Dockery Farms has been called the birthplace of the Delta blues by B. B. King and many others. It’s not an accident then that this land fueled the first protest music. The blues came from the land around the barn. From Charley Patton, the Black grandson of a white man. Patton’s music flowed from a place of rage about how he lived a small, threatened life because his grandmother was Black—“skin the color of rape,” the poet Caroline Randall Williams wrote. He became the first blues star, the man who taught Son House, who taught Robert Johnson, who taught Muddy Waters, who hailed from the same
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