William Alfred Dockery (November 10, 1865 – December 29, 1936) was an American landowner who built from scratch the

Dockery Plantation Dockery Plantation was a cotton plantation and sawmill in Dockery, Mississippi, on the Sunflower River between Ruleville and Cleveland, Mississippi. It is widely regarded as the place where Delta blues music was born. Palmer, Robert (1981). '' ...

, the famous home of such original

Delta blues Delta blues is one of the earliest-known styles of blues. It originated in the Mississippi Delta, and is regarded as a regional variant of country blues. Guitar and harmonica are its dominant instruments; slide guitar is a hallmark of the s ...

musicians as

Charley Patton Charley Patton (April 1891 (probable) – April 28, 1934), also known as Charlie Patton, was an American Delta blues musician and songwriter. Considered by many to be the "Father of the Delta Blues", he created an enduring body of American mus ...

Robert Johnson Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911August 16, 1938) was an American blues musician and songwriter. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generati ...

Son House Edward James "Son" House Jr. (March 21, 1902His date of birth is a matter of some debate. House alleged that he was middle-aged during World War I and that he was 79 in 1965, which would make his date of birth around 1886. However, all legal re ...

Howlin' Wolf Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910January 10, 1976), better known by his stage name Howlin' Wolf, was an American blues singer and guitarist. He is regarded as one of the most influential blues musicians of all time. Over a four-decade care ...

, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, and

Pops Staples Pops may refer to: Name or nickname * Pops, an informal term of address for a father or elder * Pops (nickname), a list of people * Pops (Muppet), a Muppets character * Pops (Johnny Bravo), a character from the Cartoon Network animated televisio ...

Plantation

Dockery's parents left the Carolinas sometime before the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...

and settled in Mississippi as farmers, but were left poor by the war's end. Dockery was born in Love, Mississippi, and went on to graduate from the

University of Mississippi The University of Mississippi (byname Ole Miss) is a public research university that is located adjacent to Oxford, Mississippi, and has a medical center in Jackson. It is Mississippi's oldest public university and its largest by enrollment. ...

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 Cleveland is a city in Bolivar County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 11,199 as of the 2020 United States Census. Cleveland has a large commercial economy, with numerous restaurants, stores, and services along U.S. 61. Clevelan ...

in the

Mississippi Delta The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo ...

between the

Yazoo River The Yazoo River is a river in the U.S. states of Louisiana and Mississippi. It is considered by some to mark the southern boundary of what is called the Mississippi Delta, a broad floodplain that was cultivated for cotton plantations before the ...

and the

Sunflower River The Sunflower River (also known as the Big Sunflower River) is one of the main tributaries of the Yazoo River in the U.S. state of Mississippi. It is navigable by barge for 50 miles. It rises in De Soto County, Mississippi near the Tennessee border ...

. First he went into the lumber business, cutting trees and building a

sawmill A sawmill (saw mill, saw-mill) or lumber mill is a facility where logs are cut into lumber. Modern sawmills use a motorized saw to cut logs lengthwise to make long pieces, and crosswise to length depending on standard or custom sizes (dimensi ...

. 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 cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); a ...

, a post office and a

company store A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of people, whether natural, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specific, declared go ...

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 farmer A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, ...

s or

sharecropper Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...

s, 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.

The blues

Although the complete history will never be known, there is a central theme to the development of what is known as the blues, and that is the plantation that Will Dockery built outside of Cleveland. Although Dockery was unaware of the music his laborers played in their quarters at "house parties" during their off hours, his plantation provided a particularly fertile atmosphere for musicians to gather and play their music while others listened and danced. It is difficult to know what Mississippi music would have emerged without the musical mix of Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, and Robert Johnson.

Historic marker

A marker designating Dockery Plantation as a site on the

Mississippi Blues Trail The Mississippi Blues Trail was created by the Mississippi Blues Commission in 2006 to place interpretive markers at the most notable historical sites related to the birth, growth, and influence of the blues throughout (and in some cases beyond) t ...

is an acknowledgment of the important contribution of the plantation to the development of the

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

in Mississippi. The marker was placed in

. Governor Haley Barbour stated:

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dockery, Will Mississippi Blues Trail 1865 births 1936 deaths American planters University of Mississippi alumni People from DeSoto County, Mississippi