Kent Burnside Blues Band
Dazzle
Denver, CO
May 3, 2024

Geography has always been important to music. Especially before advances in transportation and communication, communities developed specific local styles of music, much like accents and dialects. But music, like language, is just another form of communication. And, like language and accents, differences have appeared in relatively close proximity.

Such is the case with Hill Country blues. Mississippi is widely considered a key incubator of the blues. The popular focus of the birth of the blues is the Mississippi Delta area in the western part of the state. The area is basically the floodplain of the mighty Mississippi River. The land is flat, relatively treeless, ideal for large-scale agriculture. Indeed, this is plantation country. But just to the east of the Delta is the Mississippi Hill Country. Here, the level ground of the Delta gives way to rolling hills, ubiquitous trees, smaller farm plots and a different flavor of the blues.

Clarksdale, Mississippi is often denominated as the epicenter of the Delta blues. Vast farmland surrounds Clarksdale, the Mississippi River is to the west, oxbow lakes lurk throughout the region and other remnants of the Mississippi River's meanderings in times past still mark the land.

Holly Springs, Mississippi is only 75 miles northeast of Clarksdale, but the land is much different. Trees are the first thing you see, vast forests covering the rolling hills. Outside of silviculture, agriculture here is practiced on a much smaller scale. It is from these two different environments that Delta blues and Hill Country blues sprang.

The Hill Country blues sound traces its roots back to fife-and-drum bands of the early 20th century. That music, in turn, is directly rooted in Africa. One of the foremost keepers of the fife-and-drum flame was North Mississippi musician