Edition: U.S. / Global  RECORDINGS; America's Poetry:
Mississippi Blues And the Beat  Published: August 5, 1990
There's a point on ''BLues in the Mississippi Night'' (Rykodisc
90155; CD only) when the guitarist Big Bill Broonzy compares
notes with his pianist, Memphis Slim, about life in the
gulaglike penal camps of the Deep South. ''You know, the way we
lived in those tents and things like that,'' Broonzy remembers,
''and the food we had to eat was . . . scrap food from what
other people had refused . . . old bags of beans and stuff that
they couldn't sell.'' The time is the mid-1940's, and the two
musicians, along with the harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson,
have been brought together for this recording by the folklorist
Alan Lomax. The men speak candidly about life and the origins of
the blues, and they occasionally sing.  The story unfolds: they
talk about the tough men who would walk down the table, .45 in
hand, to take food from other workers, only to be whipped
afterward by a white overseer. That l