- [Announcer] Major funding for   Return to the River,   a Television Voyage was provided by Entergy Corporation, a network of electric utilities serving Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

(birds chirping) (gentle music) - This is not land this is water, and water has an almost irresistible kind of an exotica, a mystic about it wherever water is.

And the river, because it is timeless, because it moves in the majestic way that it does, because it can, if it gets angry, tear up everything in sight, because it helps feed people on the other hand because it is just of so many capacities and so many moods, none of which man can really control.

- The earliest memory I have of the river is the same one every little boy in Greenwood, Mississippi would have, his folks would tell him do not get in that river, you stay away from that river, that river will kill you, which it will.

- The first time I knew about the Mississippi River I was trying to get out of it to get up in my house 'cause the levee had broke and my family was seeing that, I could hear this roaring and that was the water backing up coming up to our house in the Delta, not far out of Indianola.

- Well I grew up in Jackson in the days when what you did on a Sunday or when you had company was to go to Vicksburg and see the Mississippi River.

And both my parents were from out of state and they still regarded the river as something the way a sightseer would and I was always brought up with the air of its mystery and almost inaccessibility.

And it's part of my whole life.

- One April my father brought home a row boat and set it on the ground and he tied a rope from it to the back porch, and we all knew the river was rising.

- And so we all, those of us who are trained about the river and those of us who just stand on the bank and stare, we stand in awe of the river.

(dramatic music) - [James] The mighty Mississippi, father of waters.

Along its shores, inpenetrable swamps became cotton fields, slavery ignited a civil war, and the sounds of spirituals, gospel, jazz, blues and rock and roll still echo across its muddy banks today.

Recently a group of writers including Alex Haley and Shelby Foote and musicians B.B.

King and Mose Allison journeyed down the lower Mississippi on a voyage of rediscovery.

They were led by Captain Gabriel Chengery the master of the historic Delta Queen.

The trip was coordinated by the noted folk lore scholar Bill Ferris, the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

- But it's been said that the Delta Queen has been a steam powered time machine, it takes people back into the past.

♪ I'm growing tired of the big city's lights ♪ Tired of the glamor and tired of the sights ♪ In all my dreams I am roaming once more ♪ Back to my home on the old river shore ♪ Memories are bringing happy days of yore ♪ Misty Mississippi and you ♪ Mockingbirds are singing round the cabin door ♪ Misty Mississippi and you ♪ Rolling the wide world over ♪ Always alone and blue so blue ♪ Longing for my homeland ♪ Muddy water shores ♪ Mississippi and you (water rushing) - [James] The voyage begins in Memphis Tennessee, Gateway to the Delta.

A market for the cotton and for the music that would pause here before passing into the country beyond.

Memphis is the realm of King Cotton and other kings.

(dramatic blues music) - [B.B.]

I first left from Indianola and hitchhiked to Memphis.

I'd heard a lot about Memphis but mostly about Beale street.

- [James] at the river the Beale street landing was the busiest place in Memphis.

As early as 1900, Beale Street's well-deserved reputation for night life was immortalized in music by a new talent from the Mississippi Delta: W.C.

Handy.

♪ If Beale street could talk if Beale street could talk ♪ Married men would have to take their beds and walk ♪ Except one or two who never drink booze ♪ And the blind man on the corner ♪ Who sings this Beale Street blues - Once you went to Beale Street you could learn what was going on in Baton Rouge or New Orleans or Indianola or anywhere you wanted to 'cause the musicians would migrate.

- [James] The musical tides that flooded Memphis created something uniquely American.

Music that could bring people together.

- That's how the name B.B.

King came about because I was known then as the boy from Beale Street, the Beale Street Blues Boy.

Which today when somebody say B.B.

it means Blues Boy.

And of course you can add the Beale Street if you like.

That's what I learned about Beale Street when I first got there much, much.

It was sort of like the foundation of an education.

At that time, the blacks and the white musicians wasn't allowed to be together, but there was a place on Beale Street where everybody did get together, the musicians I'm talking about, and they'd jam until Number One, which was the cops at that time, would come by and run 'em away, but they still would find a way to get together.

All of these things I learned that I didn't know before I'd left home.

That music and musicians and people that like music that patronize it think in terms of trying to make good music, that's all.

- [James] Early in 1950 Sam Phillips, a local radio engineer, started the small recording studio on the far side of Union Avenue.

Then in 1952 he created his own record company the now famous Sun Records and forever altered popular music.

His recordings combined the rockabilly styles of Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis with the country style of Johnny Cash and added the blues influences of such greats as B.B.

King.

(electric guitar blues music) - Believe it or not that the feeling that I got in church I still that some what when I'm playing today.

(electric guitar blues music) When I'm singing and playing, the difference is when we're singin' gospel, you're singing about heavenly bodies, when I'm singing the blues I sing about everyone's.

(chuckles) ♪ Everyday everyday everyday I have the blues ♪ Everyday everyday everyday I have the blues ♪ Make me worry baby ♪ It's you I hate to lose ♪ Come on ♪ I'm gonna pack my suitcase move on down the line ♪ I'm gonna pack my suitcase move on down the line ♪ Ain't nobody worryin' ♪ Now and ain't nobody cryn' (blues electric guitar solo) (audience clapping, cheering, and whistling) - [James] Late in 1953, a young truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi walked into the Sun Studios to record a few songs as a birthday present for his mother.

Sam Phillips had recently told his secretary, "If I could find a white boy who could sound black, "I'd make millions."

("Well, That's Alright" by Elvis Presley) ♪ Well, that's all right now mama ♪ That's all right for you ♪ That's all right now mama, just anyway you do ♪ That's all right, that's all right ♪ That's all right now mama, anyway you do Elvis Presley truly was the King of Rock n' Roll.

From his early years, dominating the music scene until his death in 1977, he was the standard by which all others would be measured.

("American Trilogy" by Elvis Presley) ♪ So hush little baby ♪ Don't you cry ♪ You know your daddy's bound to die ♪ But all my trials, Lord ♪ Soon be over (upbeat blues music) - [James] Downstream from Memphis, the blues continued to develop on both sides of the Mississippi River.

On the Arkansas side at Helena, King Biscuit Time became and continues to be a daily blues tradition.

("King Biscuit Time" by Robert Jr. Lockwood) ♪ Good evening, everybody ♪ Tell me how do you do ♪ Good evening, everybody ♪ Tell me how do you do ♪ We're the King Biscuits Boys ♪ And we have come out to welcome you - [Announcer] Pass the biscuit 'cause it's King Biscuit time right here on KFFA Radio.

Say ya neighbors, it's light as air, and it's white as snow.

That's King Biscuit flour, the perfect flour for all your baking needs.

- [James] King Biscuit Time began, like the Louisiana Hay Ride and the Grand Ole Opry as a locally sponsored radio program that featured live music.

Arkansas blues men, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Junior Lockwood achieved national fame, playing in the tradition of Robert Junior's stepfather, the legendary Robert Johnson.

("Me and the Devil Blues" by Robert Johnson) ♪ Early this morning ♪ When you knocked upon my door - Robert Johnson is without question the most important early blues artist.

His lyrics and his style of bottleneck delta guitar performances have shaped all of modern blues and rock n' roll.

He supposedly had a pact with the devil, and in exchange for his soul, he would be the greatest blues artist ever.

("Me and the Devil Blues" by Robert Johnson) ♪ Me and the devil ♪ Was walking side by side ♪ Me and the devil, wooo ♪ Were waling side by side.

- We've had some great blues singers from this Delta.

I think that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson are probably as great a stature in the world of art as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.

They are very great artists.

- Well, music's really a window on the American South.

And when we look at that window, we see the two great traditions of culture from Africa and Europe.

From Africa, the traditional work chants were brought over.

And during slavery, we can see the musics of work songs and spirituals that, in the 20th century, inspired the gospel tradition and the country blues, which was a music that celebrated the isolation and loneliness of worlds like the Mississippi Delta.

♪ What have I done, what have I done ♪ There's no more happiness in my home ♪ What have I done, what have I done ♪ There's no more happiness in my home ♪ Well, did someone mistreat me ♪ Or did I do somebody wrong - Mississippi Delta, where I'm from, it's a geographical accident, so it's called the Yazoo Mississippi Alluvial Delta.

This alluvial delta is a 40-foot deep top soil deposited year after year by overflows from the river.

It's about 200 miles long, and it's an extraordinarily fertile region.

But before they put the railroad through in about 1870 somethin', long after Civil War, it was impenetrable.

Only settlements were along the rivers, along the Mississippi and the Yazoo, where the steamboats could come and go and bring people in and out.

- [James] The Mississippi Delta would experience the most exciting burst of original music the nation had ever seen.

Legends sprang up over night from obscure honky tonks and juke joints.

Early artists, Son House and Muddy Waters would establish this delta blues style that would later be nationally acknowledged through performances by John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf.

Blues music was finally accepted as a true art form and reached the worldwide audience through recordings like Willie Dixon, Son Thomas, and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Their music still haunts the Delta today.

(blues guitar) (steam pushing through the steam pipe) (cheerful calliope music) Greenville has been called the Athens of Mississippi.

A surprising number of writers, artists, and musicians have come from the mercantile center and river port, responding to its dramatic history of defeat and renewal, of planting, harvest, and flood.

Literature thrived in Greenville where, as in most southern towns, the art of storytelling usually began on someone's front porch.

- On Sundays in particular, after the big meal, the family would gather in the front room or on the front porch, depending on the weather, and the elders would talk telling stories, and the young would sit like so many little birds in a nest and listen.

And this is how I remember it.

I think of it with such nostalgia.

This was how the culture came down.

This was how you learned about all manners of things.

This was how I learned about my grandmother's father, Tom Murray, a slave blacksmith.

It was how I learned about his father, a game cock fighter called Chicken George and how I learned about his mother, Chicken George's mother, a lady named Miss Kizzy, and about her father in Africa, a buggy driver in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.

All of this came down from the rocking chairs.

And that was how the stories got told in our house, and our house was no different from average other houses.

We children grew up with a sense of story.

And it was part as being, as the expression goes in the South, it was part of being raised right.

And this again, it didn't matter about race.

This was the way you got raised right.

This is where you learned respect for the elders.

It was where you learned respect for church.

It was where you learned, you know, this whole panoply of respects.

- [James] These lessons of respects and the stories of generations of ancestors had to be passed down through families because the story tellers had no access to publishing.

The first Greenville author to be widely published and to reach national acclaim for his stories of the South was William Alexander Percy.

- My father wrote this book,   Lower Mississippi in 1942.

It's a history of the river's people and its politics, of its prevails and triumphs.

And in it, he's got a good portrait of his old friend, his mentor and fellow writer, the author of   Lanterns on the Levee.

He wrote of him.

"Will Percy was a small, fragile man "with thick, silvery hair, and a finely molded, "beautiful face."

"One remembered that tired, sensitive face "above the open pastel soft shirt because it reflected "a composite of the trouble and happiness "of all who brought their grief and joy to him.

"And especially did one remember the searching blue eyes, "the eyes of a fighter in a poet's face.

"Will Percy was a product of the river, "and I know of none other like him."

- The joke was there were more people writin' books in Greenville than are readin' them.

But Greenville produced at least 12 published authors between the years of, say, 1935 and 1955.

That's a lot of writers from one little town.

And it was a sort of tradition.

And it's the presence of Will Percy, I think, that accounts for a literary progress in Greenville.

(thunder) - [James]  Lanterns on the   Levee, Percy's most famous book, illustrates the river's hold on the imaginations of those living on its banks, a hold that intensifies during a flood.

- [LeRoy] "The 1927 flood was a torrent 10 feet deep, "the size of Rhode Island.

"It was 36 hours coming and four months going.

"It was deep enough to drown a man, swift enough "to upset a boat, and lasted enough to cancel crop year.

"The only islands in it were eight or 10 tiny Indian mounds, "and the narrow swallow banks of a few dreams commanded.

"The South Delta became 7,500 square miles of mill-race "in which 120,000 human beings "and 100,000 animals squirmed and bobbed."

("Didn't it Rain" gospel song) ♪ Listen to the rain ♪ Listen to the rain, children ♪ It rained all night long ♪ Didn't it ♪ Yes, you know it did ♪ All night long ♪ Didn't it rain ♪ Well, knockin' at the window ♪ Then they're knockin' at the door ♪ Crying, "brother Noah, can't you take on more ♪ Noah cried, "no, you're full of sin ♪ God got the key and you can't get in" ♪ Just listen how it's rainin' ♪ Will you listen how it's rainin'?

♪ Just listen how it's rainin' - [LeRoy] "For 36 hours the hours the Delta "was in turmoil and movement in terror.

"Then the waters covered everything.

"And turmoil ceased, and a great quiet settled down "over everything in the South, "deadlier because of the strange, cold sound "of the currents gnawing at foundations, "hissing against walls, careening "and clawing all obstructions."

("Wade in the Water") ♪ Wade ♪ In the water, children ♪ Wade in the water, children ♪ Wade in the water ♪ God's gonna trouble the water ♪ Oh yes, I said ♪ Wade in the water - [Narrator] The people of the Delta feared God and the Mississippi River.

On Sunday mornings the air of the little towns vibrates with the ringing of church bells as the faithful of many sects and both races gather for worship.

And in the spring time when the waters of the river are high against the levees, the faithful go after services to look at the yellow flood and to ponder the possibilities of disaster.

(gospel singing and clapping) - Up the river came the culture of the western world coming up through the port of New Orleans so that every little town along the river had the chance to participate in and to grow into a common culture, a background that we all had, and the river was the amalgamating force.

- The Delta's a true melting pot.

Swarms of Assyrians, Italians.

There were 50 Chinese stores in Greenville when it had fewer than 15,000 people.

It's a true melting pot.

And here they are bragging about moonlight and magnolias and pure blood lines.

It's all foolishness.

It was exact opposite.

- This country is mixed.

There's hardly anybody in the country now who is pure anything.

I don't know who they would be.

And you find every kind of people who have come together like a confluence in the river so is the confluence in the peoples.

And there's just been this great mixing.

- Mr. Faulkner observed, I think, correctly that the Indians in Mississippi disappeared, that they disappeared into both races, both the black and the white, and these days it's not unusual to be walking the streets of Vicksburg or Rosedale and Nitta Yuma and look over and see that high cheek bone and noble carriage of our mutual ancestors.

- The idea of place is very unique as an American Jewish experience.

I think Jews in the big cities don't have this sense of place.

They are caught up in the great struggle in American to make it away from where they are, not to plant roots where they are.

And this sense of place is a very powerful factor in any Southerner's experience, regardless of what one's religion or race is.

One of the things about Jews in the South that surprises people is that Jews are not aliens in the promise land, but blood and bones part of Southern history, part of its pain, part of its passion, part of its story.

First of all, blacks and Jews shared a history of persecution.

One of the great rationales for slavery was that it was converting these heathens from Africa to Christianity.

And so one had a kind of missionary rationale.

But the slaves didn't just hear the New Testament.

They heard something else.

They heard the Old Testament.

Go Down Moses, Let My People Go, Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho, Daniel and the Lion's Den.

And growing up, these negro spirituals were very stirring to me because they were part of my story too.

And the blacks in the South identified with the great Jewish story of Moses leading the people of Israel out of slavery into freedom, and embraced this as a metaphor for their own longing.

- [Narrator] I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.

And if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws on us all to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

(acapella negro spiritual) - [James] The words of Richard Wright of Natchez helped shape American Literature.

His writings liberated black people from the fear of expressing outrage at their persecution, segregation, and exploitation.

The state of Mississippi would produce many great heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, some like Medgar Evers and the three northern student volunteers, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner would give their lives for the cause.

These voices were as strong or stronger than those of intolerance and hatred, like the humble but powerful voice of Fannie Lou Hamer.

- She knew life.

She had lived it.

She had experienced things that many of us could never think of facing, and yet she could smile, she could shout, she could make other people happy, and she, if necessary, she could cuss them out.

- [Fannie] We are tired of being mistreated.

We are tired of dying for nothing.

And God wants us to take a stand.

And the only way that we can change the system in the state of Mississippi is by going to the courthouse and registering to vote.

But you got to stand up.

Freedom is not something that's put in your lap.

You will have to go to the courthouse and say, "I want to register."

This is a protest.

And show them that I'm not satisfied.

- Freedom, freedom!

Freedom, freedom!

Freedom, freedom!

- Four hundred years of love, non violence, turning the other cheek, and still being lynched, hung, and murdered.

Is have to be something else.

- And I think that history will say that among those who were freed or totally one over by her, the white Mississippians who are finally freed if they had the will to be free from themselves, from their history, from their racism, from their past.

And I know that there's no way for us who have been freed to adequately thank those who freed us, except to try also to continue the work which Mrs. Hamer and so many of you began, are continuing, and will continue in the future.

I'm glad I had a chance to be here.

I'm gladder yet, that I can say that I'm from here because of Mrs. Hamer and because of many of you.

(acapella negro spiritual) - [James] Before the Civil War, Vicksburg was a sleepy little town, situated high on the bluffs above the river.

Its only concern was the traffic and trade from the river below.

But in 1863, it became the Gibraltar of the Confederacy.

The battle for Vicksburg was the turning point of the Civil War.

- The western front meant everything.

Virginians think that the Civil War was fought in Virginia, specifically between Washington and Richmond and overlapped down to Petersburg just a little bit, but that 100-mile stretch.

If you draw a hundred mile circle around Brandy Station, Virginia, you have enclosed everything Robert E. Lee did from the time he became a commanding army in northern Virginia until he left.

Gettysburg is within a hundred miles of Brandy Station and so is Appomattox Court House.

It was a very small area.

Now Virginians believe that the important fightin' went on there because of these big, horrendous battles while the skirmishing out in the West, back and forth, up and down and everything.

The opposite is not true, but it's closer to the truth.

They skirmished up and down, back and forth between Washington and Richmond interminably.

The South won most of the battles but never was able to capitalize on it.

Out West, when Grant took Donelson, he took all of Kentucky and most of Tennessee.

When he took the Mississippi River, he split the Confederacy in two.

The big things that made that war a northern victory were done out here in the West.

- [Hodding] Only six batteries were ready in May when Farragut attacked.

He failed and attacked again in June with a fleet and with field pieces he'd placed on the Louisiana shore.

- And at first, upstream excursion by Farragut and Butler, they trained the guns on the town and said, "Do you surrender?"

And Vicksburg's response was, "Mississippians don't know how "to surrender, and if you think you can teach us how, "come try it."

(band horns, bomb explosion) - [Narrator] It was a death fight.

First Sherman struck.

Then Grant drove at the bluffs again and again in a series of campaigns as important to the tactician for the failures as for the final success.

The bloody frontal assaults were repelled.

Then Grant threw General J.C. Pemberton's army into the city proper.

After thousands of men had died on both sides of the Vicksburg breastworks, Grant decided the city could be taken only by siege.

The Union dug 12 miles of trenches, in which men were blown to bits by Confederate mines, and from which they burrowed to blast the defenders sky high in turn.

So close were the opposed rifle pits, redans, and redoubts that hand grenades were used and shells were lobbed from hollow logs reinforced with metal bands.

The residents dug caves in the walnut hills and stuck it out.

By June 28th, the rations of the defenders, outnumbered two to one, were only a stale biscuit and a piece of fat bacon a day.

Mule meat was fought for.

- I can tell you that it lasted for 47 days.

I can tell you that the Union army and the Union navy did everything they could to pound it to pieces with the stuff they threw in here at civilians.

They were shootin' at men, women, and dogs.

Children, it was a fairly shameful performance.

- [Narrator] On July fourth, Pemberton, badly outgeneraled but not outfought, surrendered.

No matter how heavy the cost, Grant had dealt the Confederacy a mortal blow.

The South's death knell was clanging for all to hear.

- [Shelby] Do you want to know why Southerners don't forget the war?

The state of Mississippi in the year after war 1866 spent a solid 1/5 of its total income on artificial arms and legs for returning veterans.

You just don't tell me to forget it.

There's no way I can forget it.

The impact was too great.

- When these big houses were along the river, and Mark Twain used them as guides for the steamboat, remember he said that's when Windsor was one of the marks along the river.

It would be lighted up for parties at night, and they'd see it from the river when they went by.

I found out they used to fight duels on the sandbars down below there.

The whole sense of a whole bank of history lying behind you there.

It's amazing to think that Mark Twain looked at it and saw it.

And it was mysterious and compelling.

It's really unique.

It's just wonderful.

(sorrowful fiddle music) - [James] Natchez, founded by the French explorer, Bienville, in 1716 is one of America's most elegant little towns.

It was spared the ravages of the Civil War and visitors now come to see these monumnents to a vanished way of life.

(sorrowful fiddle music) - That must have been some grand era, the big boats, and the big houses.

'Course that was the heyday of my hometown, Natchez.

In those days, Natchez had more millionaires, it's been said, than any place south of New York City.

The tourists who would come to Natchez would often ask why it was that there were more old antebellum mansions and plantation-style houses here than any place else in the South.

And I knew the answer was cotton.

In fact, right over there in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, five or 10 miles from here, there was more cotton grown in the year 1860 than in the states of North Carolina and South Carolina put together.

In the 1840s and the 1850s before the Civil War, as far as cotton growing was concerned, Natchez was where it was at.

(night owl and crickets) - [Narrator] First there is the eloquence of silence.

The dawn creeps in stealthily.

The solid walls of black forest soften to gray and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves.

There is not the faintest breath of wind nor stir of leaf.

The tranquility is profound and infinitely satisfying.

Then a bird pipes up.

Another follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music.

You see, none of the birds.

You simply move through an atmosphere of song, which seems to sing itself.

And when the sun gets well up and distributes a pink flush here and a patter of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering.

(country fiddle) - [Narrator] The word Cajun is a mutilation of the word Acadian.

The Acadians came to Nova Scotia, settled in the small area called Acadien, French Acadian English.

But they were exiled by the English when England took over because they wouldn't swear allegiance to the king of England.

The first group of Acadians that came to Louisiana came up the Mississippi River, and they landed here in the swamps and the bayous, and they made their home here.

Just realize that some of them took 20 years to get from Nova Scotia to Louisiana, 20 years!

They took what the land had to offer, and they made good food of it.

That's Cajun cooking.

The spices and herbs grew wild, red pepper and all that.

And they found what they wanted here: happiness.

And they kept that culture, and they still have it.

And I'm part of it, and I love it.

Cajun is also to me a way of life.

The way you live, the way you have fun.

(Cajun accordion music with singing in foreign language) - The beauty about living around here is that you never go hungry, and if you keep some friends, you'll never have a sad day.

You'll always have a beautiful time, and we have a wonderful relationship around us.

Real good.

- These things here are fried.

We're gonna take them out and make our gravy.

- Well, baby, you got that looking good, baby.

- Can't beat it with a stick, coach.

- And I can tell you puttin' your touch on it.

- Oh yeah, only way to cook.

- You add a little Cajun, you add a little Creole, and you stir up some river water, and you put it in a little bayou batch.

And you got it!

Wonderful!

(Cajun accordion music) - Very few musicians that plays that original French music like we do.

In fact, we the only two man that plays that music over here in this area.

The young people, they're the ones that goin' for that Zydeco Cha Cha.

That's what they like, and they leavin' that French Cajun music behind.

- Zydeco comes from a French phrase:   Les Haricots Sont Pas Salés "The beans are not salted," and if you speed that up as the music speeds up, you get zydeco.

- That don't make no sense.

Les Haricots Sont Pas Salés That's not "beans are not salted."

You don't put that in a song.

You want to put something beautiful in a song, like our songs.

We got a lot of French songs that are named after a town, Lafayette, Kaplan, Mamou, Lacassine.

We even got a waltz for this bayou.

- [Man] Bayou Teche Waltze.

- The Waltze of Bayou Teche.

- I'll stay with that Cajun French music as long as I can, because in my heart, there ain't no other kind of music like it.

(Cajun French music) (hand drum solo) - [Walker] The river confers a peculiar dispensation on the space of New Orleans.

Arriving from Memphis or Cincinnati, one feels the way Huck Finn did shoving off from Illinois.

Going from an encompassed place to an in-between zone, a sector of contending or lapsing jurisdictions.

On New Orleans ordinary streets, one will say there's a sense both of easement and of unspecified possibilities.

(hand drums) - [James] A multitude of peoples of all races and religions lifted the Crescent City out of the swamp from a land so wet that its tombs are above ground.

- [Alex] New Orleans was the most cosmopolitan.

The most dramatic and certainly the most fun-loving city in the whole of the South, and I guess maybe it would hold that title to this day.

- [James] After the Civil War, black musicians began to experiment with the discarded instruments from military bands.

The swinging marches they played became known as jazz and can still be heard today at Preservation Hall and at funerals throughout New Orleans.

Around the turn of the century, piano players merged with brass bands to produce a syncopated sound known as ragtime.

(ragtime music) Some of these musicians rose to fame, playing in the houses of New Orleans' red light district.

Later, these pioneers of the jazz movement, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, and the most famous ambassador of American jazz, Louis Armstrong, took the New Orleans sound out of the bars and back alleys and into the mainstream and national and international music scene.

- The definition of jazz is the music that's formed, felt, and conceived simultaneously.

And you won't hear much of it because even the great jazz players don't do it all the time.

So the greatest jazz players, they start out with something they know, that they've learned, and they play it almost by rote.

And then they try to work into these passages that are felt, conceived, and performed at the same time.

And that's what real jazz is.

(jazz music) ♪ The band is rompin' ♪ The folks are stompin' ♪ I just can't get off the ground ♪ Believe me, Bridget ♪ I can't get with it ♪ Since my little baby left town ♪ Ain't got no house in Westchester ♪ Don't have no Cris-Craft to cruise ♪ Lost all my bases with Lester ♪ I... ain't got nothin' but the blues (audience clapping and whistling) - [James] In 1766, early colonists of New Orleans began celebrating the old Parisian custom of parading a fat ox through the streets of the city on Shrove Tuesday.

And each year since, New Orleans becomes America's largest and longest-running street party, a 40-day carnival known as Mardi Gras.

Here in New Orleans life and death flow together in the traditional jazz funeral where grief and celebration go hand in hand.

("Just a Closer Walk with Thee") - [Alex] I think about something which the great Dr. King said.

"We ain't where we want to be.

"We ain't where we goin' to be, "but we sure ain't where we was either."

And I think that's very true.

- The real progress we made is in the relationship between the races.

That has been true progress, and I think it's a near miracle that it's worked as well as it has after 200 years of the opposite.

The South is greatly admired throughout this nation for having dealt with that problem as well as it did.

I wish they'd learn how to do it as well in Boston, and in Detroit, and LA.

We've done a good job of that and can be proud of it.

And my fervent hope is that something good will come out of it, I mean, really good.

A very old black woman was telling me today, she'd been a part of this movement the whole time, She said, "The South is going to rise again, "only this time, we're all gonna rise together."

(New Orleans band music) (water rushing) (peaceful music) - [James] And thus living, it is difficult to contemplate that future which lies beyond the pressing immediacies.

Yet some of us still have dreams for our river and for an Eden's promise fulfilled through the free cooperation of free men.

This day will come to a valley whose earth can feed and clothe a nation, but does not yet satisfy the hungry, and the shelterless, and the unclothed who are cast out along its 1,000 river miles.

(solemn music) I believe only that Eden is still attainable, though not easily, that the Mississippi, great sewer, father of waters, master and slave of its self-created earth is destined to become the true artery of a nation's impregnable heart.

(inspiring music) - I sort of feel that there's a sort of mission here.

We aren't just riding up and down the river, but mission that we who are gathered, will become trustfully kind of pioneers of more of this, more of the purpose of this, to see what can be achieved if we do come together, and find each other, and ride up and down the river in a kind of symbolic way toward a greater, better day tomorrow for us all.

Thank you much, everybody.

(clapping) (inspiring orchestral music) (crickets chirping) - [Announcer] Major funding for   Return to the River, a Television Voyage was provided by Entergy Corporation, a network of electric utilities serving in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

And by members of the foundation for Public Broadcasting in Mississippi.