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The real story, however, is what this is doing to the Mississippi river basin. Thankfully, we are protected by the best levees in the Valley (northern Delta counties), which did not even fail in 1927 (Cleveland hasn’t been flooded by the River since 1903!), so unless there is an earthquake, we should be all right.

Michael Loyd Young, documents the 150 miles of Highway 61, the famed blacktop road snaking from Memphis, TN down to Greenville, MS. At the halfway point, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, sits Clarksdale, MS, the city considered the birthplace of the blues and the location of Robert Johnson’s famed “Cross Road Blues” intersection of Highway 61 and 49. The Delta has been home to blues legends such as Charley Patton, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Cadillac John Nolden, B.B. King, T-Model Ford, Mississippi Slim, Big Jack Johnson, and Willie King, among countless others whose music has become the glue that holds these communities together as they struggle to survive.

The river was up 40 feet at the Greenville Bridge by the time we got there – swelled by the normal snowmelt in many of the 37 States and 2 Canadian provinces that drain into it and also from the floodwaters that flowed down from the Cumberland River that had trashed Nashville, Tennessee a couple of weeks ago – all of this made for some exciting canoeing – with many of the sandbars and islands under water.