Desperado Orchestra

"Can’t Stop the Blues: Race Records, Exploitation, Segregation and Censorship" When Alan Lomax was conducting his field recordings of blues music in the Mississippi Delta for the Library of Congress in the 1930s and 1940s, the traditional blues had already morphed and developed styles outside of the solo acoustic guitar and other blues traditions found within the plantation life in the South. A major change in blues had to do with the “Great Migration” starting in 1914, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South moved North to work in factories. In these Northern cities they were able to work for more promising wages, had access to better education and lived what seemed as a more promising lifestyle. Though exploitation, segregation and violence were still a part of their lives, the new urban settings offered an escape from the plantation life and a space for the unification of blacks from all over the South to live and work together in thei