Upbeat Down South: Jimmy Anderson: Natchez Swamp Blues

Linton Avenue in downtown Natchez, Mississippi, is dotted with large Victo- rian homes, surrounded by luxuriant vegetation. In the early twentieth century it was home to successful Jewish families. The maids, gardeners, and carpenters who took care of these homes and the people who resided there lived right behind Linton Avenue on Maple Street, where simple cypress cabins still stand adjacent to small pine shotgun houses. This area was, and remains, one of the only African American neighborhoods in downtown Natchez. The city was highly segregated during the Jim Crow era and today its built environment still recalls its compli- cated social and racial history.

 

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The Natchez Fire: African American Remembrance through Interviews, Photographs, and Songs

The fire had already taken the life of more than two hundred people, most of them young African Americans, students from the surrounding high schools and colleges who had come to the club to celebrate the end of the school year by jitterbugging to the tunes of then famous Chicago swing jazz band leader Walter Barnes. Along with these interviews are 10 photographs I took between 2009 and 2011, including the places and residents whose memories of the tragedy form the core of my fieldwork. […]I am grateful to Jimmy Anderson and Thelma Williams who allowed me to reproduce several of their archival photographs, each of which adds visual depth to their powerful accounts.

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