The Great Migration

Between roughly 1910 and 1970, some six million African Americans left the South — fleeing Jim Crow, lynching and the cotton economy, drawn by wartime factory work and the simple possibility of being treated as citizens. Isabel Wilkerson calls it “the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century” (Wilkerson 2010).

For music, the migration was the great transmission line. The Illinois Central Railroad ran straight from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side, and the blues rode it: Muddy Waters in 1943, Howlin’ Wolf via Memphis in 1953, and hundreds of thousands of the listeners who made their club scene possible. Gospel’s capital moved to Chicago with its congregations; jazz had already traveled from New Orleans up the same river a generation earlier.

The pattern repeats throughout this site: when people move, music mutates. The acoustic, solo Delta blues became the electric ensemble Chicago blues within a decade of arriving — the single clearest example of geography rewriting a genre.