The 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.