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Smitty's Red Top Lounge in Clarksdale, Mississippi, is also still operating as of last notice. [18] Juke joints are still a strong part of African American culture in Deep South locations such as the Mississippi Delta where blues is still the mainstay, although it is now more often featured by disc jockeys and on jukeboxes than by live bands.
Among the Gullah people and enslaved African Americans in the Mississippi Delta, where the concentration of slaves was dense, Hoodoo was practiced under a large cover of secrecy. [34] [35] [36] The reason for secrecy among enslaved and free African Americans was that slave codes prohibited large gatherings of enslaved and free Black people ...
Many African-American musicians developed the blues here, and took this original American music with them to Chicago and other northern cities during the Great Migration. The Clarksdale Micropolitan Statistical Area includes all of Coahoma County. It is located in the Mississippi Delta region of Mississippi.
Map of Liberia in the 1830s, where the Mississippi colony and other state-sponsored colonies are identified. Mississippi-in-Africa was a colony on the Pepper Coast (West Africa) founded in the 1830s by the Mississippi Colonization Society of the United States and settled by American free people of color, many of them former slaves.
The Delta has some of the lowest population densities in the American South, sometimes fewer than 1 person per square mile. Slightly more than half the population is African American, reflecting their deep history in the area. Eastern Arkansas has the most cities in the state with majority African-American populations.
African Americans are the majority ethnic group in the northwestern Yazoo Delta, and the southwestern and the central parts of the state. These are areas where, historically, African Americans owned land as farmers in the 19th century following the Civil War, or worked on cotton plantations and farms. [89]
Delta blues is one of the earliest-known styles of blues. It originated in the Mississippi Delta and is regarded as a regional variant of country blues. Guitar and harmonica are its dominant instruments; slide guitar is a hallmark of the style. Vocal styles in Delta blues range from introspective and soulful to passionate and fiery.
Levee camps constructed from the early 1800s to the 1930s were originally initiated to create a system of man made levees along the Mississippi river after an increase in flooding. Before 1879 levees were built by a combination of African American convicted criminals, slaves, and racially mixed immigrant laborers.