Contemporary Authors

• Katrina's Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America ( edited by Keith Wailoo) Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, N.J.), 2010
• Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita Brookings Institution Press (Washington, DC), 2011
• Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2014

1. Backwater blues : the Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American imagination LCCN 2014001434 Type of material Book Personal name Mizelle, Richard M., Jr., 1975- Main title Backwater blues : the Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American imagination / Richard M. Mizelle Jr. Published/Produced Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2014] Description xii, 209 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780816679256 (hc : alk. paper) 9780816679263 (pb : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 015406 CALL NUMBER E185.6 .M76 2014 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. Katrina's imprint : race and vulnerability in America LCCN 2009038466 Type of material Book Main title Katrina's imprint : race and vulnerability in America / edited by Keith Wailoo ... [et al.]. Published/Created New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2010. Description vii, 209 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780813547732 (hc : alk. paper) 9780813547749 (pbk. : alk. paper) 0813547733 (hc : alk. paper) 0813547741 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 046772 CALL NUMBER HV636 2005.N4 K38 2010 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Learning as a function of stimulus and response arousal with control over meaningfulness, imagery, and concreteness, LCCN 72611219 Type of material Book Personal name Mizelle, Richard M. Main title Learning as a function of stimulus and response arousal with control over meaningfulness, imagery, and concreteness, by Richard M. Mizelle and Frank H. Farley. Published/Created Madison, Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning, University of Wisconsin, 1971. Description ix, 15 p. illus. 28 cm. CALL NUMBER LB1059 .W478 no. 165 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• University of Houston - http://www.uh.edu/class/history/faculty-and-staff/mizelle_r/

  Faculty and Staff
  Richard M. Mizelle, Jr
  Associate Professor
  Mizelle Portrait
  Phone: (713) 743-0130
  Email: rmmizelle@uh.edu
  Office: 533 Agnes Arnold Hall

  Richard M. Mizelle, Jr. received his Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University in 2006. He holds a B.A. in history from North Carolina Central University (1994) and M.A. in history from the American University (2000). His work has been supported by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the McKnight Foundation.

  Teaching
  Professor Mizelle teaches courses on the history of race and medicine, medicine and society, environmental history and technology, and the Civil Rights Movement in modern America.

  back to top

  Research Interests
  Professor Mizelle’s research explores the historical borders and overlap between questions of race, environment, technology, and health in modern America. His forthcoming book, Backwater Blues: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood and the African American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), offers a critique of long-standing ideas of black environmental complacency by showing the ways in which black commentators from W.E.B. Du Bois to Bessie Smith provided an ecological intellectual criticism of the disaster. He is also co-editor of Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).

  Professor Mizelle is currently at work on a new project that will examine the long and complex history of race and diabetes from the turn of the 19th century through Hurricane Katrina.

  back to top

  Selected Publications
  Books

  Backwater Blues: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood in the African American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

  Co-editor, Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).

  Articles

  “Black Levee Camp Workers, the NAACP, and the Mississippi Flood Control Project, 1927-1933,” Journal of African American History, 98, no.4 (2013): 511-530.

  “Deamonte’s Epidemic: Uncertain Science, Citizenship, and the Landscape of Gum Disease” (Article in Progress)

  “South of the Border: African American Migration to Mexico Between the Wars (Article in Progress)

• University of Minnesota - http://ias.umn.edu/2015/04/08/mizelle/

  Richard Mizelle, Professor of History, April 2015
  APRIL 8, 2015IASBAT OF MINERVA, VIDEO AND AUDIO0

  Download: audio, small video, or original.

  Richard Mizelle is Professor of History at the University of Houston. His research explores the historical borders and overlap between questions of race, environment, technology, and health in modern America. His book Backwater Blues: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood and the African American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), offers a critique of long-standing ideas of black environmental complacency by showing the ways in which black commentators from W.E.B. Du Bois to Bessie Smith provided an ecological intellectual criticism of the disaster. He is also co-editor of Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) and is currently at work on a new project that will examine the long and complex history of race and diabetes from the turn of the 19th century through Hurricane Katrina.

  Prof. Mizelle visited the University of Minnesota in April 2015 for the John E. Sawyer Seminar Symposium on “The Once and Future River: Imagining the Mississippi in an Era of Climate Change“. His book Backwater Blues was the subject of a discussion in March 2015 on Environmental Disaster and African-American Experiences.

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Print Marked Items
Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927
in the African American Imagination
David Welky
Journal of Southern History.
82.4 (Nov. 2016): p965.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination. By Richard M. Mizelle Jr.
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 209. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-8166-7926-
3; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-8166-7925-6.)
Probably no natural disaster in American history has received as much attention as the 1927 Mississippi River flood.
Richard M. Mizelle Jr. goes beyond existing narratives surrounding the event, combining environmental history with
African American and cultural history, to present a racialized understanding of the flood. As Mizelle notes, African
Americans left only a faint trail of documentary sources describing the event. Mizelle instead unearths clues as to how
African Americans perceived the crisis from an array of fascinating sources, from blues songs to short works of fiction
to oral histories. The result is a brief yet wide-ranging volume that raises several interesting ideas meriting further
consideration from historians.
Readers acquainted with John Barry's or Pete Daniel's works on the 1927 flood will find much that is familiar here, as
throughout Mizelle intersperses his text with copious background material. What separates Backwater Blues: The
Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination from other volumes is Mizelle's attempt to
demonstrate how African Americans situated environmental incidents, or so-called natural disasters, within a context
of racial oppression. Blues songs, for example, offered a way to highlight inequalities in the distribution of flood relief
and the brutal treatment along the levees without triggering violent retribution from whites. Stories by novelist
Richard Wright, whom Mizelle credits as having a "blues voice," furthered this antimajoritarian critique of the flood
experience by exposing the harsh realities of second-class citizenship among southern African Americans (p. 21).
Subsequent chapters explore equally fascinating topics that revolve around a broader discussion of race and the
environment. Mizelle examines the suspicion that many African Americans held for the American Red Cross, an
organization notorious at the time for racial discrimination in its relief operations and for maintaining such a close
relationship with the military that many African Americans associated the organization with the use of force and
intimidation tactics. Another chapter describes how the flood helped inspire self-declared "Creoles of color" to
relocate from southwest Louisiana to the Frenchtown district of Houston, where they created a distinct identity based
on traditional music and food even as they endured differential treatment based on skin color (p. 101). Extrapolating
from this community, Mizelle uses the migration to Frenchtown as a way of commenting on the larger exodus of
African Americans from the flood zone to areas outside the South.
Backwater Blues brings fresh insights into the human side of the 1927 flood. It draws from previously unused sources
as well as from the writings of African American thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain
Locke. At times, however, the author might have benefited from a more focused argument. Like a Mississippi River
flood, Backwater Blues tends to run wide but shallow. Mizelle, for example, declares that blues recordings "provide
the backbone of this book," but he tends to make little use of the songs beyond quoting a few lines here and there (p.
x). A deeper and more consistent analysis of these sources might further illuminate his arguments about race and the
environment. Further, the book tends toward the episodic, becoming more a collection of chapters than an
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interconnected whole. The blues disappear for long stretches, and it is sometimes difficult to see a relationship
between, for example, the Frenchtown Creoles of color--who did not consider themselves African American--and the
black levee workers and flood victims who populate the rest of the book. Other chapters feel similarly disconnected
from each other.
Nevertheless, Backwater Blues is an ambitious work that challenges historians to cross disciplinary lines while
seeking innovative ways to articulate the voices of historical actors who, due to gaps in the printed record, cannot
speak for themselves.
DAVID WELKY
University of Central Arkansas
Welky, David
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Welky, David. "Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination." Journal of
Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 965+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867714&it=r&asid=39a47bca8e04c90e862545196563eff4.
Accessed 4 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867714
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Mizelle, Richard M., Jr.: Backwater blues: the
Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African
American imagination
F.J. Hay
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
52.6 (Feb. 2015): p1044.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Mizelle, Richard M., Jr. Backwater blues: the Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American imagination.
Minnesota, 2014. 209p discography index afp ISBN 9780816679256 cloth, $75.00; ISBN 9780816679263 pbk,
$25.00
52-3286
E185
2014-1434 CIP
Historian Mizelle (Univ. of Houston) offers a well-written account of the devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood. In
addition to providing extensive coverage of contemporary accounts as recorded in oral histories, newspapers,
memoirs, earlier histories, government documents, and works of African American literature (especially Richard
Wright's), this volume contextualizes how the flood was perceived and documented in contemporary blues lyrics. This
significant contribution to the scholarly use of the blues gives voice to the African American working class and the
impoverished via literary/historical explanation--an enterprise dating back at least to Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology,
and Afro-American Literature (CH, Sep'85). Mizelle brings to this study a more comprehensive knowledge of the
genre, thus producing a more nuanced and profound treatment of the blues than his predecessors. He refutes "Black
environmental illiteracy"; discusses the underdocumented role of the Red Cross's participation in brutal racial
discrimination and oppression; explains the place of the 1927 flood in the history of American natural disasters
(especially in comparison to the aftermath of Katrina); and explores the militarism of disaster relief rhetoric. Mizelle
has mastered an extensive, interdisciplinary literature to produce a work of lasting importance. One minor drawback is
the book's inferior index. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general
readers.--F. J. Hay, Appalachian State University
Hay, F.J.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Hay, F.J. "Mizelle, Richard M., Jr.: Backwater blues: the Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American
imagination." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Feb. 2015, p. 1044+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA416401057&it=r&asid=8fe80f20f71da3b3bc1e581a0b8e256a.
Accessed 4 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A416401057

Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. Aug2015, Vol. 46 Issue 2, Gregory Hansen, p125-126. 2p.
Backwater Blues: The Mississippi
Flood o f 1927 in the African
American Imagination. By Richard
M. Mizelle, Jr. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Pp. ix-xii + 160, notes, selected
discography, index. $25, paperback)
Research on a region’s social history often
focuses on the most salient events with a community’s
historical memory. In this respect, the
1927 flood holds a prominent place in the collective
memory of
communities located
along the Mississippi
River. The rebuilt
levee system and the
continuing engineering
projects for
flood control are not
only visible reminders
of the flood
but they also serve to
elicit both sketchy
memories and extensive
accounts of the
catastrophe. Although only a few elder residents
can recount first-hand experiences with
the flood, the verbal legacy of the disaster remains
vibrant in the storytelling and historical
recollections of contemporary residents of lower
Mississippi River region. Richard Mizelle’s new
book draws from a range of sources to provide a
trenchant interpretation of the history of this
flood within African-American memory culture
and historical imagination. He focuses much of
his work on the legacy of the flood within the
Mississippi River Delta—which he more accurately
terms the “Yazoo-Mississippi River Delta.”
Along with his treatment of how the 1927 flood
is important within African-American history,
Mizelle also uses Delta blues music as a vibrant
resource for understanding both the symbolism
and the experiences of surviving the cataclysm.
The book begins with a strong and engaging
study of the historical context for the massive
deluge. Mizelle provides a fine balance of
historical context and narrative to show the importance
of this region within African-American
history, and he outlines how the flood
control system was initially constructed and
maintained over time. In these introductory
chapters, he makes and develops a strong case
for using scholarship in blues music to augment
the written record. Crediting Clyde Wood with
an approach of “blues epistemology,” Mizelle
emphasizes how blues music and its related narrative
tradition can yield insight into how
African-Americans have sought resistance as
well as healing in the face of racial oppression.
The author mines dozens of blues songs and various
biographies of blues musicians to show how
the experience of surviving the flood not only
is directly narrated but also symbolically expressed
in music. A significant strength of the
book, here, is that he doesn’t simply posit interpretations
of the lyrics using text-based theories,
such as reader-response criticism. Rather
he uses historically verifiable accounts to contextualize
the musical expression, and he then
unpacks a range of symbolic meanings that he
specifically connects to this history.
Mizelle’s emphasis is the place of the flood
within the African-American imagination.
This approach is important for numerous reasons.
On an overt level, this approach is essential
to writing the history of the flood because
the flood disproportionately affected the higher
black populations living in the region. In terms
of historiography, a unifying interest in African-
125
American historical memory and imagination
also demonstrates epistemological and ideological
problems with dichotomizing the flood’s
history in terms of an “American history” that
contrasts to African-American history. Mizelle
convincingly demonstrates why African-American
experiences are integral for understanding
the region’s history as a whole.
The book’s five chapters are centered on a
chronology of the flood and its aftermath. The
economic and social disparities that existed
across racial lines are clearly and vividly presented
through a range of historical sources. It’s
common for residents of the region to have only
sketchy impressions of this history, hut the accounts
of the deprivations, injustice, and violence
that occurred in the region are important
chronicles of a painful past. He provides a
strong historical treatment of systemic oppression
including the convict-leasing system, debt
peonage, and abuses in the levee camps. The
lyrics of songs like “Levee Camp Man Blues”
and the better known “Levee Camp Moan” portray
direct accounts and expressions of the atrocious
conditions in these settlements during the
flood. Mizelle strikingly demonstrates that even
seemingly benign acts of charity were used to
advance discriminatory and racist policies. The
chapters on the American Red Cross’s relief efforts
could be used as textbook examples of institutional
racism within a wider politics of
culture that bolstered oppression in the name
of benevolence. The largely neglected history
of these interventions is integral for interpreting
the lyrics of songs like “Red Cross Man.” In his
treatment of these lyrics, Mizelle’s analysis elucidates
the sketchy allusions and often esoteric
symbolism in lines such as “Red Cross gives my
man, three days a week, sack of Red Cross flour,
hunk of old white meat.” His interpretation indicates
layers of coded meanings show how the
relief efforts sustained the status quo of a segregated
society.
Mizelle saves his treatment of “When the
Levee Breaks” for his conclusion. Most readers
will be familiar with this blues song through the
Led Zeppelin cover version; however few listeners
may directly connect Jimmy Page and
Robert Plant’s version with the 1927 flood. But,
Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie wrote the
song, recording it in 1929 as a direct commentary
on the flood. Mizelle doesn’t provide an indepth
treatment of their recording careers, yet
his analysis suggests that their song could serve
as an anthem for the entire history. He emphasizes
how the song portrays human vulnerability
in the face of technological failure. The short
and direct lyrics exemplify central elements of
blues aesthetics: “If it keeps on raining, levee’s
going to break / If it keeps on raining, levee’s
going to break / And the water gonna come and
(you’ll have) no place to stay.” Mizelle also explicates
how the deeply polysemic symbolism in
these lyrics is also central to blues aesthetics.
The song lyrics’ provocative force becomes
clear in the phrase that follows: “Crying won’t
help you, praying won’t do you no good / Crying
won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good /
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to
move.” On the level of historical particularity
as well as on the more abstract generalized articulation
of African-American memory culture,
Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie’s song
evokes the existential predicament of facing the
hard reality of life yet somehow finding strength
to endure.

American Historical Review. Jun2015, Vol. 120 Issue 3, p1049-1050. 2p.
Drew Swanson
RICHARD M. MIZELLE JR. Backwater Blues: The Mississippi
Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp.
xii, 209. Cloth $75.00, paper $25.00.
As the crow flies, Dockery Plantation in the Mississippi
Delta—once home of blues legends Howlin’ Wolf, Robert
Johnson, and Charley Patton, and one of the claimants
for the location where Johnson sold his soul to the
devil in exchange for his ungodly guitar skills—is about
20 miles from Mounds Landing, where in 1927 the swollen
Mississippi River surged through a crevasse. The resulting
floodwaters inundated the lower half of the
Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. It was, Richard M. Mizelle Jr.
claims, “the most significant environmental disaster of
the twentieth century,” a cataclysm with lasting repercussions
for southern race relations as well as the environment
(p. 12). And the legacy of this flood for
African Americans, he argues, can be best accessed
through the blues that flowed from places like Dockery
and spread across the nation.
Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the
African American Imagination is Mizelle’s effort to limn
the African American experience of the flood, particularly
in the delta, and the legacy of the event in memory
and culture. He contends that existing histories of the
flood have largely dealt with top-down narratives of the
event and its aftermath and have thus failed to get at
the heart of the experience of rural African Americans.
The physical destruction and displacement of the floodwaters
altered southern lives and landscapes, but their
memory and legacy were of equal importance, shaping
black perceptions of agricultural work, mobility, federal
flood programs, relief agencies, and economic opportunities.
The introduction and first chapter argue for the blues
as a particularly effective source to get at the social history
and lasting meaning of the flood, examining references
to the flood in a number of songs. The medium of
music should be central to our understanding of the disaster,
according to Mizelle, for “the blues archive complements
other ways of knowing about the 1927 flood,
providing a fuller account of the historical record”
(p. 29). Chapter 2 explores two short stories by Richard
Wright that plumb the harsh legacy of the levee break
and subsequent environmental injustice for rural black
farmers. Next comes a more conventional chapter on
Red Cross relief efforts in the delta, with a focus on African
American suspicion of official charity networks in
light of their administration by influential local whites.
Of particular interest is Mizelle’s demonstration of the
multiplicity of flood responses in northern black communities,
like those of Chicago, which often circumvented
government-endorsed channels. The following
chapter looks at a flood diaspora community, Frenchtown,
outside of Houston, and its role in popularizing
zydeco music. Mizelle’s final chapter examines life and
work in levee construction camps following the flood.
These communities, under the supervision of the federal
government (in the form of the Army Corps of Engineers),
combined “the debt peonage associated with
sharecropping and the convict-lease system,” and as a
consequence became popular subjects of blues songs
(p. 128).
Mizelle’s book is the freshest and most engaging in
the sections that deal intensively with blues artists and
lyrics; it includes a discography for readers interested in
learning and hearing more. Although his introduction
argues for the centrality of blues in explaining the dispersed
effects of the flood, only the first and last chapters
make much use of the music as source material.
These sections evoke James C. Giesen’s excellent work
on the role of music in spreading and influencing cultural
understandings of the boll weevil across the cotton
South in Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in
the American South (2011). All the chapters contain interesting
examples of the pervasive and lasting influence
of the flood, but they are less than firmly connected,
making the book feel like a collection of articles on the
cultural history of the 1927 flood rather than a cohesive
monograph. More thoroughly integrating blues songs as
sources into each chapter might have done much to
ameliorate this issue.
In addition to blues scholars, Backwater Blues
will likely be of greatest interest to environmental historians.
It is an accessible primer on the lasting cultural
power of a “natural” disaster as read through the
Canada and the United States 1049
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2015
superstructure of the racial mores and laws of the
South. As such, the book is a valuable contribution to
the growing body of literature on African American environmental
history and broader national understandings
of the appropriate relationship between people and
nature.
DREW SWANSON
Wright State University

Lipsitz, George1
Source:
Journal of American History. Jun2015, Vol. 102 Issue 1, p281-281. 3/4p.
Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927
in the African American Imagination. By Richard
M. Mizelle Jr. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2014. xii, 209 pp. Cloth,
$75.00. Paper, $25.00.)
In this imaginative and original study Richard
M. Mizelle Jr. asks and answers important
questions about the impact on the African
American imagination of the Mississippi River
flood of 1927. He brings a fresh perspective
to a well-researched topic by focusing not so
much on the material causes and consequences
of the flood but on how and why black
people have consistently framed it as a landmark
racial event rather than merely as an environmental
disaster. Mizelle discovers a rich
repository of environmental analysis in black
culture grounded in reaction to displacement
and dispossession and recognition of the ways
historical exploitation and injustice create cumulative
vulnerabilities that guarantee that
natural disasters that impact everyone will
have especially deleterious effects on African
Americans.
Recognizing that traditional archives and
records are structured in dominance, and that
they rarely contain evidence of the subjective
perceptions and quotidian experiences of
members of aggrieved groups, Mizelle turns
to an alternative archive located inside the lyrics
of blues songs, written in works of expressive
fiction and investigative journalism by
black authors, and spoken in testimonies recorded
in oral histories. He draws deftly on arguments
by Clyde Woods and Farah Jasmine
Griffin about the blues as not simply a specific
musical genre but instead as part of a broader
epistemology design to affirm the linked fate
of black people and to fuse them into an aggrieved
and oppositional collectivity.
Mizelle’s seemingly small decisions about
research design produce big results. Disaster
relief efforts and charity projects celebrated
by whites as noble humanitarian endeavors
are understood inside the counternarratives of
black culture as little more than racial projects:
ventures motivated more by desires for labor
control than flood control. It is not just that
blacks were systematically denied the aid freely
offered to whites but also that their impressment
as laborers in flood control projects functioned
as a means of preserving and extending
a system of racialized debt peonage. While recognizing
fully the serious environmental and
economic consequences of the flood, black
cultural workers chose to emphasize the disaster’s
importance as an instrument of racial
domination.
Mizelle’s research reveals that the counternarratives
of black culture proceed through
spatial and temporal logics that differ markedly
from the conventions of historical research.
The flood happened in the Mississippi Delta,
but Mizelle shows that its impact was felt nationally.
The flood took place in 1927, but because
works of expressive culture incorporated
it into the black cultural imaginary, it endures
as a repository of collective memory and a
source of political instruction able to be activated
at any time—most recently as a framework
for understanding the organized abandonment
of poor and working-class blacks in
New Orleans in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina
hit the mainland.
George Lipsitz
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav321

Welky, David. "Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 965+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867714&it=r. Accessed 4 July 2017. Hay, F.J. "Mizelle, Richard M., Jr.: Backwater blues: the Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American imagination." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Feb. 2015, p. 1044+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA416401057&it=r. Accessed 4 July 2017.

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