Word: delta
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...were surprised, everywhere we went. The more you explore the communities along the river, the farther south you travel down into the Mississippi Delta, the more apparent it becomes that this is still a land unto itself, defined by its colorful, bloody past and wrestling with a different experience of this present explosion of progress and prosperity. It is a land apart even from the region that cradles the early stretches of the river itself, the Midwestern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, which reinvented themselves three times in a half-century, moving from agriculture to industry to high technology...
...topsoil blown from the hills of Wyoming into the Missouri, acres of Kansas prairie swallowed by flooding and swept downstream. Mark Twain's characters claimed that a man who drank the water could grow corn in his stomach. You know all this, and yet you are unprepared for the Delta, otherworldly and flat, the best place to grow cotton on this earth, once a hellish jungle, cleared by the backbreaking labor of slaves and sharecroppers. It's a wet western Kansas, a beautiful, flat, fertile window...
...difference, of course, is that when faced with the shrinking labor needs of modern farming, the good people of western Kansas simply moved away in search of better lives elsewhere. While this happened in the Delta as well, a large number chose to stay in one of the poorest regions in the U.S. The average family of four here has an income of $16,538, slightly more than half the national average. In Mississippi County, Ark., 35% of kids live in poverty, and 40% of adults don't have a high school diploma...
...time for us to be movin' on," sings blues musician Keb'Mo', even as he preserves the art form that most perfectly captures the agony of the past and the promise of making something lasting out of the pain. The Delta town of Clarksdale, Miss., is trying to find its way by re-engineering its cash crop: the blues, with a new museum honoring such hometown heroes as Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. The history of the music is the story of the people who invented it and the suffering that created...
Near the town of Coldwater in Tate County, Miss., where the kudzu hills rise gently from the Delta flatlands in the west, there's a gravel track that runs through stands of scrub oak and pine to reach a dusty clearing: two single-wide trailers, a small vegetable patch, a bluetick hound sleeping in the lee of a faded green Lincoln. Music is in the air--the fierce, hypnotic boogie known as hill-country blues--because this is the headquarters of the North Mississippi Allstars...