By Blog Author Anita Havens

A collection of poems and the authentic Depression Era photographs that inspired them. All of the photographs were taken in the South by the FSA between 1935 and 1944 and are in the public domain. The pictures captured the hard life that gave birth to The Blues in poignant, still images.

This book came together so easily. I would search the FSA website, and each new photograph brought back old stories told by my grandparents. The poems came so quickly, sometimes in the middle of the night. I would get up from bed and jot them down on a paper towel–afraid that I would forget them before morning.

My mother’s father, Warren Cowsert, was half American Indian. He was also a sharecropper and farmed part of the bottomland in O’Tuckolofa bottom near Paris, Mississippi. His father helped clear the virgin forest in the Mississippi flatlands near Pontotoc. Pappaw grew up poor. One time he told me, “Honey, if the Good Lord offered to let me go ’round again, I’d just have to tell him ‘No thank you!’ ”

Pappaw told me that when he was a child, the old houses they lived in were so poorly build that he would wake up many a winter morning to find a dusting of snow on the bed quilts where it had blown in through cracks in the walls.

Another story he told was about his grandmother. She lived with them and helped take care of the house-full of kids. She was part Cherokee and part Creek Indian. Her husband had fought in the Mexican War, and she drew a small pension check from him. Pappaw said he thought they would have starved to death had it not been for that check.

He said he would wake up in the middle of the night to the whirr of their old spinning wheel. His grandmother, Mary Elizabeth, would be spinning yarn to make socks for the family. Pappaw said once a week they would wake up to find a clean pair of socks at the foot of each bed.

You can read a sample of THAT’S WHY WE SANG THE BLUES here.

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Here is a link to the book–THAT’S WHY WE SANG THE BLUES