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Mississippi River Flood of 1927 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Short silent film produced by the Signal Corps of the Mississippi flood of 1927. Reel 1, flood waters rage through Illinois, carrying houses and debris.…

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Use Troops in flood area to imprison farm hands: Refugees herded like cattle to stop escape from peonage - The Chicago Defender

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Use Troops in flood area to imprison farm hands: Refugees herded like cattle to stop escape from peonage - The Chicago Defender

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Getty Images. Find high resolution royalty-free images, editorial stock photos, vector art, video footage clips and stock music licensing at the richest image search photo library online.

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The Great Mississippi River Flood - National Museum of African American History

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The Great Mississippi River Flood - National Museum of African American History

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Devastating floods alter landscapes, ruin lives, and change the course of history. This was true in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889, along the Ohio River in 1937, following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2016.

One of the most destructive floods in U.S. history was the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. NMAAHC owns a remarkable set of photographs commissioned by the Illinois Central Railroad documenting the flooding. The railroad ran along the Mississippi River through communities large and small. While the original intent of the photographs was to document the destruction of property, today the photographs are valued more for bearing witness to the flood's human toll.

The flood started in the summer of 1926 with exceptionally heavy rains in the Mississippi basin but did not peak until April the following year. The waters did not subside until August 1927.

Floods along the Mississippi River and throughout the South were not uncommon as Bessie Smith made heartbreakingly clear in her song Back Water Blues, recorded in March 1927, and inspired by a flood occurring more than a year earlier.

"When it thunders and lightnin'
And the wind begins to blow
There's thousands of people
Ain't got no place to go"
Bessie Smith

The lasting impact of the Great Mississippi River Flood, however, places it in its own category. The flood inundated 16 million acres of land, displacing nearly 640,000 people in states from Illinois to Louisiana. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, the river swelled to 80 miles wide.

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 will go down in history as one of America's greatest peacetime disasters. The Final Report of the Colored Advisory Commission Appointed to Cooperate with The American National Red Cross and the President's Committee on Relief Work in the Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927 The American National Red Cross

The Great Mississippi River Flood disproportionately impacted African Americans, like many other floods in U.S. history. It is estimated that of those who lost their homes, more than half a million were black. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans were displaced from their communities and workplaces.

The railroads and plantations affected by the flood feared their laborers, who lost everything when forced from their homes, would never return. In the Delta lowlands, African American families made up 75% of the population and supplied 95% of the agricultural labor force. Many of these laborers were trapped in situations far worse than sharecropping, stuck in a system that bound them perpetually to the plantations.

To keep refugees nearby, the railroads and plantations partnered with the American Red Cross to create a system of refugee camps, steering more than 200,000 African Americans into them. The camps varied in size and also living conditions, ranging from acceptable to deplorable. The Final Report of the Colored Advisory Commission, appointed to cooperate with the American Red Cross and the President's Committee on Relief Work in the Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927, noted, "The camps in which we found the most satisfactory conditions were those where the local colored people have had an opportunity to assist in the administration of affairs. The camps which were found to be especially good were: Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Natchez . . . In the camps at Greenville, Sicily Island and Opelousas, the colored people had practically no part in the activities of the colored refugees."

At many camps, including the one at Greenville, Mississippi, National Guard troops prevented refugees from leaving and outsiders from visiting. The Colored Advisory Commission reported that at Greenville, Negro inmates complained whites came and went at will without passes, while colored people were not given similar privileges. There were also complaints of rough treatment of colored people and discrimination regarding labor conditions and the distribution of food. The Guard also unofficially promised to return refugees to their employers after the flood was over. Thousands of African Americans would later leave these refugee camps or bypass them all together to pursue new lives in northern towns and cities, accelerating the Great Migration.

Currently, there are efforts underway in Baton Rouge to help people recover from the latest flood to devastate lives in the American South. But if the past is an indicator, it may be generations before life in these communities' returns to what it once was.

Browse Photos in the NMAAHC Collection Documenting the 1927 Mississippi Flood

Written by Laura Coyle, Head of Cataloging and Digitization
Published on September 7, 2016; updated January 11, 2019

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The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927

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The NMAAHC owns a remarkable set of photographs commissioned by the Illinois Central Railroad documenting the 1927 Mississippi River Flood. The railroad ran along the Mississippi River through communities large and small. While the original intent of the photographs was to document the destruction of property, today the photographs are valued more for bearing witness to the flood's human toll.

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Storm, flood leave thousands homeless: many die of exposure as tornado rages - The Chicago Defender

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Storm, flood leave thousands homeless: many die of exposure as tornado rages - The Chicago Defender

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Photograph Collection - Mississippi Department of Archives & History

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Photograph Collection - Mississippi Department of Archives & History

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The Mississippi River flood of 1927 inundated roughly 27,000 square miles of land and displaced some 700,000 persons. Property damage was estimated at $400 million, and 246 people died in the flood waters. Particularly hard hit by the disaster was the Mississippi Delta region. The 124 photographs in this collection were taken by the flood committee of the Illinois Central Railroad Company in April, May, and October of 1927. Arranged geographically, north to south, the images document flood damage along the route of the Illinois Central Railroad from Memphis, Tennessee, to Delhi, Louisiana. The collection also includes one map of the Illinois Central Railroad throughout the flooded area.

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The Mississippi Flood - The Chicago Defender

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The Mississippi Flood - The Chicago Defender

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Library of Congress Primary Source Analysis Tools

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Library of Congress Primary Source Analysis Tools

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Teacher’s Guides and Analysis Tool | Getting Started with Primary Sources | Teachers | Programs | Library of Congress

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jQuery(function($){ var $container = $(‘.search-results’); $container.isotope({ layoutMode: ‘fitRows’, itemSelector: ‘.item’ }); imagesLoaded( $(‘#results’), function( instance ) { var $container = $(‘.search-results’); $container.isotope({ layoutMode: ‘fitRows’, itemSelector: ‘.item’ }); }); }); Primary Source Analysis Tool for Students Students can use this simple tool to examine and analyze any kind of primary source and record their responses.

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The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood - Gilder Lehrman

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The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood - Gilder Lehrman

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The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood | In the latter part of August 1926, the sky darkened over much of the central United States and a heavy and persistent rain began to fall. | In the latter part of August 1926, the sky darkened over much of the central United States and a heavy and persistent rain began to fall. Rain pelted first Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma, then edged eastward into Iowa and Missouri, then into Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. Lightning seemed almost to crack open the sky, booming thunder made buildings quiver, and rain poured from the sky in sheets. When this storm passed, another followed, then another. Though the rain fell in the dry season, it saturated the soil and filled the riverbeds, drowned crops, and ruined harvests. The rivers rose. On September 1, water poured over the banks of dozens of streams and flooded towns from Carroll, Iowa, to Peoria, Illinois, three hundred and fifty miles apart. On September 4, floods deluged much of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, killing four people. The Mississippi River itself washed out bridges and railroads in the upper Midwest. Another storm followed. Flooding stretched from Terre Haute, Indiana, to southeastern Kansas. A separate storm in northwestern Iowa dumped fifteen inches of rain in three days, sending rivers exploding over their banks, drowning ten, inundating 50,000 acres including Sioux City, and causing millions of dollars in damage. As far west as Omaha rivers rose to threatening levels. When the rains began they had relieved the region of the summer heat. Now they were frightening. People could do nothing but watch their crops drown and their rivers rise and, reminded of their own impotence and of the power of God and nature, pray. The rain continued into October. The Neosho River in Kansas and six hundred miles to the east the Illinois River in southern Illinois reached their highest levels in history—an extraordinary occurrence in October, when rivers normally run low. Flooding in those states was the most disastrous ever. The Mississippi at Vicksburg had only broken thirty feet on the gauge six times in history. Each time, the following spring saw a great flood on the Mississippi itself. The river at Vicksburg had never broken thirty-one feet on the gauge in October. In October 1926 it broke forty feet. Precipitation continued into the winter over the entire Mississippi Valley, which stretches from New York to the Rockies and drains thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces. The US Weather Bureau noted that the average reading through the last three months of 1926 on every single river gauge on each of the three greatest rivers of North America—the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi itself, draining nearly one million square miles and stretching the width of the continent—was the highest ever known. The Weather Bureau later stated, “There was needed neither a prophetic vision nor a vivid imagination to picture a great flood in the lower Mississippi River the following spring.”[1] On Christmas Day 1926, both Nashville and Chattanooga—on two different rivers—flooded. On New Year’s Day 1927, the main river at Cairo, Illinois, broke flood stage, the earliest instance on record. In January Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville flooded. The saturated land throughout the Mississippi valley could absorb no more water, but water still came. In conjunction with the melting of a vast snowpack, virtually the entire Mississippi River system flooded in the spring of 1927, killing people from Virginia to Oklahoma. But the greatest concern lay along the lower Mississippi, from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf, and tributaries feeding into that part of America. The Gulf of Mexico once reached north to present-day Cape Girardeau, Missouri, but the river system had deposited so much sediment into what geologists call the Mississippi Embayment that it had filled in the area between Cape Girardeau to the Gulf, nearly 35,000 square miles in seven states. That was the river’s natural flood plain. And there, on top of everything else, five separate rain storms struck, each one of which was greater than any single storm in the preceding ten years. Throughout that region, only levees were in place to contain the energy of the river. The length of that levee line was well over 1,000 miles, and the great earthworks seemed an impregnable fortress, towering two and three stories above the flat delta land. It was not impregnable. In 1927 the Mississippi reclaimed three-quarters of its flood plain, devastating Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The statistics recounting the damage are staggering. At its widest, the river created a vast inland sea more than seventy-five miles across—one could travel the normally dry seventy miles from Vicksburg to Monroe, Louisiana, by boat. Not counting the flooding of parts of cities as large as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, just along the lower river alone, the homes of more than 920,000 people were damaged. The nation’s population at the time was only 120 million. Roughly 1 percent—perhaps more—of the entire population of the country was flooded out of their homes. 330,000 were rescued by boat from rooftops, trees, levee crowns, and second stories.[2] Hundreds of thousands of homes and commercial buildings were destroyed. No one knows the death toll—the Red Cross claimed it was only 246 but the Weather Bureau said 500, while a professional disaster expert estimated the dead in Mississippi alone at 1,000. But the biggest impact of the flood was less on individual communities that were inundated than on America itself. Far more than any other natural disaster, the 1927 Mississippi River flood altered the course of American history. It did this in four chief ways: it revised environmental management, propelled a dark horse to the presidency, altered the political landscape for African Americans, and expanded the role of government in crises. River Management First, and most directly, the flood settled an engineering argument over how to handle rivers. The US Army Corps of Engineers had pursued what it called a “levees-only” policy toward flood protection, refusing to use reservoirs to prevent water from entering the river. This was based on a theory that increasing the amount of water in the river would increase its current, which in turn would pick up sediment from the river bottom, deepening it enough to accommodate a flood. But a leading Corps scientist, who became the chief of the Corps of Engineers, had run experiments and concluded that “the investigations . . . have rendered untenable that position [that] the exclusive use of levees . . . lowered the flood by deepening the bed.”[3] Why the Corps followed the levees-only policy in defiance of all scientific evidence is a classic case study of bureaucracy and turf warfare. But the 1927 flood ended the debate about the Mississippi and all great rivers. Henceforth engineers recognized that rivers had to be accommodated and could not be constrained. The success of this approach was demonstrated in 2011, when another great flood came down the Mississippi and put 10,000 square miles under water—virtually all of it by design, in floodways used for farming. A Dark Horse Is Propelled to the Presidency The 1927 flood also made Herbert Hoover president of the United States. An enormously wealthy engineer, Hoover developed and owned mines and oil fields in America, Russia, China, Australia, South America, and Africa. But for all his wealth, he had no political base. How could he? Hoover had left the United States after graduating Stanford and did not return until the US entered World War I; he had not even voted in a presidential election until 1920. Nonetheless he wanted to be president. A logistical genius, he had organized American food production and distribution during World War I and fed much of Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. John Maynard Keynes said he was “the only man who emerged from the ordeal [of the peace conference] with an enhanced reputation.” He became known as “The Great Humanitarian.” Using his own wealth, he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1920. His campaign was mocked, and he received no support. But President Warren G. Harding named him Secretary of Commerce, and in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge put him in charge of the response to the flood. The flood was the biggest story of the year and it lasted for weeks, through several crests, the rescue of populations, and recovery planning. Hoover and his staff worked diligently to exploit the coverage; no newspaper was too small. Hoover personally communicated with weekly papers from Arizona and Texas to Washington State, Nebraska, and Indiana. In evaluating his strategy, the present-day political commentator James Carville concluded that “Hoover had a better press operation than any politician I know today.” Routinely, the press hailed Hoover as a hero and a savior; a California paper proclaimed, “He is the ablest and most efficient American in public life . . . In personal fitness for the presidency there is no other American, even remotely, in Mr. Hoover’s class.”[4] Coverage like that prompted Hoover to confide to a friend, “I shall be the nominee, probably. It is practically inevitable.”[5] Hoover’s confidence was not based on the media alone. He finally had a political base. That base was among African Americans, who then overwhelmingly voted Republican. While African Americans were not a major political force in the country, they played two important roles. When scandals had threatened to break over the distribution of flood aid to African Americans, Hoover turned to Robert Moton to keep a lid on the scandal. Moton had succeeded Booker T. Washington as head of both the Tuskegee Institute and “the Tuskegee Machine,” the political operation that generally exercised near veto power over appointments of southerners by Republican presidents. African Americans generally and Moton personally also played an important role at the 1928 Republican National Convention for Hoover. Although African Americans could not vote in most elections in the South, they often controlled the Republican Party in southern states. And there was one place they could vote—at the Republican National Convention for the presidential nominee. When Hoover promised Moton that he would break up large plantations and make sharecroppers landowners, an ecstatic Moton told other African American leaders this would be “more significant than anything which has happened since Emancipation .” Moton was in charge of black delegates to the convention, and this virtually guaranteed Hoover a base. With help from African Americans, the push from the media, and Moton’s successful efforts to suppress scandal, Hoover won the GOP nomination on the first ballot and easily went on to win the 1928 presidential election. African Americans Shift from the Party of Lincoln The aftermath of the flood soon prompted the shift of African American voters away from the Republican Party. Ironically, this shift began with Hoover’s historic 1928 landslide win. Since Reconstruction, no Republican presidential candidate had carried a single southern state. Largely because the 1928 Democratic candidate Al Smith was Catholic, Hoover carried five: Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina. As a result, GOP political operatives saw the possibility of creating a Republican Party in the South that could compete with the Democrats. Since African Americans could not vote in the South, that party would be all white. After the election, Robert Moton’s influence in the Hoover camp eventually declined, and Hoover turned away from the base that had won him his office. Hoover even nominated a man to the Supreme Court so racist that a Senate controlled by his own party rejected the nominee. To Moton’s great disappointment, Hoover abandoned his proposal to transform sharecroppers into landowners. Moton and other black political leaders regarded this as a personal betrayal; that and the GOP’s outreach to white southerners ended many African Americans’ emotional connection to the party of Lincoln. In 1932, Moton said that if Franklin Roosevelt “has done anything for the Negro as Governor of New York, I have not heard of it.”[6] But he refused to endorse Hoover for reelection. Hoover still received a large majority of the black vote, but respect for him was gone. The Role of Government in a Crisis The most important effect of the 1927 flood was also the most subtle: it changed the way Americans viewed government’s responsibility in a time of crisis. Although there is no scientific data on the question, it seems, based on existing policy and newspaper editorial commentary, that most Americans in the 1920s felt the government had no responsibility to provide any direct assistance to individuals. There was certainly a widespread sense that people who sought government help were at best weak and at worst immoral, and government policy reflected such sentiments. In 1905 a yellow fever epidemic erupted in New Orleans. Public health experts knew how to contain yellow fever, but before Theodore Roosevelt’s administration would send public health experts to help, it required New Orleans to pay $250,000 in advance to cover the expenses. And in 1922, when a flood in Louisiana had made 40,000 homeless, Governor John Parker refused even to ask the Red Cross for help, saying, “Louisiana has issued no call for aid and will not.”[7] That attitude was reflected in federal policy toward flood relief. In 1927, the Red Cross fed over 600,000 people, some for a year, and more than 300,000 lived as refugees in tent cities. All the money for this was raised privately. Not only did the federal government spend nothing to feed, clothe, and shelter these people, the army demanded reimbursement from the Red Cross for use of its tents and field kitchens. When it came to recovery, the story was the same. To help these people and the devastated states recover—the agricultural economy in parts of seven states and the banks which had financed the agriculture were destroyed—the federal government spent nothing. Coolidge not only ignored numerous pleas to visit the flooded territory, but refused even to autograph pictures of himself to be auctioned off at fundraisers. The Red Cross gave people departing refugee camps who had lost absolutely everything—every piece of furniture, every cooking utensil, every tool, every farm animal—goods and seeds worth less than $20. Hoover personally urged bankers and big businessmen to privately finance recovery efforts, but the government did nothing. By and large, Americans thought this was wrong. Months of media coverage of hundreds of thousands of desperate Americans seemed to change the country’s view of government’s role. In 1927 John Parker, no longer governor of Louisiana, was in charge of the state’s recovery. In 1922 he had refused to seek aid. Now, with 200,000 Louisianans homeless and destitute, he asked for all the aid he could get from every quarter. That reversal in attitude was also demonstrated by the one source of public opinion that is measurable: newspaper editorials. Hoover’s staff combed hundreds of newspapers and reported that, whether papers were Democratic or Republican, “at least four-fifths of the editorials coming in” demanded federal action. “There continues to be considerable criticism of the attitude of the President.”[8] Because of Coolidge’s intense opposition, Congress did not act to directly help individuals or businesses. But in 1928 Congress did pass a massive flood control act—the most expensive domestic program the federal government had ever launched—which set a precedent in reordering state and federal responsibility. The flood had other effects. It spurred black migration out of the South, reordered regional and national power structures, influenced the blues. It had more substantive impact on the nation than any other disaster in US history. Yet it is less well known than the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, even the Johnstown flood. That fact in itself is a lesson; to understand history, one must look deep. [1] US Army Corps of Engineers, Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers for 1926 (Washington, 1926), p. 1793. [2] Marion Bragg, Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River (Vicksburg: Mississippi River Commission, 1977), p. 91. [3] Andrew Atkinson Humphreys and Henry Abbot, Report on the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River; Upon the Protection of the Alluvial Region Against Overflow; and Upon the Deepening of the Mouths . . . , (Philadelphia, 1861), pp. 30, 186, 387, 404-407. [4] “The Mississippi Flood and Mr. Hoover’s Part in Relief Work,” news summaries for May 23, 1927, Hoover Library. [5] Craig Lloyd, Aggressive Introvert: A Study of Herbert Hoover and Public Relations Management, 1912–1932, (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1972), p. 84. [6] Donald Lisio, Hoover, Blacks, and Lily Whites: A Study of Southern Strategies (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1985), p. 269. [7] New Orleans Times Picayune, April 29, 1922. [8] Press summary, undated early June (probably June 7), and June 17, 1927, Hoover Library. John M. Barry is a best-selling historian. His book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, published by Simon and Schuster, won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for the year’s best book in 1998. In 2005, the New York Public Library listed Rising Tide as one of the 50 best books of the preceding 50 years.

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The Flood of 1927: Disaster on the Mississippi | Grades 6-8, 9-12 Social Studies Teaching and Lesson Resources

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Evaluate the causes and effects of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 on the United States, specifically Louisiana and its people. Follow Jay Dardenne, Louisiana’s former Lieutenant Governor, as he discusses the impacts of Flood of 1927 with Historical Geographer, Richard “Rich” Campenella. Together, they will analyze why the Flood of 1927 was such a “mega-disaster” and what the United States government did in response to prevent another such flood from occurring.

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The 1927 Flood - Butler Center for Arkansas Studies

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The 1927 Flood - Butler Center for Arkansas Studies

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Interactive Map - The Great Flood; Mississippi River Centennial

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Interactive Map - The Great Flood; Mississippi River Centennial

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The Great Flood Project is working to build a robust collaborative archive of stories and materials that tell the story of the 1927 flood. This archive will consist of primary and secondary sources, including photos, videos, and oral histories. It is designed to be a landing page for existing efforts that have already documented this history, including communities, organizations, and individuals who are willing to share their stories with the project. The Great Flood Projectalso recognizes the physical landscape as a critical and necessary component of the archive.

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1927 Great Mississippi River Flood (video restoration and colorization).

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And how it impacted American economy, river engineering strategies, and society.

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Mississippi Department of Archives & History

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Mississippi Department of Archives & History

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Here you can find educator resources and a general lesson plan appropriate for use in Mississippi Studies, U.S. History, Geography, and other middle and high school classrooms. In this lesson plan, teachers will find engaging activities and historical content related to the 1927 Mississippi River Flood Photographs.

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Mississippi River at Work - Army Corps of Engineers

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Mississippi River at Work - Army Corps of Engineers

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The Flood & Its Impact on Greenville, MS

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The Flood & Its Impact on Greenville, MS

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The Flood of 1927 and Its Impact in Greenville, Mississippi - 2006-03

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The Great Flood of 1927 unleashed a spring season of catastrophic events along the banks of the Mississippi River. A weather system that stalled over the Midwestern states in the fall of 1926 brought untold amounts of water to the Upper Mississippi River region. The region’s burgeoning tributaries caused the Mississippi River to overflow in eleven states from Illinois to Louisiana.

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The Mississippi - Saint Louis Art Museum

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Some left because of promises of work in the North. Others left because their farms had been devastated by floods. | Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

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More than 75 years ago, a young artist named Jacob Lawrence set to work on an ambitious 60-panel series portraying the Great Migration, the flight of over a million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North following the outbreak of World War I. By Lawrence’s own admission, this was a broad and complex subject to tackle in paint, one never before attempted in the visual arts. Yet, Lawrence had spent the past three years addressing similar themes of struggle, hope, triumph, and adversity in his narrative portraits on the lives of Harriet Tubman, leader of the Underground Railroad (1940), Frederick Douglass, abolitionist (1939), and Toussaint L’Ouverture, liberator of Haiti (1938).

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The official website of the National Guard

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The Mississippi Flood of 1927 - Lucy Somerville

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The Mississippi Flood of 1927 - Lucy Somerville

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Return to The Flood of 1927 and Its Impact in Greenville, Mississippi (As published in the June 1927 edition of Woman’s Press) By Lucy Somerville

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Deny flood to flood sufferers in Mississippi: Relief bodies issue work or starve rule - The Chicago Defender

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Deny flood to flood sufferers in Mississippi: Relief bodies issue work or starve rule - The Chicago Defender

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Mississippi River Flood of 1927 Photograph Album

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Mississippi River Flood of 1927 Photograph Album

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Digital Snapshot: 1927 Mississippi River Flood

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Digital Snapshot: 1927 Mississippi River Flood

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MDAH Digital Snapshot: 1927 Mississippi River Flood Photograph Collection by DHatUSM · MapHub

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MDAH Digital Snapshot: 1927 Mississippi River Flood Photograph Collection by DHatUSM

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Flood of 1927 - Encyclopedia of Arkansas

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Flood of 1927 - Encyclopedia of Arkansas

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Flood of 1927 - Encyclopedia of Arkansas

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The Flood of 1927 was the most destructive and costly flood in Arkansas history and one of the worst in the history of the nation. It afflicted Arkansas…

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Singing the Blues about 1927's Delta Floods

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Singing the Blues about 1927's Delta Floods

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Noah Adams speaks with University of Memphis musicologist David Evans about songs inspired by the Mississippi Delta floods of 1927. We listen to Lonnie Johnson's "Broken Levee Blues" and Charlie Patton's "High Water Everywhere."

(Soundbite of "Broken Levee Blues")

NOAH ADAMS, host:

It has been said about natural disasters that the rich people write the history and the poor people write the songs. Much of the truth about the 1927 flood along the Mississippi delta can be found in the blues.

(Soundbite of "Broken Levee Blues")

Mr. LONNIE JOHNSON: (Singing) They want me to work on the levee. I had to leave my home.

ADAMS: That is Lonnie Johnson singing "Broken Levee Blues." He was just one of many blues musicians who sang about the '27 flood. Musicologist David Evans at the University of Memphis has written an article about the music that came out of that disaster.

Tell us, please, about Lonnie Johnson. He was the first to record a song directly connected with the 1927 flood there in Mississippi.

Professor DAVID EVANS (Musicologist, University of Memphis): Right, just a few days after the main levee break north of Greenville, Mississippi. He was a prolific recording artist and perhaps had a studio date already scheduled. He recorded "Broken Levee Blues" and then also did a cover of Missy Smith's song "Back Water Blues," which had actually been recorded before the big flood of 1927.

ADAMS: When you go through all these lyrics of all these tunes, do you find that there's a hidden protest here, or is it really sort of God's will and these are the blues and this is high water?

Prof. EVANS: Well, a lot of the blues just dramatized personal experience. Some of the singers did actually live through the flood. There are elements of protest and anger. Sometimes, of course, they come out simply in the singing style--the rough, raw voice of Charlie Patton. He sounds like he's in a rage. And sometimes they come out in the lyrics. One has to keep in mind that these records were made for companies that were owned by and run by whites. It would have been a little bit dangerous to come out and protest overtly, so the protest often is between the lines and sometimes it requires a bit of interpretation. But it's definitely there.

ADAMS: You write in your article, `As the floodwaters rose in April, blacks were ordered by armed whites to work on the levees while white families fled.'

Prof. EVANS: Yes, this is documented in newspaper accounts, especially in the black press, papers like the Chicago Defender. When Charlie Patton sings, `I would go to the hill country but they got me barred,' quite clearly he's referring to the Greenville levee, which served much like the Superdome did in the recent flood as this place where black people were just more or less herded into and they were not allowed to leave. And when the floodwaters receded, they were remanded to the custody of the landowners that they were sharecroppers for. They couldn't go where they wanted to.

(Soundbite of "High Water Everywhere")

Mr. CHARLIE PATTON (Blues Musician): (Singing) I would go to the hilly country, but they got me barred.

ADAMS: David Evans is the author of the forthcoming article High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood, talking with us from the studios of WKNO in Memphis, Tennessee.

Thank you, Professor Evans.

Prof. EVANS: It was a pleasure.

(Soundbite of "High Water Everywhere")

Mr. PATTON: (Singing) ...where, yeah. I would go down to Rosedale, but they tell me there's water there. Now the water now, Mama, done took Charlie's town.

ADAMS: DAY TO DAY is a production of NPR News, with contributions from slate.com. I'm Noah Adams.

Copyright © 2005 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Singing the Blues about 1927's Delta Floods

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Noah Adams speaks with University of Memphis musicologist David Evans about songs inspired by the Mississippi Delta floods of 1927. We listen to Lonnie Johnson's "Broken Levee Blues" and Charlie Patton's "High Water Everywhere."

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WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News

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WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News

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Great Songs About The Great Flood | WNYC

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Filmmaker Bill Morrison’s latest effort looks at the Great Flood of 1927, which changed American history and American music through the great migration of African-Americans northward.…

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When the Levee Breaks: Ripples of the Great Flood

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When the Levee Breaks: Ripples of the Great Flood

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When The Levee Breaks: Ripples Of The Great Flood

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Along the mighty Mississippi River, rising waters carry musical echoes of the river’s long history of floods. Many of those sonic tributaries reach back to perhaps the worst one in U.S. history: the Great Flood of 1927. Its history can be found in textbooks, but it comes to life in music.

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Living Memories Of The Great Flood Of 1927 - 64 Parishes

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The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927: A  Brief History

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The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927: A  Brief History

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The Great Flood of 1927 was one of the greatest natural disasters of the twentieth century. The flood inundated some 27,000 square miles and drove approximately 600,000 people from their homes in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Estimates of the economic damage wrought by the flood varied from $246 million to $1 billion, while the loss of life ranged from 246 to upwards of 1,000 men, women, and children. The sheer destructive power of the flood was captured in a series of photographs commissioned by the Illinois Central Railroad, copies of which are housed in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. These photographs do more than illustrate the misery that the flood brought to the Delta, they reveal a story of railroads and race, one that lay at the very heart of the region's history.

It is fitting that the Illinois Central would compile a photographic history of the Great Flood, as the histories of the railroad and of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta were all but inseparable. The Illinois Central helped build the plantation economy of the Delta, which emerged as the nation's premier cotton-producing region around the turn of the century. Beginning in the 1880s, the Illinois Central encouraged the creation of large, sprawling cotton plantations by selling its land for low prices on long credit. In the years that followed, the Illinois Central became a prominent "booster" of the Delta, recruiting settlers to the region and spurring its economic development. The railroad purchased timber for crossties from Delta farmers, then it hauled away the dense forests that once carpeted the region. Once cotton cultivation overran the Delta, the Illinois Central carried its harvests to entrepots throughout the Mississippi River Valley, making the Delta's planters some of the wealthiest men in the South.

The floodwaters that surged across the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta did not spare the Illinois Central. On July 13, 1927, the New York Times reported that the railroad had suffered some $2 million in property damage and was anticipating reduced cotton revenues during the coming year. Not surprisingly, the photographers hired by the Illinois Central focused much of their attention on the flood ravaged railroad. For example, a photographer near Helm, Mississippi, captured track that had buckled when its roadbed became waterlogged. Another showed swamped boxcars that had become makeshift shelters and storage facilities near Cary, Mississippi. Because railroads were perched on elevated roadbeds, the tracks that crisscrossed the Delta and the adjoining depots became places of refuge for displaced Mississippians. In Egerton, photographers caught people sitting atop boxcars while cars, livestock, and refugees gathered onto nearby tracks.

It was, perhaps, no accident that people sought refuge along the railroads. The railroads and their workers had been in the forefront of rescue and relief efforts. In Greenville, for example, LeRoy Percy urged railroad officials to rush emergency supplies into the Delta and to marshal empty boxcars that could be used as makeshift shelters. In congressional testimony about the flood, chief engineer A. H. Blaess of the Illinois Central praised the heroism of his company's engineers, brakemen, and track gangs. "In sandbagging track, driving bridges through raging torrents, raising track in water...diving under the flood to throw a submerged switch, [and] working long hours under the broiling sun or in driving rain," the railroaders of the Illinois Central exhibited an almost indescribable "spirit and morale." A congressional report on flood relief efforts documented the heavy load carried by the Illinois Central. The railroad ran 311 rescue trains, transported 46,381 refugees, hauled almost 800 carloads of distressed livestock to dry ground, carried almost 1,300 carloads of supplies, and provided 1,674 cars to be used as living quarters-all free of charge. The railroad even provided medical assistance to people in the Delta.[i] By the time that flood ended, historian Pete Daniels reckoned that the Illinois Central and other railroads had donated some "$1.5 million in free transportation and free use of the cars for refugees' homes."[ii]

As the photographers worked their way across the Delta, they captured one of the nation's worst humanitarian crises since the Civil War. The plantation economy that enriched both the Illinois Central and the Delta planters was built upon the exploitation of black sharecroppers, who constituted almost 90 percent of the population of some areas. In the wake of the flood, the Delta's sharecroppers scrambled onto their rooves, onto the railroad embankments, and onto the levees. Some 325,554 people crowded into 154 tent cities that the Red Cross had established throughout the Mississippi Valley. The 1927 flood collection captures the racial disparities in the often-crowded camps. One image snapped at the Birdsong Camp in Cleveland, Mississippi, on April 29, 1927, shows black people eating from four rows of tables under the supervision of white relief workers. Another photograph taken at Birdsong Camp throws more light on conditions on the camp. In this picture a line of black men, women, and children stand on a ramshackle walkway in front of their tents, all under the eyes of a white supervisor. Conditions were often crude. A few weeks later, a photographer caught a glimpse of the misery inside a camp when he snapped a photograph of a black family huddled around the fly of their tent at a muddy tent in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

When the floodwaters receded, the foundations of the Delta's economy began eroding. During the First World War, black southerners had escaped the region, looking for economic opportunities and a respite from Jim Crow in the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast. That Great Migration continued after the flood. Once again, the Illinois Central played a role in shaping the Delta, this time as an escape route. As historian James C. Cobb notes, "In addition to its role as the conduit for letters from relatives and friends already gone, the Illinois Central Railroad itself became a seductive symbol for the superiority of northern life."[iii] The railroad that had helped make the Delta, now helped its plantation empire unravel.

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1927 Flood History & Additional Resources — Home

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Famine looms in Mississippi Flooded area:Thousands Homeless as Flood Sweeps Mississippi - The Chicago Defender

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Famine looms in Mississippi Flooded area:Thousands Homeless as Flood Sweeps Mississippi - The Chicago Defender

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Dwarf Colony Discovered In Mississippi: Folks Flock To View Colony Of Dwarfs Discovered In Mississippi During Flood - The Chicago Defender

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Dwarf Colony Discovered In Mississippi: Folks Flock To View Colony Of Dwarfs Discovered In Mississippi During Flood - The Chicago Defender

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Hundreds Of Homes Hit By Mississippi Flood - The Chicago Defender

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Hundreds Of Homes Hit By Mississippi Flood - The Chicago Defender

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Mississippi man hailed as hero of flood area: Rows Boat Through Raging Torrent; 100 Lives Saved - The Chicago Defender

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Mississippi man hailed as hero of flood area: Rows Boat Through Raging Torrent; 100 Lives Saved - The Chicago Defender

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"No Funds" for Hoover Committee to Investigate Mississippi Levee Slavery: N. A. A. C. P. will push flight for inquiry - The Chicago Defender

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"No Funds" for Hoover Committee to Investigate Mississippi Levee Slavery: N. A. A. C. P. will push flight for inquiry - The Chicago Defender

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Rush Food and Clothing to Flood Victims: Refugees cry for help as hunger grows 100,000 already left without homes flood scenes; The Chicago Defender

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Rush Food and Clothing to Flood Victims: Refugees cry for help as hunger grows 100,000 already left without homes flood scenes; The Chicago Defender

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Voices from the Flood Image Gallery- PBS

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Voices from the Flood Image Gallery- PBS

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Voices From the Flood | American Experience | PBS

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What was it like for the residents of the Mississippi Delta in spring 1927, as torrential rains fell and the river rose steadily to flood stage?

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New code may halt labor quiz in Mississippi Valley - The Chicago Defender

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New code may halt labor quiz in Mississippi Valley - The Chicago Defender