It’s May, which means the Mississippi is rising and it’s time for a month’s worth of flood songs. We’re going to kick it off with a classic from Bessie Smith: Backwater Blues. A lot of people associate this song with the 1927 flood, but it was actually recorded in February of 1927, several weeks before the Mississippi started busting through levees. In “High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood”, musicologist David Evans speculates that Bessie Smith wrote the song after visiting Nashville at the end of 1926 when the Cumberland River was wreaking havoc on the city. Those heavy rains in the Mississippi Basin at the end of 1926 set the stage for the tragic events that followed in the spring of 1927 as the Mississippi reclaimed much of its historic floodplain in the South.
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