Coahoma: The Delta Name That Explains the Music

Coahoma is one of the smallest towns in the Mississippi Delta, a cluster of buildings in the Delta a few miles west of US Route Sixty-One. But the name is older than the town and larger than its population would suggest. Coahoma derives from a Choctaw phrase meaning red panther or red claw, and the county that carries the name, Coahoma County, has produced more documented blues musicians per square mile than almost anywhere else on earth.

The county seat is Clarksdale, which claims the most famous blues address in America: the crossroads of Highways Forty-Nine and Sixty-One, the mythologized site of Robert Johnson's midnight bargain with the devil. But the music was never just at one intersection. It grew everywhere in Coahoma County, in the labor camps along the rivers, in the commissary stores, in the churches where the same voices that sang hymns on Sunday afternoon sang something different on Saturday night.

Son House was born in Coahoma County in nineteen two. Muddy Waters, born McKinley Morganfield, grew up on Stovall Plantation just outside Clarksdale. The folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Muddy Waters there in nineteen forty-one for the Library of Congress, capturing a field recording of a twenty-seven-year-old sharecropper playing a bottleneck slide guitar in a plantation worker's cabin. Two years later, Muddy Waters left for Chicago, where he plugged in and invented electric blues.

The town of Coahoma itself is so small as to be nearly invisible from the highway. But it sits in territory saturated with the history of an art form. The cotton fields around it look as they have for a century. The radio station KFFA in nearby Helena, Arkansas, broadcast King Biscuit Time starting in nineteen forty-one, and the signal reached every corner of Coahoma County. People here were listening. The music they made from what they heard, and from what the land required of them, became the foundation of everything that followed.