“I was raised in Money, Mississippi. My dad was a sharecropper, and I helped him pick cotton. He also had side hustles to support his nine kids. One of those hustles was making moonshine and selling it to juke joints. My job was filling the containers with water–moonshine took a lot of water.

Dad moved to Baptist Town, one of the only places Blacks could live in Greenwood. Robert Johnson and Honey Boy Edwards lived and played the blues here. Dad sold moonshine to the juke joints they played in.

I grew up surrounded by history and the blues but didn’t know some of it until I went to college. People didn’t talk about the murder of Emmitt Till in Money; I didn’t know what happened until I went to Mississippi Delta Community College in 1975–learned it’s important to keep sharing the stories.

My wife and I had this house in Baptist Town and opened the Back in the Day Museum to show how African Americans lived from 1871 to 1971 in Greenwood. This is how their home would look, smell, and feel. Items in the museum are what folks left behind before moving north for better lives. We have Bibles, tools, and lots of records. There was always music. The blues was a tonic: whatever ills you, blues heals you. Look at the sewing machine with the colorful thread. The first person who used it was probably happy to get a new sewing machine to make clothes for her family. The last person was probably thankful not to use it anymore, buying clothes instead of making them.

I’ve been doing blues and civil rights tours for forty years, talking about music and history. Civil rights. Voting rights. Human rights. Everything came through the Delta. A lot of things happening here are happening in other places around the world, and we need to teach the kids. My granddaughter won an award for writing about the history of the Mississippi Delta and about me bringing ghosts to life. That’s what this is, bringing dead people back and showing what part they played in our lives.”

Sylvester (Delta Blues Legends and Civil Rights Tours)

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