Whenever I would sing and have these people gather round me like they did, they seemed to me as a family—that family that one looks for, one tries to find.”—B. B. King

Otha Turner

Otha Turner lived in the Gravel Springs community, which is located in the hill country of northeast Mississippi, the world that William Faulkner chronicled in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Although the Delta has been the primary focus for the study of the blues in Mississippi, there is a growing recognition of black music in this area of the state. . . . Their musical style and that of Otha Turner strongly influenced the sound of the North Mississippi Allstars.

James “Son Ford’ Thomas

I first encountered the Delta blues in Leland. During the summer of 1968, I met James “Son Ford” Thomas, a gifted musician, storyteller, and sculptor. We became friends, and our lives remained closely tied together for over twenty-six years until his death in 1993. Allen Ginsberg told me that Thomas was my “guru,” a description that clearly fit the relationship I shared with him over the years. Thomas performed regularly in my classes at Jackson State University, Yale University, and the University of Mississippi. — William Ferris

Willie Dixon

Compositions such as “Hoochie Koochie Man,” “Spoonful,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” “Little Red Rooster,” and “Evil” established Dixon as America’s foremost blues composer. His education in Vicksburg and his early decision to compose blues songs underscore the importance of literary expression within the southern black community. Dixon’s work also helps us understand the crucial link between the oral tradition of the blues and writers like Richard Wright, who captured these worlds through his fiction. Wright’s literary career and Dixon’s musical career reflect the power of black worlds that moved from Mississippi to Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century.

B. B. King

B. B. King’s name is synonymous with the blues. . . . King’s performances and recordings have defined the blues for more than six decades as he has reached out to members of each new generation with music they can understand and embrace.

As a child, he learned to play the blues on the one-strand-on-the-wall, a traditional instrument made by musicians like Louis Dotson by stretching a wire from a broom handle between two bricks across a metal bolt on each brick. Like Dotson, King plucked the string and moved a bottle up and down to change notes. King’s guitar style is strongly influenced by blues guitarists Lonnie Johnson and T-Bone Walker and by jazz guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. He blends their styles with delicately “bent” notes and powerful vocals drawn from his musical roots in the Mississippi Delta.

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All images from the William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, unless otherwise noted.