The Mississippi Delta

Why am I posing with rusty bolts in Mississippi?
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These bolts are attached to something very special on a plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Hopson Plantation
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I'll tell you first about the plantation...and then about the bolts. This old cotton plantation has a lot of stuff for exploring.

Old Tire
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There's a lot of farm equipment here and there. I liked climbing on this tire.

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Trailers
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Especially since it belonged to an old tractor.

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There's a lot of corrugated tin around this farm.  I like old trailers.

Shacks
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And they have a lot of old sharecropper shacks.  You can stay in these like a hotel, now.

My Favorite Thing
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Then I found this old piece of machinery.  See me, sitting near some bolts?

​Mechanized Cotton Picker!
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​A couple weeks ago I was nearly run over when I was posing in a Texas cotton field. (scroll down in the blogs)  The cotton picker didn't look anything like this!

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This old machine picked cotton on the Hopson Plantation back in the 1940's.  This was the first farm to use mechanical cotton pickers ever!  That's pretty amazing to me.

It's also pretty sad, because this machine put a lot of people out of work.

Pinetop Perkins
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But Pinetop didn't  lose his job at Hopson.  He actually drove one of those old cotton pickers right on the Hopson Plantation.  When the sun went down he went in the old commissary and played the piano.  He became a well-known Delta Blues musician.

Pinetop's Friends
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I didn't get to meet Pinetop.  He died just over a year ago in Austin, Texas.  But I got to hear some of his friends perform in the old commissary, which is now a bar.

 

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And better than that I sat on a cotton picker.  Who knows, maybe Pinetop sat on that very one!
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