, so to better put the story below in context,
> where are you located in this country - somewhere in the "South”?
> 
> Dave King
> Sunnyale, Calif.
> 
> 
>> On Nov 10, 2019, at 8:34 PM, Rodger J Holtin <rjh334578 at gmail.com.invalid> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Last month I spoke for a local historical society and my subject was the
>> songs that were inspired by the great Mississippi flood of 1927.  My
>> audience was mostly baby boomers one millennial and two or three
>> octogenarians.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I used the usual stuff by Charlie Patton, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie,
>> Lonnie Johnson and so on, all available for free on the internet these days.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> But I also noticed that from 1927 through early 1929 there were a number of
>> songs also written about rain
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Rain (Ford and Glenn & Jacques Renard))
>> 
>> I Get The Blues When It Rains
>> 
>> Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella
>> 
>> Singing In The Rain
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I don't find many others until we get to about 1934 and it seems to me that
>> the rash of 1927-29 rain songs might well have been influenced by news of
>> the rains and the flood just as much as those obvious flooding songs.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> So as a little icing on the cake so to speak I played the vocal portion of
>> old dance band records of those songs, and then, somewhat trepidatiously, I
>> played the Rhythm Boys record of I Left My Sugar Standing In The
>> Rain/Mississippi Mud, carefully noting it was not politically correct.  To
>> my amazement, the folks who we might have expected to have been most
>> offended by it declared it to be their favorite record of the presentation.
>> During the punch and cookies portion of the evening, the same ladies made
>> sure I got an extra piece of pie.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Still later, during the finger licking portion, one of the octogenarians
>> came over to me and said that he had a story about that for me. It seems
>> that his grandmother had a gramophone on her closed-in back porch and when
>> he was a kid (1950s) he and his cousins used to go and play with grandma's
>> Victrola. One of the favorite songs for the kids to pull out was Mississippi
>> Mud. Every time they played it, grandma would come running out and tell them
>> to take it off because she thought it was a terribly disrespectful song
>> because it made fun of the poor people that lost everything in the flood the
>> year that record came out. Apparently she remembered the timing of that
>> quite vividly. The kids asked her why, if that song was so bad, she kept the
>> record. I love the answer, and you will, too. "Because I like the other
>> side," she said.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I gave the same presentation last week for the county library, and as a wrap
>> up, told the Mississippi Mud record story.  This time somebody asked what
>> was on the other side, and one of the other folks immediately piped up that
>> Ain't She Sweet was the flipside.  I couldn't believe anybody but me in this
>> county would have known that.  And, yes, that may or may not have been the
>> issue that Grandma had.  Looks like it was issued on 78 about two dozen
>> times, so no telling which version they had, but I'm guessing the Rhythm
>> Boys record had the best distribution since it's the one that has crossed my
>> path the most often.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I'll be giving the same dog n pony show in a neighboring town in March of
>> 2020, and you can bet I'll work in both parts of that story.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Rodger Holtin
>> 
>> 78-L Member Since MCMXCVIII
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> For Best Results Use Victor Needles
>> 
>> 
>> 
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