MISSISSIPPI DELTA BLUES AND HERITAGE

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Christmas is probably the most festive time of the year, a season of giftgiving and celebration. We all know that Christmas is a religious holiday which marks the birth of Jesus Christ. But did you also know that some of the traditions are adapted from rituals dating back to the time before Christianity?

Many pagan peoples regarded the winter solstice as a time of celebration. Anticipating the return of spring, people decorated their homes with evergreen plants, a symbol of eternal life. Mistletoe was especially popular, as it was believed to have magic powers.

People hung sprigs of mistletoe in their homes and kissed beneath them as a gesture of friendship.

At pagan festivals there was also a lot of singing and dancing going on – “dancing in a circle” is the original meaning of the word “carol”.

Still now we keep these traditions up: we sing Christmas carols and dance around in circles, we kiss beneath the mistletoe and we decorate our homes with Christmas trees. By the way, did you know that it was a German who set the trend of decorating Christmas trees in England? It was Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. When he moved to Eng land, Christmas trees had already been popular in continental Europe, but not in England.

In 1841, Prince Albert put up a Christmas tree at Windsor Castle. The event was reported in the press; and as the whole country was very keen on the royal family, people enthusiastically took up the custom of decorating a tree at Christmas

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MISSISSIPPI DELTA BLUES AND HERITAGE

Think about all the emotions expressed in the music you listen to: joy, happiness, loneliness, nervousness, and, of course, sadness. Music with sad themes is often called the ‘blues’.

Blues music developed in the United States among Southern blacks after the Civil War. When slaves were brought to America from Africa, they brought their musical traditions with them. Blended with folk and popular music of whites, these African musical traditions developed into the blues.

The blues is believed to have originated in the Mississippi Delta, a wedgeshaped region in northern Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. This is a rural area where the poorest and most disadvantaged black people lived – this lifestyle created a need for the expression of sadness that is so often sung in the blues. The conditions in this area – poverty, racism, and inhumane working situations – led many blacks to go north, to cities such as Memphis, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit.

The blues did not vanish from the Mississippi countryside, however, and in 1978, the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival was founded to celebrate and promote the blues and the culture of the Mississippi Delta people. What started out on the back of a flatbed truck is now the oldest and largest blues festival in the South, with 20,000 visitors and performances on three festival stages.

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