Dockery Plantation: Where the Blues Was Born

Will Dockery came to the Mississippi Delta in eighteen ninety-five and built a plantation that grew to roughly twenty five thousand six hundred acres, nearly forty square miles, near the Sunflower River in Bolivar County. He ran it as a company town. Sharecroppers on the Dockery land were paid in scrip that could only be redeemed at the Dockery commissary store. They could not take their earnings elsewhere. The arrangement, which kept the labor force economically captive, was typical of the Delta's post-Reconstruction plantation economy.

Around nineteen hundred, a young guitarist named Charley Patton arrived at Dockery and spent the next three decades there. He became the first Delta blues star: a performer whose growling, percussive, rhythmically complex guitar style drew crowds from across the region to the plantation's juke joints and yard parties on weekends. His songs documented the sharecroppers' lives directly. Songs about floods. Songs about leaving. Songs about the violent hierarchy of the plantation economy, stated plainly in the blues idiom where plainness was protected by the music itself.

Patton taught the style to the people around him. Chester Burnett, who would become Howlin' Wolf, came to Dockery and learned from Patton. Robert Johnson played in the communities around Dockery and absorbed the tradition. When B. B. King talked about the origins of Delta blues, he pointed to Dockery. When blues scholars mapped the geography of the form's development, Dockery kept appearing at the center.

The significance is this: the music that eventually became rock and roll, that became rhythm and blues, that became the dominant global popular music of the twentieth century, was incubated inside a system of economic captivity. It was born in the scrip economy, in the debt that kept the sharecroppers from leaving, in the weekends when the music was the one space that was not controlled by Will Dockery's ledger.

The plantation is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The original buildings survive. Charley Patton is not buried here. Nobody built him a monument.