[blues music playing] High cost of living, baby, getting higher every day.

When I sing, or when I hear the blues, it gives me a good feeling.

The reason the blues give me a good feeling, it tells the truth.

It's history of Black people up from slavery.

If you don't know where you're coming from, how you know where you're going?

[MUSIC - BJ REED, "I KNOW I'VE BEEN CHANGED"] I know I've been changed.

You know the angels in heaven done signed, they done signed my name.

[blues music playing] You have to just figure your life out.

How did I end up in this?

Well, I was born into it.

And that's the only thing I can tell you.

Our people were brought here, already of skills and trades, as a tool to help build this country.

Any of this stuff that's called the blues, it wasn't just about the misery of some of the things that we had to endure.

It was about the life in itself.

(SINGING) Go to sleep.

Do you think, during slavery, all the torture and the abuse, do you think that that slave was any less happy than any man to have a child by the person he loved?

And you can't extinguish that.

(SINGING) Baby, who's been talkin' everything that I do?

Baby, who's been talkin' everything that I do.

'Cause you know that I love you Blues is a feeling.

And it makes you happy or h'it will make you sad.

All this that you see right here, all this is farm land.

All this was just open land, all the way around, as far as you can see.

When I was born and raised on this place, 5 or 6 different families stayed on here, used to sharecrop.

You never did get no justice in sharecropping.

Everything that it was taken to produce the crop, the boss man was supposed to pay 50%, but that never happened.

Everything came out of your 50%.

[man singing] It was hard down here on the farm.

But we made it.

(SINGING) Early in the morning 'bout a half past four, sittin', waiting, the time passing, getting out the door, but it was rough.

Yeah, baby, it was tough.

It was rough and it was tough down on that Goosa Quarter Farm.

We raised a lot of peas, a lot of sweet potato, too.

Ate so many till I didn't know what to do.

But it was rough.

Yeah, baby, it was tough.

It was rough and it was tough down on that Goosa Quarter Farm.

It was rough.

It was tough.

It was rough.

Yeah, baby, it was tough.

It was rough.

And it was tough down on that Goosa Quarter Farm.

It was rough and it was tough down on that Goosa Quarter Farm.

(SPEAKING) It was hard down on that farm.

[applause] And that's the blues.

It just takes you on down the road.

[banjo playing] And another thing about the blues, the blues don't 'scriminate.

It don't have no color.

Comes out of Africa, the blues goes all over the world.

[street noise] [MUSIC - "BANDIAGARA FARMER'S SONG] [call and response singing] I remember being exposed filmically and to folks who studied the African diaspora, the implicit connection between song styles in Mali and gandy dancers, railroaders in Alabama, the way certain notes would be accented and hit, the work songs, and the selection of theme and the types of melody constructed.

"Be my woman so I can be your man."

Uh!

Again, "be my woman so I can be your man."

Uh.

To get that track moved a little bit.

And to find out that, oh, over in Mali, they had this stomp tradition where they accent a capella singing with the stomping of the foot.

Now that's some fascinating stuff.

[drumming] [laughter] [crickets singing] Alabama had cotton plantations, thousands and thousands of acres.

Nothing but cotton.

Well, they picked cotton, they hoed cotton, they chopped cotton.

You had to keep yourself company.

The person working next to you, he doing just what you doing.

They just started singing.

That was our company.

You sung.

You sung.

And you sung.

And when you get tired, you quit.

And then when you rest up, you sung some more.

And that made your day.

When we was coming up, we sang the blues.

And the white man, he would be standing at the end of the row or sitting out in his truck listening.

By damn, but they can sho' sing.

You couldn't go to school with them.

You couldn't go to the front door to get a hamburger from there, but he loved to hear you sing.

Oppression is a shapeshifter.

So you trade in enslavement for peonage.

And then you treat peonage for this evolutionary, Jim Crow, foot on your neck type of existence.

(SINGING) Oh, it's hard for a praying child.

I can't stand the storm.

Oh, I can't stand the storm.

(SPEAKING) Women would moan to pass the time away while they were doing the chores, fetching water, cooking biscuits in the kitchen.

She'd keep herself company with that moaning.

(SINGING) It's another day's journey.

And I'm glad about it.

(SPEAKING) When some one of us'd come in the room, she'd say "Go ahead and get on out of here, child.

I'm talking to the Lord."

(SINGING) It's another day's journey.

Oh, and I'm glad about it.

(SPEAKING) And it used to annoy me so much.

I didn't understand it.

I really didn't.

But it was comforting to her.

(SINGING) Oh, lordy, trouble so hard.

Oh, lordy, trouble so hard.

I did not learn about Vera Hall until I became older.

Now some of her songs, like "Trouble So Hard" I was singing.

But I didn't know who it was.

I didn't know that was somebody from right here, just a couple of counties over.

These songs would just be-- you'd hear them.

But you didn't know where they came from.

(SINGING) Railroad Bill, he goin' 'round that curve.

If you go 'round there, you better raise your nerve.

I'm scared of Railroad Bill.

These songs were sung July the 23rd, 1937, by Very Hall at the home of Mrs.

Ruby Pickens Tartt at Livingston, Alabama for the benefit of the Library of Congress in Washington.

John Lomax had pioneered this idea of studying folklore through music.

From Texas, he had recorded cowboy songs and ballads.

Ruby Pickens Tartt was from Sumter County, Alabama.

She grew up hearing music and hearing the stories that many of the workers of her father told.

And so as a child, she started retelling them and copying them down, kept doing that throughout her life.

[MUSIC - GOSPEL HARMONETTES OF DEMOPOLIS, "JESUS IS ON THE MAIN LINE"] She had come from a family in which she was kind of indulged.

She had the first car in the county.

She had attended Sophie Newcomb College.

She had gone to New York to study art.

On Sundays, she often went out and attended African-American churches throughout the countryside.

Back in slavery, we used to sing.

And they liked it then.

[MUSIC - CARRIE ROBINSON, "POWER TO LIVE RIGHT"] Whites used to go to Black churches to just sit and listen to 'em sing.

(SINGING) People power.

Power to walk right.

Power to walk right.

Ruby Pickens Tartt signed up to be part of the Works Progress Administration, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs to put people back to work.

She was hired to oversee a sewing project because she was known as a skilled seamstress.

But instead of them sewing, often, she would ask them to sing and write down the songs.

[MUSIC - LEADBELLY, "WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?"]

John Lomax was named head of the folk song section of the WPA.

(SINGING) Don't lie to me.

Tell me where did you sleep last night?

He had already been to Alabama and pretty much declared Alabama a musical wasteland.

So he was shocked that this woman had transcribed all these songs.

And so he called her on the phone and set up a trip to come to Alabama.

(SINGING) Job, Job.

(SINGING) Um-hmmm Oh, what you reckon.

.

Um-hmm.

My Daughter's dead.

John Lomax had come in and tried to record music in Alabama that he had found in Mississippi.

But he went out without having somebody who was a part of the community.

Miss Ruby had set up arrangements for them to have people come to her home, which was in Baldwin Hill here in Sumter County.

And the singers would come and they would sit on the back porch.

And they would sing and they would record the music.

They actually went around and went into the homes of these individuals and set up their equipment.

That's why the recording equipment was in the car.

In a 15 miles radius, they recorded about 600 songs.

[MUSIC - MARY MCDONALD, "KNOCK JOHN BOOKER"] (SINGING) Lomax would never have had access to a lot of these people, because they were rightfully suspicious of white people in the 1930s.

They trusted her, though.

They trusted her father, her family.

With Miss Ruby, it was something that she did on quite a regular basis.

It was songs they had already sung together.

Ring games they'd already played together.

(SINGING) Rain, rain, Ain't gonna rain no more.

Ain't gonna rain no more.

Rain, rain, It ain't gonna rain no more.

it ain't gonna rain no more.

[MUSIC - TOM BELL, "WORRIED BLUES"] (SINGING) I'm leaving here.

These were people who lived in the red clay hills.

None of them made much money.

Most of them worked for white people and barely got by.

You've got people like Enoch Brown, who was very eccentric.

It'd be 90 degrees.

And he'd have on his army trench coat and his rubber galoshes pulling' his wagon with the Coke bottles in it.

And watch you going out of sight.

He was kind of a boogie man.

He would stand on one end of the Sucarnoochee Bridge and sing these hollers.

[HOLLERS - ENOCH BROWN, "FIELD HOLLER"] The holler was used in talking back and forth across distances to each other, but also to spread messages to each other, to signal where a meeting was.

Lomax and Ruby Pickens Tartt saw the value in people like him and Rich Amerson, people who, I guess, were outcasts in many ways.

Rich Amerson never held one job for very long, wandered all over the place.

He was a strawberry picker.

He was a preacher.

He was a post hole digger.

Richie, tell about your steamboat days.

All the way from Momphis to Selma on the Warrior River on the picking boat.

My boss man was named Mr.

Will.

Straw boss was named Mr.

Jim.

When we unload the fertilizer, we have to go down the hull and walk up the tall steps.

And every time they come up from on top and throw it down, the fellow will tell you, when he comes 'a calling: Go get your sack.

(SINGING) Whoa back, buddy.

Whoa, back.

I've got a coat here to fit your back.

You go on up the stairs and throw it down BIM!

"It ain't the right sack, hurl it back.

Come on up the next buddy.

Whoa, back, buddy.

Whoa, back.

We got a coat here to fit your back.

Right on up the stairs, bim, bim, BIM!

Throw it down.

He just hurl it back.

That's the wrong sack.

Him just calling: Whoa, back, buddy.

Whoa, back.

We've got a coat that'll fit your back.

(SINGING) I'm going home on the morning train.

I'm going home Vera Hall and Dock Reed were cousins to one another.

Dock Reed had a very deep baritone voice that is very distinctive.

He refused to sing any other music except spirituals.

He thought any other type of music was the devil's music.

He had a pirate's wooden leg.

I can't remember how he told me he lost his leg.

He told me.

But you know, I lost this leg one time.

And he was talking about his wooden leg.

And I said, what did you do?

He said, well, I was with a friend.

And the friend's husband came home.

And I had to leave quickly.

I left my leg in the bed.

Vera Hall sang with him.

And it's really beautiful to hear them sing.

She also knew blues music.

But she just did not want her cousin Dock Reed to know that she knew blues music.

Things that she had learned from others, as she said.

Little old town in the country, closed at sun down.

The little cafes'd be running.

But they didn't have nothing like that.

You had house parties, like they're having a fish fry.

And they'd be selling a little home brew or moonshine.

That was their entertainment on the weekend.

And then Monday morning he's back out there on the field, chopping cotton, or plowing his mule.

(SINGING) Another man done gone.

Another man done gone from the county farm another man done gone.

Miss Vera had a hard life.

Alan Lomax convinces her to travel with him to New York.

She does a singing tour there.

She loses one husband.

She raises her son alone.

She ends up cleaning houses.

[river rushing] He had a long chain on.

[dogs barking] He had a long chain on.

He had a long chain on.

He had a long chain on.

I don't know where he's gone.

I don't know where he's gone.

The songsmiths, the blues person, the keeper of these incredible stories of liberation and struggle are on the battle lines of producing sustainable survival.

The cemetery in which Ruby Pickens Tartt was buried, she wanted to make sure the singers could sing at her funeral.

There was probably a wooden marker that marked Vera Hall's grave.

But we do not know exactly where.

What they're listening to now, all this electronics, when you start pulling all that out, what you got left?

The most important thing, that voice that Mr.

Lomax found when he went out on those country roads.

They sang about what they saw.

Vera Hall grew up in the sharecropping era.

One of the things that caused the Great Migration was the boll weevil, it was such a plentiful little thing.

It lays over 200 eggs in a day.

And so when they hatch, then they just destroy everything they touch.

This particular song, I can just see her now.

It's kind of high-pitched.

(SINGING) Hey, hey, boll weevil.

Where is your native home?

Way down in the bottom among the cotton and corn.

First time I see'd a boll weevil, a-sittin' on a square.

Next time I see'd him, he had his family there.

Boll weevil here, boll weevil there.

Hey, hey, boll weevil, boll weevil everywhere.

Got out of high school.

I said, I'm going North where I can go to work and make me some money.

I said, I can't make no money here.

So I went out and started working at a car wash.

For a whole week, I got $30.

Train ticket was $21.50.

So I went to the Goodwill and I bought me some working clothes.

When I got to Chicago, my cousin picked me up.

I had $12 in my pocket.

After I got to Chicago, I got married.

I had a girlfriend in Mississippi.

I sent and got her.

Started a family.

[MUSIC - FANNIE BREWER, "I SHALL OVERCOME"] With the different migrations, there always have been communities in Detroit and Chicago of people from Alabama and Mississippi who formulated neighborhoods.

And they might be, shoot, six generations deep now.

The blues serves as a touchstone for the experience of their ancestors.

I like it for that.

Chicago is a place that's got something for everybody.

[MUSIC - "JUST A CLOSER WALK WITH THEE"] (SINGING) Oh, just a closer walk with thee.

Grant it, Jesus, if you please.

If you was a bachelor or a singer or whatever you may be, Chicago got it for you.

If you want to enjoy yourself at midnight, you can get up and get in your car and go where they playing music.

Wee ha!

Blues seven days a week.

Disco, and rock and roll and soul, Chicago have that, too, on the weekend.

But not through the week, they didn't have that.

Blues, seven nights a week.

It's a blues town.

Well, time roll on, 1970-71 my brother called me up one day, he said, I done bought me a guitar.

What do you think about us putting a band together?

So we got started.

Oh, we played six months, about a year.

So a jazz man one night, he wasn't playing, he come to listen to us in the basement of my house.

That's where we rehearsed.

He said, y'all still down here in the basement?

I went last night to hear a band couldn't play near 'bout as good as you all.

Y'all down in this basement.

Y'all need to come out of there.

Hey!

(SINGING) Say you got your new man, baby.

Somebody you don't know.

Yeah, you say you got your new man, darling.

Somebody you don't know.

Well, every time you want some money, you knocking on Little Lee's door.

Say you going out with your girlfriend.

Have a ball.

[speaking] When I sing the blues, and I say, my baby left me this morning.

My baby didn't leave me.

But he left you.

See, the blues don't lie.

(SINGING) You know, you called me up the next day, trying to explain it all.

Think I'll go down to Florida, get me a cruise.

Yes, I think I'll go down to Florida.

Get me a cruise.

You know when I got back, my baby had moved.

The blues serves as something that's familiar when you do your obligatory remigration or your journey back home.

You go sit down.

No, Tiger.

I don't want to play.

Yeah.

He wants to play.

[dog panting] When I was about 19 or 20, I left and went North.

I had a lot of cousins up there and friends.

And thy were telling me how life was up there.

And I wanted to go up there and see what it was.

But it wasn't what they were telling me it was.

It wasn't like that.

It was all different.

They didn't get no rest.

Just working, party all night, drinking and all this.

It wasn't my bag.

All them sirens, all them lights and people.

I said, I'm going back South where I can enjoy myself.

(SINGING) I just want to go where the thunder don't roll.

.

Marching and all that was going on.

And that's when the Black people started getting somewhere to live on their own.

To move off of those places like that.

I bought me four acres of land and built this house here in '79.

[engine starting] Friday that own the lumber company up there in Tuscaloosa, he owned all this land, from here all the way down through there.

He didn't sell no land to white folks.

He sold it all to Blacks.

That's why this is a Black community.

He sold it to the people that made him rich, the Black folks.

(SINGING) Amazing grace.

.

.

(SPEAKING) I remember my dad saying he went over to Eutaw, which is in Greene County.

That's another area of the Black Belt.

And there was a big crowd coming, white people, and they all had what he called billy clubs and chainsaws and guns.

And the Black people that were on the other side of this mob didn't have any weapons.

My dad had gone into Green County to get his chainsaw sharpened.

And he took his chainsaw and started up the motor.

And he came to the front of the line.

It was that very day, face-to-face with those police officers and their dogs and their billy clubs, that he realized that he couldn't turn back.

And so that's when he became the president and founder of the Pickens County branch of the NAACP.

(SINGING) A never dying soul.

(SPEAKING) His door was always open.

It would be 2 o'clock in the morning, for us to get a knock on the door.

And my mother said her heart would just stop.

Because she never knew what it was going to be.

And it would be some type of secret message where the meeting was going to be, or someone needing asylum.

(SINGING) Oh, keep on walking.

Keep on talking.

Marching up the freedom way.

It's a totally different world down here.

I said, hey, y'all.

Hey!

Yeah!

But the rest of y'all didn't say nothing while ago.

Y'all was just looking at me.

You know-- I'm not from down South.

I'm from up South.

I'm from Kansas City, Missouri.

Coming down to Alabama, the racial tension that was going on, I was actually a little afraid.

We did a lot of travelling, Tokyo, we lived in so many different places.

Las Vegas, we ended up getting a band house there.

Usually, it was just motel after motel.

We rode four deep across the front.

When somebody was ready to move, you'd say shift.

Everybody'd shift this way and keep sleeping.

I never wanted to have anything to do with musicianship.

I thought it was a miserable life.

Women and family problems, all over the country, and during that time, drunks and drug addicts, every morning after the show they're throwing up and dealing with a hangover.

That's what I saw.

I had to realize that wasn't a musician.

That was a person and his personal dilemmas, that just happened to be a musician.

Hey!

I got the blues.

Oh.

Well, yeah, yeah, I got the blues.

You know what?

You can't find it in no book.

Lord, you just got to inherit the blues.

Whoa!

Hey, y'all.

When I'm sad and lonely or when I'm happy, too, even when I just don't know, don't know what to do, Lord, Lord, Lord.

I feel so happy every time I hear them sing the blues.

My mother had a juke joint.

And all the blues singers used to come through town.

And they get to drinking that good old white lightning.

They'd get so drunk, they can't hardly stand up.

Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williamson and them, they gave me a little lesson, showing me how to do it and everything-- when they was sober.

Oh, yeah.

Listen, y'all.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Now BB King he had them.

Yes, he did.

And Johnny Taylor he had 'em, too.

Anybody'll tell you, Sonny Boy Williamson, got down with the down home blues.

Yeah!

Woo!

There's some people, they feel so free when they are out there doing what they do.

The down home blues.

Being a Coast Guardsmen on the North Atlantic.

Oh, my God.

You can feel that thing.

You know?

And people wonder, oh, you got to be crazy to get out there.

Yeah, yeah.

Perhaps.

Same thing with this blues, man.

You travel this road.

And you do these things.

You play for hours and hours, no sleep.

And then you got to get back on the road and come back.

And all you made was maybe $50 a person to put on a show.

Oh, but the spirit, that spirit, though.

It's worth that.

What's fascinating about the Black Belt is the way that traditional blues still remains incredibly popular on radio stations and fully engaged with live performance.

The Black people could not go to white clubs.

They couldn't get licenses for clubs.

So they would have house parties.

I remember asking an old musician, you know, did you bring your own liquor to drink at the house parties?

And oh, no, when it was your time to have a house party, you were going to charge.

[party chatter] [stove sizzling] It's an active, active tradition in the Black Belt.

And that means there's a pipeline of younger musicians and poets who are coming along and taking up the banners of that region.

There's an implicit connection between what they're doing and what Vera Hall did and all these other folk.

At a house party, the music had to keep going, or the beat had to keep going.

Bottles could be flying.

People fall down drunk.

But you were told the music kept going.

Keep the dancing going.

The house party transitioned in some cases to the juke joint.

Often without a license, not much difference from the house party except maybe it was a shack or something at the end of the street where people could congregate and have a good time and dance to their music and meet their neighbors and friends.

I was not allowed to really sing when I was a child because my father, and people around here, and people in general thought that the blues was devil's music.

But the devil doesn't have any music.

He just doesn't.

One of the last juke joints in Birmingham was Gip's Place.

[MUSIC - BIRMINGHAM GEORGE CONNER, "I'M LEAVIN'"] Mr.

Gip had this utility house to put his tools in.

But the tools never made it in there.

God Jesus bless your people today.

He was a church man at the time.

They would set up these tents in the summertime.

He'd carry that tent back to his place there.

And he made that tent turn into a juke joint.

That was illegal.

The authorities knew it was illegal.

And when it started getting too popular, they didn't want to really close it down because it had been there for so long.

And they treated it as a house party and turned a blind eye.

Mr.

Gip, he was a very nice guy that loved children.

And I got a chance to put my hands on a real guitar for the first time.

And Mr.

Gips, before the juke joint was in the back, had been playing homemade guitars, you know, that I made out of a King Edward cigar box.

I came off of the road traveling with BB King and Bobby Bland, all the other big blues hitters.

I decided to come in and open a business so I could be a family guy.

That's why I just had to let the road go.

In my salon, I've incorporated my music, everything.

Whenever I write something, my customers got to listen, whether they want to listen or not.

If they go up under the dryer or do anything, I come right here.

And I just start pickin'.

How y'all doing tonight?

Y'all doing all right?

Yeah Everybody ready to have a good time?

OK.

We want to welcome you guys out to the Red Wolf Lounge.

You guys know how we do it.

Each and every Wednesday night, across the track, back in the back, you come in the door and you party like that.

(SINGING) Y'all feel all right?

I do too!

If you don't mind, before we go any further, can you give it up for the lady of the house?

Can you give it up for Rita?

[cheering] Making this thing possible.

We got some Alabama Blues Hall of Famers in the house.

We have some great blues musicians in the house.

Didi is your bartender.

Make sure you go get you something to drink.

We got Jesse outside with the food.

Go outside and get you something to eat.

Alabama Blues Hall of Famer Earl "Guitar" Williams is in the house tonight, y'all.

Beautician, hairdresser, he do it all.

So if you ever want to get serenaded while you get your hair did, you can go over to Bessemer and see legendary Alabama Blues Hall of Famer, Mr.

Earl Williams.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

Can y'all hear me out there?

All right, we going to start this thing one more time.

(SINGING) I was down in Louisiana, a-walking down the street.

Just a little bit hungry for something different to eat.

I took a stroll down Decatur.

I saw a can of alligator.

How do you prepare it now?

That's when this lady started to stare.

And said a can of alligator.

She said a can of alligator?

You want a can of that old alligator?

I said, yeah, give me some of that old alligator.

She said steam a little rice.

It's going to make it really nice now.

And pour on your alligator and then you tell me 'bout it later.

Don't be afraid to eat him now.

He ain't afraid to eat you.

Come on, pretty baby.

Here's what we're gonna do.

She said steam a little rice.

Goin' to make it really nice.

And pour on your alligator.

And then you tell me 'bout it later.

I want a can of alligator.

I want a can of alligator.

A can of alligator, I want a can of alligator.

See you later, alligator.

In spite of civil right gains, today, up in the Black Belt, so many people unemployed, underemployed.

So many people don't have access to becoming literate in such a way that you can inject yourself into the global economy.

[bell ringing] The color line is still rigidly drawn.

That's why the singers keep singing about it.

(SINGING) There are sad, sad times.

The whole world ought to be ashamed.

These are bad, bad times.

The whole world crying in vain.

I had an aunt up there in Lowndes County.

Any time I was in her presence, she would say, "You my boy."

And I would just get such a self-esteem boost from her.

Do you think the music does that?

It gives validity to your experience, give you words that have power, that articulate things, allow you to envision being free in certain types of ways.

(SINGING) These are a sad, sad time.

The whole world oughta be ashamed.

Johnny Shines told me, some years ago when I first started trying to learn how to play the harmonica, "The blues is in you."

He says, "If I can get you to stop thinking, maybe it'll come out you."

I was horribly, horribly angry.

You know, you deal with one thing at home.

And then someone's speeding in off the road to get into a parking space.

You're on your bicycle.

You get hit and knocked over.

"Well, what are you doing in the way?

Get out of the way."

And of course, if there's a police by, you know, you know, "What are you doing around here anyway?

Get your bike and get out of here."

This damn person just hit a child on a bike.

You can be in the worst of conditions.

You can always keep that hope alive, I've found, through the blues.

Willie King was a good, good man.

Lived on a farm, in a trailer.

You would never know that he had ever been any place outside of Old Memphis or Panola.

Willie King is known all over the world.

He stayed in some of the most wonderful hotels.

But he comes back home to this.

He had no money.

And I don't think he needed any money.

In the field next to his trailer, he had a festival called the Freedom Creek Festival, a wooden-raised stage just made out of raw timbers, really.

A light that shone onto the stage, which may or may not work because they had an extremely long extension cord.

[MUSIC - WILLIE KING, "LET'S COME TOGETHER"] I want to take it back to the roots.

Take the blues back to the roots of where the creek bank was.

Because when I was a little boy growing up, I know the creek have served many purpose for us to survive down on the creek.

We have made whiskey down the creek bank.

Oh, yeah, to survive.

We went down the creek bank to fish.

We got baptized down on the creek bank.

We have went down and washed clothes on the creek bank.

And I took my first bath in muddy water down on the creek.

(SINGING) Ain't going back.

Ain't going back.

Ain't going back.

To the plantation no more.

I plowed the mule.

I picked the cotton.

'Til my fingers got rotten At one time, it wasn't allowed to go uptown.

So we had to make our town downtown in the woods.

(SINGING) Let's come together.

Makes no difference who you are.

Let's come together.

Makes no difference who you are.

Let's come together.

Love each other.

Like sisters and brothers.

It's not just about someone getting up on stage with a harmonica and a guitar.

It was always about the response of the people in the audience to that message.

You can put so much feeling into just three notes.

You tell a story.

In the beginning, and you build and you build.

And when you get to the end, you lived happily ever after -- putting how you feel to music.

If you're out in the country, you gotta go to the mailbox.

You gotta walk to the mailbox.

Sometimes you take somebody with you and y'all chat.

Or sometimes you meet up with a neighbor, and some information is exchanged.

And then you walk together a piece of the way.

I think the music does that.

It helps us to walk together a piece of the way.