Delta-themed Playlist

Music critic Bill Ellis ponders why so many musicians of all genres have channeled the Mississippi Delta in song and compiles “The Delta Dozen”.

Paul Simon wasn’t the first tunesmith smitten by the charms of the Mississippi Delta, nor has he been the last. Like its nearby cousin Memphis, Tennessee, the Mississippi Delta has inspired songwriters for the better part of a century. From the vaudeville stage and early years of country, jazz and blues to rock, hip-hop and even techno, composers have sought inspiration from the culture, landscape and overall atmosphere unique to this Southern region. That so many giants in American music have hailed from here has something to do with it, greats such as Jimmie Rodgers, Mose Allison and Sam Cooke, to name a few. Then there’s the roll call of blues legends from pre-war innovators such as Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson to post-war pioneers John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and B.B. King––all from this land where the blues began, as Alan Lomax once noted.

So it’s not surprising that musicians have been channeling the Mississippi Delta in song and spirit from the days of the 78 to the MP3. The lyrical themes and imagery in these songs have been varied, including the Delta as a place of historic, mythic and musical resonance; a nostalgic symbol of the past; a state of mind; even a conceit for love, womanhood and female sexuality.

What follows is a short list of both well-known and noteworthy songs with Mississippi’s Delta in their titles. In arriving at such a list, a number of limitations were imposed. Band names don’t count (sorry, Atlanta blues act Delta Moon). Neither do songs about the Delta Queen riverboat (which leaves out numbers by John Hartford, Leftover Salmon, et al.). Ditto tributes to Delta musicians (such as Eric Clapton’s Robert Johnson homage Me and Mr. Johnson), songs about specific towns (Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Town” or “Walking into Clarksdale” by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page or Jesse Winchester’s poignant “Biloxi”), songs about the 1927 Mississippi flood (Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere”), songs about railroad lines (Tommy Johnson’s “Slidin’ Delta” ), and songs with Mississippi sans Delta in the title (starting with “Miss the Mississippi and You” and extending to countless others by Dylan, ZZ Top, Train, Faith Hill, Afroman, David Banner, J.B. Lenoir, etcetera).

That said, songs which mention the Delta of our infatuation by title are too numerous to list here. Contenders can be found by Rare Earth (“Delta Melody”), the ex-guitarist in Whitesnake (Micky Moody’s “Delta Bluesman”), jazzman Kenny Garrett (his impressionist mash-up “Delta Bali Blues”), and the British saxophonist who gave Elton John half his stage name (Elton Dean’s “Delta Rambling”). What follows then is a highly subjective, chronological “best-of,” a sampler, if you will, to get you started on your own Delta-themed iPod list. And before you write a letter to the editor wondering why “Delta Dawn” wasn’t included, listen to the song again: it takes place in Brownsville, Tennessee!


“The Delta Dozen”

1 “Mississippi Delta Blues” by Jimmie Rodgers (1934)

“You can see those steamboats and fields of snowy white,” sings Meridian’s “Blue Yodeler” in as nostalgic a tune as ever was penned about the Old South. The magic worked well enough that Bob Wills and Merle Haggard both got “muddy water in my shoes” covering this sentimental country classic.

2 “Delta Serenade” by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra (1934)

Jazz genius Ellington penned several Delta-evoking songs (as well as recording a fine 1932 version of the Alexander Hill standard “Delta Bound”), but none were arguably better than this masterpiece of orchestration, mood, and feel, a three-minute melancholic balm for those struggling through the Great Depression.

3 “Delta Blues” by Son House (1941)

In this Library of Congress recording by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax, quintessential pre-war bluesman Eddie “Son” House declares, “I ain’t gon’ be back no more/When I leave this town, baby, I’m gonna hang crepe on your door” (black crepe on the door indicating a death in the family). Harsh words, indeed, for someone cutting ties with his spouse, his town, and in slightly more veiled terms, the Delta itself. True to his word, House moved two years later to Rochester, New York, where he was still living when the folk and blues revival came calling in the 1960s.

4 “My Home Is In The Delta” by Muddy Waters (1963)

Like Son House, Clarksdale-area blues titan Muddy Waters was but one of millions of African-Americans who left the rural South during the decades of the Second Great Migration, a situation he captured so tellingly in this song. Reflecting the anxiety and conflicted emotions of many who left loved ones and a way of life for the uncertain if promising opportunities of the North, Waters concludes this blues with an abruptly unfinished line about the person he had to part with, musing, “I’ve been sitting here thinking, wondering where in the world she’s been.”

5 “Mississippi Delta” by Bobbie Gentry (1967)

In songs such as “Chickasaw County Child,” the classic “Ode to Billie Joe,” and that single’s other side, the bluesy grinder “Mississippi Delta,” Bobbie Gentry captured like no one before or since the knowing details of time and place, down to the tin cans of black strap molasses and chigger bites, that only a child of the Delta could share.

6 “Delta Lady” by Joe Cocker (1969)

Few mainstream pop songs (pre-Prince, at least) were ever as erotically charged as this one, where the “soft and fertile delta” takes on a whole other meaning in this mega-hit for Joe Cocker, written by Leon Russell about soon-to-be-equally-famous back-up singer Rita Coolidge.

7 “Mississippi Delta City Blues” by Chicago (1972/1977)

Back when the über-pop band still injected their distinctive soft rock with hard-driving rhythms, this funky number, written by founding member Terry Kath, served as both a rave-up on their 1972 “Live in Japan” platter and the opener of “Chicago XI” (tragically, the last album for Kath who died from an accidental gun shot months after the record came out).

8 “Mississippi Cotton-Pickin’ Delta Town” by Charley Pride (1974)

This Top 5 country hit by Sledge, Mississippi, hall of famer Charley Pride reminisced in tones both whimsical and biting about growing up in a small Delta town where the kids were left “munching on a dust-covered ice cream cone.”

9 “Down in the Delta” by James “Super Chikan” Johnson (1997)

The lead track on this Clarksdale bluesman’s breakout album, “Blues Come Home to Roost,” places you smack in the middle of a carefree Delta day replete with “tractors are humming, cotton popping up through the ground…” And in classic contradictory blues fashion, Johnson makes sure to add, “my house is 80 years old and the front porch is falling down.” Guiding the whole affair is a breezy groove that sways the clothes lines of Johnson’s fertile imagination.

10 “Delta Disco” by Transglobal Underground (1998)

In their quest for the ultimate fusion of club and world music, these London-based electronica mavens merged two distinct Deltas––Mississippi’s and the Nile’s––in a stream-of-conscious flow that offered this trippy line: “Egyptian pharaohs fell from the sky, fell from the sky and played the blues.” You’ll hear nothing else like it, guaranteed.

11 “Darkness on the Delta” by Cassandra Wilson (2002)

Jackson, Mississippi, jazz star Cassandra Wilson gave new life to this standard, performed in a poignant duet with the late Greenville boogie woogie piano great, Abie “Boogaloo” Ames.

12 “The Delta Sound” by John Sinclair (2002)

Channeling Muddy Waters, onetime White Panthers founder and John Lennon cause célèbre, John Sinclair intones, “Ain’t too many left that plays the real deep blues,” in a Beatnik howl at the Delta moon that reminds us why this region of earth continues to matter. “Deeper than deep,” he proclaims, the Mississippi Delta is “from where all feeling rises.” DM