The B.B. King Day Symposium at Mississippi Valley State University is intended to mix and mesh musical and cultural traditions with the blues as its foundation.
This year’s symposium, to be held Thursday, is no exception.
“Suffering Songs: The Blues Identity of Native and African American People and Their Struggles” will draw on a shared heritage of oppression and suffering to make some beautiful and uniquely American music together.
The founder and director of the symposium, Dr. Alphonso Sanders, chairman of MVSU’s Department of Fine Arts and director of the B.B. King Recording Studio at MVSU, hopes to illuminate and explore links between Native Americans and African-Americans as seen, experienced and linked through the blues.
Sanders said the idea came to him initially at the end of last year’s symposium, a musical revival of producers, performers and promoters celebrating the history of the Chitlin’ Circuit in American music.
Sanders said that event was attended by a number of Native Americans.
“As I was talking to them, they started sharing why they are drawn to the blues,” Sanders said. “It became clear that the sufferings of the two are the same.”
Sanders began researching rhythmic aspects of African drumming, Native American drumming and the rhythms that drove the blues to a hybrid genre, rhythm and blues, or R&B.
A conversation with Guelel Kumba, a Senegalese musician living in Oxford, affirmed the mix of cultures and sounds inherent in Mississippi blues.
“Kumba said he heard the music of African-Americans before coming to the United States but never made the connection with the native sounds of his country until he got to Mississippi. He said he saw the thread that tied him to the country blues of Mississippi.”
Butch Mudbone, a Seneca Indian musician who has performed with many blues greats, including B.B. King, was also at last year’s symposium.
He introduced Sanders to a blues festival in Ithaca, New York, organized by Native Americans, and led him to learn about other Native American blues musicians.
Tribal dance and Mississippi native people from the Choctaw nation soon became part of the program through their ambassadors, such as William Dan “Swift Eagle” Isaac, who will be a presenter at this year’s symposium.
“Swift Eagle led me to Harold Comby, a tribal elder, which led to Mark Howell at the Winterville Mounds. One thing led to another,” Sanders said. The Winterville Mounds site near Greenville is a 42-acre site of prehistoric Native American ceremonial activity.
The melding of rhythm, historic suffering, dance, human connection and lots of good music will start at 9 a.m. and extend through the day at the Social Sciences Building auditorium on the Valley campus, and the public is encouraged to attend.
From the plantation to the reservation, common threads will be drawn through musical expression.
“Once you get everybody together at this symposium, they make one big musical sound,” Sanders said. “Their friendship and their connections are evident. They are so glad to be together, which rarely happens in the entertainment world.”
Sanders said the event has turned out to be, in a way, like B.B. King’s homecoming celebrations in Indianola, and they reflect King’s wide span of musical influences and interest.
“Our first symposium paid tribute to B.B., just after he died,” Sanders said. “That spawned interest in jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and the blues influence on their music.
“That led to honoring the musicians of the Chitlin’ Circuit and now to this.”
Red, black and blues might well be the symposium’s theme. It’s an American mix that emerged from this Mississippi homeland with its rich cultural heritage and will see new life on the campus of Mississippi Valley State University this Thursday.
For a full schedule of symposium events, visit the B.B King Recording Studio’s Facebook page or the university website at www.mvsu.edu.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
