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Will Dockery (1865–1936) built from scratch the Dockery Plantation, the famous home of such original Delta blues musicians as Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, and Pops Staples.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Dockery Farms and the Birth of the Blues )〕〔 ==Plantation== Dockery's parents left the Carolinas sometime before the American Civil War and settled in Mississippi as farmers, but were left poor by the war's end.〔 Dockery was born in Love, Mississippi,〔(【引用サイトリンク】 publisher = Mississippi State University )〕 and went on to graduate from the University of Mississippi in 1885. He left the family farm and purchased, with a $1000 gift from his grandmother, tracts of forest and marshland outside of Cleveland, Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta between the Yazoo River and the Sunflower River. First he went into the lumber business, cutting trees and building a sawmill. As he made more money he acquired more land; realizing that the bottom soil was rich, he cleared the trees, drained the marshes of malaria-carrying mosquitoes and began to plant cotton. It subsequently became known that Dockery needed manual labor, and he was willing to pay for it, so laborers flocked there. Eventually, Will Dockery built a large cotton gin, a post office and a company store which produced its own money. By the 1930s, Dockery plantation covered of rich fertile river delta lowland. Will Dockery earned a reputation for treating his workers fairly.〔 Over the years, black laborers began to migrate to the Dockery Plantation, to work in the fields and become tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a system in which they leased land to cultivate, paying the owner a share of the crop. The families lived on their land and grew their own gardens. Often peripatetic blues musicians were attracted there for itinerant work and they lived in what were called the "quarters" for bachelors, known for the partying and drinking going on there. Here musicians, often drunk, played their music far into the night. The guitar was particularly suited to the rural Mississippi Delta musician.〔 〕 The Mississippi Blues Commission placed a historic marker at the site of the plantation in recognition of its enormous importance in the development of the Mississippi blues. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Will Dockery」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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