Susan Scott Parrish

This is almost as much of a slog as the Mississippi mud that covered most of Louisiana and Mississippi in the late spring and summer of 1927. I found this book remaindered by Princeton University Press, and now I know why....

To be sure, it says it is a cultural history, and cultural histories generally don't have as much actual history as straight histories. There is a bare minimum of factual background: 1926 and 1927 were both very rainy, and a lot of water headed down the Mississippi and its tributaries -- and the levee system by then had been built, meaning that the backwaters and swamps that historically had soaked up the floodwaters were cut off. Eventually the floodwaters were so high and so strong that they broke the levees in many places, producing vast floods that destroyed a tremendous amount of property, killing perhaps a few thousand people and displacing a million or so. Herbert Hoover was appointed to manage flood relief, and he did it with the same efficiency (and occasional callousness) as he had shown in Europe after World War I, but in a way that heavily favored white landowners over Black sharecroppers and laborers.

That is a dramatic and tragic story in itself, but Parrish has to belabor the topic so much as to lose most of its effect. The result reminds me a bit of Leninist tracts, prim and proper and moral and completely humorless and deadly dull; even when it makes a good point, you may well miss it because you're falling asleep in the face of all the earnest moralizing. And devoting half a book about the 1927 flood to literary criticism of Faulkner and of Richard Wright seems rather pointless -- what about the people no one has ever heard of?

It's not all bad. The discussion of Bessie Smith's singing about the flood -- a Black performer singing about Black troubles -- is much better. And some of the humorists of the period produced genuinely funny work, though there was far too much about lazy Blacks living off government relief. Sadly, the look at the cultural response isn't as complete as it might be. I bought this book for one specific reason: to get the background to the country song "(The Story of the) Mighty Mississippi," written by Kelly Harrell and recorded by Ernest Stoneman in May 1927, while the flood was still happening. But neither Harrell nor Stoneman is ever mentioned; what may be the song itself gets one mention on page 145. This can't be attributed to lack of popularity; while I don't know how many copies of Stoneman's disc sold (records for 78 sales vary from grossly inaccurate to nonexistent), "Pop" Stoneman was an extremely popular artist in the period before the Great Depression, and he and his family release dozens of sides.

And there is only one mention of Vernon Dalhart's "The Mississippi Flood," again on page 145. Dalhart is the man who made Country music, with his recording of "The Wreck of the Old 97" and "The Prisoner's Song" that sold at least two million and perhaps as many as six million copies. Blowing that off in a single sentence shows how incomplete this book really is.

There are other books about the Mississippi Flood. That is where I will be going next, and if you're interested in the Flood, I suggest you start there. If you are still interested in the topic, and need a sleep aid, then this book should still be available.

Put it another way, as an afterword: You can be entirely right about racism in the 1920s South, and still be so strident, so angry, and so bleeping dull that no one will pay any attention. And this book is all three.

[Note: First draft published April 11, 2023. Review was revised May 8, 2023, to emphasize just how little history and how much polemic is in here.]… (más)