In some places the flat, alluvial plane of the Mississippi Delta seems to stretch on without end. Row after row of young cotton plants take root in a fertile flood plain covered with rich river sediment from the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. Here, a small shack from the era of sharecropping stands alone, a remnant from a deeply exploitive agricultural system designed to replace slave plantations and keep rich, white landowners in power long after the Civil War. Typical sharecropping arrangements allowed a farmer to live and work on a plot of land and share a portion of the resulting crop with the owner. But with no income during the off-season, croppers were forced to buy necessities on credit from the owner through a plantation commissary at inflated prices. Add in rental fees for equipment and fertilizer, and most croppers were locked into an endless cycle of debt, which many would sing about in field hollers to soothe the pain. Those hollers would evolve into something called the blues.