When John wrote about The Delta Blues Museum and Muddy Waters’ cabin, he showed me this amazing book called Lost Delta Found.
The book was published in 2005 but it collects the lost work of John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams. These men were scholars from Fisk University. Their work took place in the 1940s and their goal was “to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community,” the black community of Coahoma County, Mississippi.
Author and filmmaker Robert Gordon and musician Bruce Nemerov have compiled the results of the folklorists’ study, including individual entries about musicians, such as Muddy Waters, general writings about the Delta, musical transcriptions of the traditional songs, and interviews. These scholars–Work, Jones and Adams–left us a treasure.
In particular, John W. Work III recorded these notes about Muddy Waters: “Muddy Water would like to join the church but to do so would mean abandoning his guitar–a sacrifice too dear to make now.” (120)
“John W. Work took this famous photo of Henry Sims and McKinley Morganfield on Stovall’s plantation in Coahoma county in the summer of 1943 . . . Courtesy of Center for Poplar Music, Middle Tennessee State University; John W. Work III Collection.” (119)
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