Hopson Plantation: The Day the Blues Had to Leave

In the nineteen forties, the Hopson Plantation outside Clarksdale, Mississippi became the proving ground for the mechanical cotton picker. The International Harvester cotton picker, a machine that had been in development since the nineteen thirties, was perfected on the fields of Hopson and pulled cotton bolls from the stalks far faster than hand pickers could. The plantation had bet on the machine, and the machine worked.

The implications were enormous. By the early nineteen fifties, the mechanization of cotton harvesting was underway across the Delta. Large numbers of Black sharecroppers, already bound by debt peonage and unable to save money under the crop-lien system, found themselves without even that marginal economic role. The Great Migration, which had already taken millions of Black Southerners to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities, accelerated sharply. The same displacement that emptied the Delta sent the blues with it to the cities, where Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf plugged in and changed it forever. The Hopson Plantation today operates as a blues heritage site with restored tenant cabins available as lodging.