My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.
That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
Very few writers understand the complex history and maddening social order of the Mississippi Delta. For Steve Yarbrough, though, it's home turf. He is wickedly observant, funny, cynical, evocative, and he possesses a gift that cannot be taught: he can tell a story.
I took Bobby Kennedy through the delta and he cried like a baby.
I'm from the Mississippi delta originally.
I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.
I don't remember any impression [from blues].The blues was just everywhere in the Mississippi Delta. It was mostly black sharecroppers living there, and there was a lot of blues around. Sometimes the guys would sing the blues in the fields, working.
I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta, and maybe that's because sharecropping was a fairly recent phenomena. I feel like the past is closer and it bears even more heavily on the present there than it does in the rest of the state.
Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.
For every epsilon, there is a delta.
Delta: We never make the same mistake three times.
