For me, the first emotional hit of the inauguration ceremony was hearing Aretha Franklin sing “My Country ’Tis Of Thee,” with the gospel chorus swelling up in the background. When she sang “land where my fathers died,” I wondered about that line and what it meant in terms of Aretha’s American ancestry.

It turns out that Aretha’s father, Clarence “C. L.” Franklin, was from Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the Delta, home of blues masters BB King and Charlie Patton (and also of Archie Manning, father of Eli and Peyton Manning).

In the days of Aretha’s father’s youth, there were only a few things a black man could do to make a living in the Delta, according to one historical account. As a black man, you could be a funeral director, since white funeral directors generally would not touch a black man’s body. If you had the talent, and a penchant for alcohol and hard living, you could be blues musician. At another end of the spectrum, you could be a preacher, if you had what it takes to build a congregation and hold an audience. Most Delta black men of C. L. Franklin’s generation were left with agricultural labor, such as picking cotton.

Like most of his contemporaries, C. L. started out in the cotton fields. He worked the fields, dreaming of other possibilities as he watched people headed north during the Great Migration. He wondered where they were going, and finally packed up and found his way to Memphis, which is the first stop north out of Mississippi. For C. L., it was the beginning of a journey that led to a long and successful life as a preacher, gospel singer, and civil-rights activist, mostly in Detroit.

We can be thankful that C. L. Franklin chose the path he did, for those choices created the environment in which Aretha grew to become the Queen of Soul.

What about Aretha’s other “fathers”— C.L.’s family and ancestors? Once he left the Delta, C. L. wouldn’t talk much about his life in Mississippi, but those who knew him suspected that there were wounds and scars there--the main ingredients of the blues. I couldn’t find specific family information, but Delta history is well-documented.

In early 20th-century Mississippi, as elsewhere, the Victrola was an up-and-coming thing, and offered a new way to experience music. Not every household could afford one, but if you didn’t own one, you could still buy records and bring them to the homes of your friends or relatives who did. You could bring along a covered dish, and spend a Saturday afternoon or evening taking turns winding up the Victrola and playing 78-rpm records. Such an event was called a Victrola party, and these social gatherings became a part of the cultural landscape of the time.

About the same time, there was another kind of party that was popular with many white people in the Delta. It was more of a public, outdoor affair, sometimes almost like a circus. Though sometimes fairly spontaneous, at other times it would be announced in advance in a local paper. Some events were even scheduled so that photographs taken there would be ready in time for an upcoming newspaper deadline. Some photographers sold postcards of these events, and you could buy these in local stores and mail them around the country.

These events were lynching parties, in which black men who had been accused of dubious crimes were hanged, tortured, or burned, in public, without benefit of trial, all for the entertainment of the good citizens of the Delta. Families brought their children, and picnic lunches.

But such an event wasn’t just for entertainment. It was also a warning to other black men: don’t step out of line, don’t show up to vote (let alone run for public office), don’t look directly at white women, don’t act fully human in any way that might imply equality.

Three states east of Mississippi, just 100 years ago, there was a United States Senator by the name of Benjamin Tillman who said, “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him." On hearing that then-President Theodore Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, Tillman is reputed to have said, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."

Across the Jim Crow South, lynching was just one of many ways to die an unnatural death. Sadly, many thousands of black men (and not a few women) died at the hands of Tillman and his comrades.

Ninety years after Tillman’s death, there are still those who would carry out his vision. But former Senator Barack Hussein Obama is now inviting people to dinner at the White House, and Aretha Franklin is singing “My Country ’Tis Of Thee” in an event celebrated around the world.

For Aretha—and the rest of us--the “land where my fathers died” ain’t what it used to be. Hallelujah.
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Two footnotes:
1. The title of Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking record, “Highway 61 Revisited,” refers to the road that roughly parallels the Mississippi River through the Delta, and was a primary route for the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and into the urban North. The road also runs near Dylan’s childhood home in Minnesota. That album includes the epic song “Desolation Row,” the first line of which is “They’re selling postcards of the hanging.” Such a postcard was once produced as far north as Duluth (Dylan’s birthplace), where three black circus workers were lynched in 1920 on allegations of rape of a white woman. The day after the mob lynching, a medical examination of the alleged victim found no evidence of assault. Though mob members were prosecuted, no one was ever convicted of murder in connection with the lynchings.

2. I’ve been to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and found that Delta history is very much alive, not so much in an in-your-face sort of way (at least not to a white passer-through), but in a steeped-into-the-woodwork and hovering-in-the-air sort of way. On my 2005 sojourn through the Delta, en route to Memphis, this song came to me out of that moist air:

Midnight, Mississippi, somewhere south of Rosedale
deep down in the Delta where the cotton still gins
Midnight, Mississippi, off Highway 49
the road snakes through from where the stories begin

you feel it all around you, but when you turn to look, it’s gone
still, you feel it breathing in your ear, hear it whispering
the way it’s talkin’ to me, there ain’t no way to make Memphis
no way to make Memphis by morning

mists of Mississippi drift up from Pontchartrain
they dance in the headlights and up where lightning burns
they crackle through the radio, tangle up the vines
disappear in daylight but they always will return

Mississippi steam rolls down from the porches
seeking to escape some antebellum ruin
it hangs in the cypress -- a faded, ragged flag
rises by the riverside and shimmers with the moon

mists of Mississippi: night-blooming dreams
they rise from the graveyards and ’round every bend
can’t keep ’em in no bottle; can’t drown ’em with no whiskey
but a bottleneck on steel’s bound to call them up again

you feel it all around you, but when you turn to look, it’s gone
still, you feel it breathing in your ear, hear it whispering
the way it’s callin’ me, there ain’t no way to make Memphis
no way to make Memphis by morning