Although it's almost certainly not true, a legend about Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, bears repeating if only for the very remarkable fact that it achieved wide currency in the first plac...
"People keep asking me where the blues started and all I can say is that when I was a boy we always was singing in the fields. Not real singing, you know, just hollerin', but we made up our songs a...
Number of black registered voters in Louisiana in 1894: 130,000 Number of black registered voters in Louisiana in 1904: 1,342 Estimated ratio of blues songs recorded since 1920 that deal with sexua...
Sharecropper A person who engages in a form of tenant farming that developed in the South after the Civil War. Sharecroppers farm a plot of land in exchange for supplies and a share of the crop. Ra...
