📍Dockery, MS, USA
1897 – 1929“I was born in the hill country of Hinds County, Mississippi, near Edwards and Bolton, in the late 1880s or early 1890s, the son of sharecroppers, and I was a small, slight boy. When I was a child, my family moved about a hundred miles north to the Dockery Plantation, near Ruleville, in the flat, rich cotton country of the Mississippi Delta, a huge farm of ten thousand acres with its own sawmill, cotton gin, store and railway depot. At Dockery I heard a guitarist named Henry Sloan, a labourer on the plantation, and I followed him everywhere, to his performances at country dances and juke joints, and he taught me to play. My father, a church elder, didn't want me playing the blues and whipped me for it, but I kept on. By my teens I was playing all over Dockery and the plantations around, and I was a showman: I played the guitar behind my back, between my knees, and banged on it like a drum, singing in a rough, powerful voice. Young players like Howlin' Wolf, Son House, Tommy Johnson and Willie Brown came to Dockery to learn from me. I travelled all over the South, playing for dances and parties, and in 1929 I made my first records for Paramount, Pony Blues and others, which sold well. I recorded more than fifty songs about life in the Delta, floods, prisons and the people I knew. They call me the Father of the Delta Blues, and Dockery Farms, where I learned to play, is remembered as a birthplace of the blues, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker honouring the music that grew there.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today