It’s not just any old day that you meet a legendary Norwegian blues singer on the campus of Mississippi Valley State University.
But on Monday, in Dr. Sade Turnipseed’s history class, Rita Engedalen, winner of the 2012 European Blues Challenge and a notable folk singer in her native Norway, belted out a Janis Joplin-style “Trouble in Mind” that rocked the house.
Engedalen and Helene Brekke, director of the Telemark Gallery and Museum in Notodden, Norway, stopped at Valley to talk about how the legacy of Mississippi Delta blues has spread to northern Europe and beyond.
The women have been in Mississippi since Friday, talking with artists and musicians about an exhibition they will be staging at Brekke’s gallery during the 2016 Notodden Blues Festival.
The festival is the biggest in Europe, and 25,000 to 30,000 audience members are expected this year. An annual event with a 30-year history, it has hosted many Mississippi bluesmen and women.
The Notodden-Delta connection is well established: Clarksdale and the Norwegian town of 12,000 are sister cities, and Engedalen has played at the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival and recorded in Clarksdale. Turnipseed, formerly education director of the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, attended the festival a few years back.
In 2012, a Mississippi Blues Trail marker was placed in Notodden for the 30th anniversary of the festival there. It was the first marker on the trail to be put up outside the United States.
At the Telemark Museum exhibition, “Blues in Art,” Brekke hopes to show photographs and artistic representations of Mississippi that highlight the connection between labor, economics and the blues, to mirror the story of industry and economic collapse in Notodden.
Engedalen explained to students that Notodden is the blues city of Norway because of its unique history.
“Notodden was created when its industry began 100 years ago,” Engedalen said. The town’s production of artificial fertilizer from nitrogen in the air, an agricultural breakthrough developed to help feed the world, supported it for many years.
In the 1980s, production shut down and most of the town’s residents were unemployed, Engedalen said. That was when the people of Notodden began to explore and appreciate the blues musical form of the American South.
“I was born in that town, and when people lost their jobs, I was one of their children,” Engedalen said.
In 2015, Notodden, about a two-hour bus ride from Oslo, was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites for its industrial history.
“It’s important for humankind to take care of its historic places, to not forget,” Engedalen said.
After a long period of economic depression and high unemployment, Notodden is seeing some of its pride returning, in large part because of the success of the blues festival, she said.
“Everybody in Norway knows Notodden is the blues capital,” she said.
Both Brekke and Engedalen hope to strengthen the cultural exchange between their industrial Norwegian city and the Delta, where the blues narrative started in the cotton fields, and before that with rhythms from Africa.
For the students gathered Monday, the take-home message was that the culture of the Mississippi Delta is so far-reaching that it made it all the way to Norway — and that the blues are universal.
Engedalen played and sang a blues gospel song she wrote, a lament for the tragic day in 2011 when Anders Breivik assassinated 93 Norwegians, most of them young people.
Engedalen asked the Valley students to join in on the chorus. The mournful tone was familiar, and the chorus, with its rising chord progression and voices swelling, sounded like hope, like Sunday morning in the Delta.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
