Introduction

"Southerners turned naturally toward music because it was an integral aspect of their cultural inheritance, and because it provided a means of release and a form of self-expression which required neither power, status, nor affluence."

Bill Malone, in Southern Music, American Music

The Deep South region, while geographically and socially diverse, is unified in many aspects of its history and culture.  A network of rivers, large and small, course through the region, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.  These rivers, especially those in the Mississippi system, allowed the people of the region to move and mix, exchanging not only goods but ideas.  The most important export is the region's culture: the Deep South inspired the country's best-known authors and provided the wellspring of American popular music.  The region's racial composition is largely responsible for these cultural successes and for its tumultuous legacy as the crucible of the Civil Rights movement.

The Deep South has inspired many of the nation's canonized authors: Maya Angelou, Truman Capote, Ellen Douglas, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Richard Wright. Most of these writers' personal histories demonstrate movement back and forth across the region, regardless of state boundaries: Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, but his family relocated during his youth from rural Arkansas, to Jackson, to Memphis. Williams' family was from Tennessee,  but he was born in Mississippi, spent part of his childhood in St. Louis, and as a young man moved to New Orleans, where he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire. At the same time, Southern writers are noted for their rooted sense of place: Faulkner, Welty, Angelou, Lillian Hellman, and Walker Percy, among others, capture the specifics of a certain time and place in their works.

"The culture of the folk survived in the South long after it succumbed to the onslaught of urban-industrial culture elsewhere."

David Potter, “The Enigma of the South,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict

The American musical forms of blues, jazz, country, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll all arose from the Deep South.  The region produced such icons as Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, W.C. Handy, Jimmie Rodgers, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, Bessie Smith, Lester Flatt, Muddy Waters, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams, Lester Young, and Jelly Roll Morton.  Nashville, New Orleans, and Memphis attracted rural musicians from the surrounding areas and served essential roles in developing the region's musical forms and musicians.