Rural Culture Gallery
In
the rural communities of the Mississippi Delta, daily life was a
mixture of hard work, economic exploitation, segregation, deep
religious faith, and music. Music echoed and led the rhythms of work,
lent comfort, and embodied hopes and dreams. Mechanization,
agricultural chemicals, and government policies destroyed the
centuries-old cycle of planting, plowing, chopping, and picking-leaving
an entire class of people without work. The rural refugees who found a
home in Memphis and sowed the seeds of what would become, by
mid-century, a musical and cultural revolution.