Memphis Minnie and The Levee
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(Conspiracy Nation, 09/01/05)
-- The year was 1927 and Calvin Coolidge was president. In that year,
the Mississippi river valley, and especially the state of Louisiana,
suffered the greatest flood in its history.
Memphis Minnie McCoy (born Lizzie Douglas, image, left, with
second husband Joe McCoy) would have lived through the devastation.
Born June 3rd, 1897, in Algiers, Louisiana, at the age of 13 she had
run away from home. In Memphis, Tennessee she played guitar in
nightclubs. Her 1929 song, "When The Levee Breaks" (co-authored with
husband Joe), was later recorded by Led Zeppelin and released in 1971.
Calvin Coolidge appointed Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to
head a flood commission. Hoover thereby became the Chertoff of his
time, responsible for "floodland security."
Many of the flood victims were Acadians. Said Hoover: They are
"as much like French peasants as one dot is like another. These
Acadians are a wonderful people and they love this Evangeline country
of theirs with all their heart and soul. We are finding it the toughest
sort of a job to convince them that when they go to a concentration
camp they do not become objects of charity."
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At the time, the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya rivers flowed
southward and roughly parallel, with a long narrow strip of land
between them. In May of 1927, at Melville, Louisiana, the levee broke.
Men, women, and children scrambled to unbroken sections of the levee.
All last night I sat on the levee
and moaned.
The nation had been preoccupied with relative frivolity and had not
especially noticed what was happening in the Mississippi Valley.
Charles Lindberg's trans-atlantic flight, for instance, consumed
attention. Complained Herbert Hoover, "I sometimes wonder if the people
of our country realize just what this calamity is. Do they know
that before the flood recedes more than half a million Americans, men,
women and children, will have seen their homes swallowed up in the
deluge..."
When the levee breaks I'll have no
place to stay.
Economic pain was tremendous. Crops were destroyed and businesses
were ruined. This was in 1927, two years before the stock market crash
supposedly caused the Great Depression.
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down South
There ain't no work to do,
If you're goin' North,
There's Chicago.
Memphis Minnie did move to Chicago, in the 1930s. It was "the city
that works," "the city of the big shoulders." There, she recorded
nearly 200 records. In 1957, she returned to Memphis. Memphis Minnie
McCoy passed away on August 6th, 1973.
The 1927 flood covered 15,000 square miles, an area larger than
Belgium. It was "a national calamity. Nothing else since the Civil War
[was] in its class... Millions of words have been written about the
[1927] flood." So why is it, during the present New Orleans calamity,
that only a lowly outlet, Conspiracy
Nation, is covering this historical angle?
(Sources: Time magazine archives for 1927 flood research. Wikipedia
for "Memphis Minnie McCoy" research.)
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