Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area

Tales, Juke Joints, Swamp Forests, Hunt Clubs, Oral Histories, and surprisingly, hot tamales.........
The Mississippi Delta has a mystique of mythological proportions. It was virgin wilderness and swamp at the turn of the twentieth century, cleared for cotton and plantation life by the 1930's, dominated by politically powerful gentleman planters, peopled by Black sharecroppers, Italian immigrants, Chinese, Lebanese and Jewish merchants. It is the source of "The Great Migration" north, and thus the home of the African American populations of many Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit. It was once a segregated society, overturned by the Civil Rights revolution, and now has many African American public officials. It is the home of soul food. It was an inspiration to Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Clifton Taulbert, Shelby Foote, and Hodding Carter. It is where Teddy Roosevelt saved the original "Teddy Bear." It is the land where Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson wrote the lyrics that eventually made the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton famous. The Delta is the American story, shrunk in time and space. Faulkner said it was "deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations." Shelby Foote claimed that one could see "a hundred years of history in twenty years in the Delta," and James Cobb wrote "When it comes to history, the Delta was clearly a region in a hurry." Analysts from Howard Zinn to James Cobb have claimed that the Delta is the South's South, the Most Southern Place on Earth, a place where American traits and experience are revealed with blinding clarity. Students of contemporary American culture will not find a better place to explore American history and culture first hand. "Much of what is profoundly American- what people love about America- has come from the delta, which is often called 'the cradle of American culture.'"
from Stories of the Delta, The National Park Service Lower Mississippi Delta Symposium, 1996