Dockery Farms

Will Dockery began buying Delta timberland outside Cleveland in the mid 1880s, fresh out of the University of Mississippi at twenty, with a thousand dollars from his grandmother, and by 1895 he had enough to put his name on the place. He came for the timber and found the bottom soil better than the trees. What he built was less a farm than a small country: a cotton gin, a commissary, a post office, a doctor, a school, a depot on the railway, and its own currency in the form of scrip, which nearby towns would honour. By the early twentieth century four hundred tenant families lived on it. The blues historians came later, and found that an unusual number of the first recorded Delta musicians had lived or played here, among them Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and Roebuck Staples. Patton anchors the claim. He arrived as a boy around 1900, learned from a Dockery resident named Henry Sloan, and used the place as a base on and off for nearly thirty years, playing the commissary porch and the all night picnics Dockery hosted for his tenants. He put it into the records: Pea Vine Blues is about the branch line that stopped at Dockery and ran west to Boyle, and 34 Blues opens with the plantation manager putting him off the property. The line was not Dockery's own, whatever the tourist literature says; it was the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley's Kimball Lake branch, and the rails went for scrap in 1942. B. B. King put the larger claim with its hedge intact: pick one single spot as the birthplace of the blues, he said, and this is where it might be said to have started. The marker at the site is titled with a question mark.