Soul of a true American super- disaster
The Mississippi flood of 1927 eclipses Hurricane Sandy.
On April 21, 1927, the levee that was holding back the swelling waters of the Mississippi River above the town of Greenville, Mississippi, burst. With the delay that year of the usual January Ohio floods and the early appearance of the June Missouri floods, the backwaters farther north couldn’t absorb the excess, and extraordinarily heavy rains meant 3 million cubic feet of water a second testing the levee.
The results of the breach were appalling. As the flood spread, the water level rose 20m in places — which puts the destructive 4m storm surge caused in New York last week by Hurricane Sandy into fearsome perspective.
British blues historian Paul Oliver vividly records that, ‘‘ Houses were washed away with their terrified occupants still clinging to the rooftops; the carcasses of cattle and mules floated in the swirling, deep brown water; isolated figures whom none could rescue were last seen crying for help as they hung in the gaunt branches of shattered trees’’.
It was a cataclysm of what we call biblical proportions — the resulting expanse of waters was 160km wide, an inland sea.
The crisis — the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States — lasted six weeks. It’s estimated that 500 died. More than 600,000 people were made destitute, the homes of 750,000 people were flooded, about US$ 350 million of damage was caused.
If the deluge was an act of God, some of its direst consequences were acts of men — and especially, this being the segregated South, involving the inequalities of race. Blacks were pressed into forced, unpaid labour in shoring up the levees to protect white property and thus prevented from protecting their own — usually more exposed — homes.
In the aftermath, homelessness and economic deprivation — not to mention the traumas of bereavement, separation, injustice and general dispossession — were among the principal causes of the migration of African- Americans from the rural South to the urban- industrial North — a huge population shift that has had huge cultural repercussions.
The flood was such a major event, it also became a subject for artistic creation of various kinds.
The ‘‘ flood song’’, as it’s been called, becomes a staple of the blues, notably Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Rising Highwater Blues ( probably May 1927), followed a month later by Barbecue Bob’s influential Mississippi Heavy Water Blues. Then famously in 1929 came When the Levee Breaks by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe, covered by Led Zeppelin, and the great Mississippi artist Charley Patton’s magnificent two- part firsthand account High Water Everywhere, which inspired Bob Dylan’s 2001 High Water ( for Charley Patton).
More recently there’s also Randy Newman’s haunting, sarcastic 1974 lament Louisiana 1927.
In literary terms, there are some wonderful treatments by black and white authors in subsequent Southern literature of this and other floods.
Zora Neale Hurston’s majestic account of black life in Their Eyes Were Watching God ( 1937) culminates in a flood; the great black novelist Richard Wright’s story Down by the Riverside ( 1938) sets its tale of doomed black victimhood amid the swirling waters; on the other side of the racial divide the superb story of baffled heroism called ‘ Old Man’ in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms ( 1939) gives perhaps the most eloquent descriptions of the flood anywhere.
The flood has barely been touched by Hollywood — perhaps one reason for it being insufficiently remembered. This sparsity of visual treatments makes especially exciting a new collaboration on the subject.
One party is film- maker Bill Morrison, director of Decasia: The State of Decay ( 2002), a collaboration with composer Michael Gordon, and The Miners’ Hymns ( 2010), with music by Johann Johannsson.
The other is Grammy- winning jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, a musical explorer who has worked with Jan Garbarek, John Zorn and Elvis Costello among others.
Their project, called The Great Flood, comes to London on Monday as part of the London Jazz Festival.
The original idea came from Morrison, as he told me in London recently. He was at ‘‘ a dinner party in Baton Rouge . . . and the subject turned to a book by John M. Barry called Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America ( 1997)’’.
Morrison had already gathered some of the surviving flood newsreel footage from 1927 — shot as he says by heroic cinematographers with ‘‘ a great eye and 35mm black- and- white negative in a very difficult situation’’ — for a spellbinding piece in 2007 called What We Build.
As well, he had long hoped to collaborate with Frisell on a full- length piece — the t wo having first met a couple of decades ago at the Village Vanguard jazz venue in New York. ‘‘ He was a dishwasher there,’’ says the guitarist. ‘‘ I didn’t even know he made films.’’
But they wanted to do something substantial together ‘‘ from the ground up, working together, really collaborating’’, in Frisell’s phrase, and the 1927 flood felt right.
It was important, says Morrison, as ‘‘ it changed the South forever’’.
And he felt it would have a resonance for Frisell’s whole career.
‘‘ I realised that there was a whole musical subtext there, and that Bill, being so steeped in Americana, blues, jazz and so on, has really created his own voice out of that — that he’d be a unique person to tell this story.’’
The guitarist agrees that his more recent career — in albums like Nashville ( 1997) and The Willies ( 2002) — has been much concerned with the discovery of roots and connections between blues, bluegrass and folk: ‘‘ The older I get, the more energy I’ve put into trying to figure out where I come from and where the music comes from . . . I realise that everything I do, no matter how abstract or impressionistic or whatever it is at this point, it’s just such a huge part of me. The music I play came from that.’’
The tunes are all original, except for Jerome Kern’s Ol’ Man River — Frisell says that after some thought, ‘‘ I didn’t want to try to mimic what those incredible musicians did then, I thought it would just be weak’’.
While the work was developing, they took it on a tour with the band up the length of the Mississippi — and had a closer- than- expected exposure to their subject.
Morrison: ‘‘ As it turned out there was another enormous flood cusping right at that moment — right at the moment we landed at Memphis. And so it was designed to give us the sense of what the South was, and gave us also the sense of what the South before a flood is.’’
As he says, ‘‘ There are very violent associations and imagery associated with a flood, but a lot of it’s just anxiety, and hand- wringing — it’s water that’s slowly rising imperceptibly, and lapping, and all you can really do is put your hands on your hips, and cross your arms, and scratch your chin, and go ‘ Wow, I hope that it holds’.’’
Frisell: ‘‘ It looked like the ocean out there.’’
The experience of being there evidently made a deep connection for these non- Southerners.
As Frisell says, ‘‘ That was really important to me.
‘‘ I think it adds some weight . . . It’s still really emotional for me to play it. So hopefully that comes through.’’
He’s excited that after some widely separated performances in the US, they’ll be playing almost every night on their European tour leading up to their London appearance.
He says they’ll be immersed in the material, and so able to ‘‘ connect with the film more and more . . . I’m looking for it to evolve’’.
His tightly knit band will be improvising more freely, aiming ‘‘ to surprise each other all the time’’.
‘‘ They’re going to get very familiar with it, and very loose with it, and will really be able to bring something new to every piece,’’ says Morrison.
This extraordinary confluence of talents and subject- matter is arranged in ‘‘ chapters’’, treating ‘‘ different aspects of the flood, whether chronologically or socially or culturally . . . as individual tunes’’.
As well as film of the flood, there is an animated sequence of images of consumer goods from the 1927 SearsRoebuck mail- order catalogue, an amateur cineaste’s sequence of blacks who had escaped the South in a Baptist church procession in Chicago — and a computerised sequence based on a map of the 1927 flood line which shows the vast extent of the inundation as from an ‘‘ imaginary spaceship’’.
Although Frisell has written what Morrison calls ‘‘ this incredibly beautiful, moving, tragic music’’ as the main theme, there’s considerable variety of tone and pace, and a larger, more positive, transformative narrative arc about ‘‘ the perseverance of a people’’.
They hope there will be a DVD release in due course.
‘‘ But for now,’’ as Frisell says with a laugh, ‘‘ I guess you’ll just have to come to the concert!’’
A trailer for the project is at: billfrisell. com/ media/ great- flood.
Philip Horne is a professor of English at University College London