B.B. King lit out for Memphis after a runaway tractor tore off its exhaust pipe while being put in the shed. The museum devotes floor space to an exhibit on the tractor, including photographs of the plantation owner, Johnson Barrett. The exhibit, like most contemporary museums, nudges you to walk along the section. Terminating the tractor story stands, almost like a supermarket end cap, a display of a tractor exhaust, its muffler at adult eye height.

Many of the museum and visitor center displays describing post-reconstruction life up to the Civil Rights movement focus, appropriately, on the Black sharecropper and the cotton economy. The general theme is that in many ways little changed after slavery. The workers were indebted to the landowners, the laws would limit their freedom to move on, their society was segregated. They did get wages, although meager, and owed most to the plantation store. Their life was little different from the White Appalachian coal miners whose company towns made them pay rent, buy with scrip at the company store, and always be in debt. In Mississippi, paternalism, such as Flake Cartledge, buying Riley King (his birth name) his first guitar, but deducting it from his wages, continued and perhaps made a difference in the two hardscrabble worlds. 

American slavery expanded because of technology, thanks to Eli Whitney and his cotton gin. His invention was supposedly motivated to move beyond slavery by mechanizing the separation of the fibre from the seeds in the cotton boll. The invention had the opposite effect. Now that producing cotton free of seeds for the spinning factories was no longer a constraint, slaves were now needed to handpick the cotton to feed the gins to feed the factories to make the thread for other factories to make into cloth — “Oh my, why of why did I swallow the fly? I guess I’ll die.”

Technological determinism, that the technology always moves humanity forward and in looking backwards was always inevitable, like an evolutionary thread that could not have been interrupted, is a hallmark of the United States. Britain had its flirtation, and its counter-revolution with the Luddites, but in America, it has completely taken hold. In commerce and national statistics, it becomes: productivity. The gold mine for increasing wage earners’ output without an increase in time or pay. It has accelerated with digital technologies and become part of life with hacks that include even minimizing the need for sleep. 

B.B. King’s tractor story holds a special key. He was deferred from the World War II draft as too important a laborer as a tractor driver to serve on the battlefield. But more importantly, his tractor driving freed up other laborers to become those needed soldiers. The tractor would become the new gin in the cotton economy, but this time, instead of requiring additional labor, it would dispose of that labor. In the late forties, International Harvester developed a commercially viable mechanical cotton picker, ending fieldwork. By 1950, a mechanical cotton picker harvested as much cotton in an hour as fifty hands. No longer was labor needed. Technology made the slave system, unfilled promise created its antecedent, the sharecropper, and technology put that system to rest. But what of the people? A common story is the Great Migration, with the pull of better jobs in urban centers. But there was also the push of unemployment and loss of a way of life as mechanized agriculture displaced people. The music museums track that migration with Memphis Blues — Delta-style picking, Saint Louis Blues — adding horns from New Orleans, Chicago — going electric, and Detroit — giving a boisterous voice. All boasted their unique styles. 

* B.B. King is the true gentleman. So the story about the broken tractor continues with B.B.’s year in Memphis. It learned him that he needed to know lots more about playing before becoming a recording artist. He returned. Worked off the debt for the damage done to the tractor, and returned to Memphis, confident that he could take on the music world. Fairy stories still come true.