How the Mississippi flows through song and still inspires

MARQUETTE, Iowa – It was just before sunset on the Mississippi River, the day’s last bits of golden light dancing on the water, when four members of the band Big Blue Sky picked up their instruments for one of their defining songs.

During the summer, the group plays Friday nights for Maiden Voyage Tours, a northeast Iowa riverboat company. Its 40-some passengers that evening had been sharing bottles of wine and hearing tales of Mississippi River history as they cruised along, speedboats occasionally racing by on either side.

Then the boat captain pulled over to an island and cut the motor. It was time for the water song.

Moving and unforgettable, “Water Song” urges listeners to think about how they treat the natural resource, so vital for life on earth. The tune was written in 2015 and came together in minutes, recalled Big Blue Sky singers and songwriters Jon Stravers and Sophia Landis. Much of the group’s music is about the river and the surrounding region, a place of curiosity, adventure and solace for Stravers and his late son, Jon-Jon.

Big Blue Sky’s work adds to a centuries-long tradition of music inspired and transported by the Mississippi River. The river’s role as a major shipping artery and a force of nature, as well as its historical and cultural significance to the nation, make it an easy thing to write about. And riverboats not altogether different from this one carried songs north and south, spreading jazz and the delta blues across the heart of the country.

Most importantly, the music describes people’s personal connections to the river — something intensely evident in Stravers’ words on the boat.

In song, he and Landis rhapsodized. In speaking, he kept it simple: “This is a good stretch of the river. It’s important. And people love it.”

Mississippi River moved and shaped jazz, delta blues

Perhaps no style of music is as intertwined with the Mississippi River as the delta blues, rooted in the musical traditions of enslaved Black Americans who were forced to work long hours in the fields of the Mississippi Delta region. Though slavery had technically ended, many Black Americans remained in unfair and oppressive working conditions at the turn of the 20th century.

Unlike gospel music sung in church, blues reflected their real lives and real feelings, said Maie Smith, group tour manager and operations manager at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

“Delta blues music is a music that works from the heart to the outside,” Smith said. “It starts with your most inner being, and helps to lift you up and rise you above whatever circumstances you were in.”

Lots of delta blues musicians worked on the river, Smith said, including those forced to build levees to protect fields from floodwaters. They endured the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which killed upwards of a thousand people and displaced almost 640,000 people from Illinois to Louisiana. Many songs were written about this historic disaster and other river floods, including Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” Barbecue Bob’s “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” and Big Bill Broonzy’s “Southern Flood Blues.”

But the river also provided opportunities for blues musicians to travel, taking their songs with them. Blues and later jazz music came north to Memphis, Kansas City and Chicago, building a following and mixing with other music styles. Today, blues riffs underpin much of American popular music, Smith said, like rock and roll and hip hop.

Music was moving on the Mississippi even before then — during the so-called “golden age of steamboats” in the 19th century. Thousands of steamboats traveled the river and its major tributaries during that time, said Steve Marking, a river historian and guest performer for American Cruise Lines on its Mississippi River cruises.

The boats took on passengers as well as freight, and companies sought to hire the best musicians to entice people to pay to board, Marking said. Later, even influential jazz musician Louis Armstrong performed for a few years on the Streckfus Steamboat Line.

Other forms of music that arose and were popularized on the river include ragtime in St. Louis and river folk music that featured banjo, fiddle and percussion. Dixieland, a form of jazz, and country music also owe a debt to the river. 

Why capture the Mississippi River in song?

Rivers in general “have inspired almost as many songs as love,” Marking said.

Many people have some sort of connection with them, whether it’s traveling them by boat or simply watching them run. Marking pointed to the song “Watchin’ the River Go By,” by John Hartford, which depicts two people who get together each night on the porch to watch the Ohio River. It’s an experience anyone, young or old, can relate to, he said (well, maybe not completely — the people in the song do so in the nude).

But more than lakes, forests or prairies, rivers are captured in song over and over again. Why?

It could be their heavy symbolism. For Marking, rivers signify the passage of time, reminding us of our journey through life.

“If you’re standing on the shore,” he said, “upstream is the past, downstream is the future.”

Rivers also make a connection — between places, or even between the past and the future.

The musicians who still travel the river today are helping make that connection, Marking said, including the ones who make up Big Blue Sky. He described taking the boat tour and listening to them play “Water Song” as “one of the top five events of my entire life.”

It’s easy to see why. The group’s music both honors the river’s musical traditions and adds something new: an eye toward its ecological importance. In between songs, passengers got to hear about Stravers’ decades of bird research on this stretch of the river, including monitoring of the cerulean warbler, one of the rarest nesting warblers in Iowa. They stopped to watch a beaver on an island waddle through the sand to make his way back to the water. And they were granted what the captain called one of the best sunsets of the summer: a bright, show-stopping pink.

Though most of their songs evolve over time, Stravers said, “Water Song” pretty much gets played the same every time. The exception is in his echo to Landis’s main melody, where he regularly inserts the name of whatever water body they’re playing on to remind listeners they need it to live.

Sacred Mississippi River water, indeed. 

Want to hear more? Check out this Mississippi River playlist!

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.