The Flood, The Levee, and the Blues

The end of the world has long been contemplated, with many stabbing wildly in the dark at what may bring about the end of times.  Most recently, global pandemics provided the scare.  Ask your parents and they'll tell you that the threat of nuclear war made them "duck and cover."  Runaway asteroids, zombie apocalypses, and global warming are other popular extinction theories, but one is older than all of them and has a further reaching audience and that is the Flood.

Every culture has their great Flood story.  Whether it be due to an angry deity seeking divine retribution, as in the Christian mythology, or creation missteps needing correction, as with the Maya, the Flood reigns supreme in anthropological studies.  The stories and art inspired by these deluges are even more captivating.  Children of both Judeo-Christian and Islamic faiths are indoctrinated with stories of Noah's Ark.  The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known stories, deals with the Flood.  But it is the art sprung from a more recent calamity that provides the greatest cultural contribution to  the theme: The American blues.

After the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, flood songs were like the zombie and sparkly vampire movies of the 2000s: everybody was doing them.  One of the "Fathers of Blues Music," Charley Patton chronicled the tragedy with "High WaterEverywhere," one of the seminal works in the genre.  Son House ("Levee Camp Moan") worked and sang with Patton, then taught McKinley Morganfield how to play guitar.  Morganfield moved to Chicago, plugged in an amplifier and changed his name to Muddy Waters.  The rest is history.

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS took the act global.  Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie recorded the song in 1929 to little fanfare.  However, the rise of Muddy Waters brought attention overseas to the American Blues and nowhere else was this more evident than in the British Invasion.  The Rolling Stones and Beatles' love for Chess recordings caused other sensational recording stars to mine old Delta musicians for inspiration and in 1970, Jimmy Page and RobertPlant set down to record.  What developed was a mind-blowing account of one of two greatest tragedies: 1) the displacement of thousands of people following a natural disaster and 2) the fact that it takes a Brit to cause a song about it to rise in the charts.

But BACKWATER BLUES cashed in much earlier than that.  Bessie Smith knew better than to let a good disaster go to waste.  In February of 1927, when the waters were still rising, she recorded the haunting and compelling hit in New York for Columbia Records.  The song is a first-person account of what many Delta sharecroppers experienced as they gathered what they could and headed for higher ground.   Singers from B.B. King, Dinah Washington and Meschiya Lake have  "stood up on some high old lonesome hill" and delivered the song to wider audiences and new generations.

Flood songs continued to be the rage even after the Delta waters receded.  Johnny Cash's FIVE FEET HIGH AND RISING followed the trend, chronicling his own dread following rising waters on his boyhood Arkansas farm.  Mattie Delaney recorded THE TALLAHATCHIE RIVER BLUES, which dealt with the same issue in a different part of the state years later.  Hurricane Katrina of 2005 has caused the canon of blues music to be revisited with new significance and a clear division in the music of New Orleans. 

Katrina presents a salient point to those seeking the end of times from a science fiction or horror movie.  While zombies are the rage right now, and pandemics are pretty damn sexy, the chances that the angry god may want to go "old school" are still high.  As poles melt and waters rise and sinners continue to thrive, who is say it isn't time to hit the reset button and begin anew?