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Rollin’ on the river: How the Mississippi flows through song and still inspires today

By: Madeline Heim ／ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

25 October 2024 at 14:00

A red-haired dog lies on the floor as a band plays in the background.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Big Blue Sky members Sophia Landis, left, Jon Stravers, Folko Landvogt and Jason McCullick perform “Water Song” during a Sept. 13 music cruise on the Mississippi River between Marquette, Iowa, and Prairie du Chien, Wis. (Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

It was just before sunset on the Mississippi River, the day’s last bits of golden light dancing on the water, when four members of the band Big Blue Sky picked up their instruments for one of their defining songs.

During the summer, the group plays Friday nights for Maiden Voyage Tours, a northeast Iowa riverboat company. Its 40-some passengers that evening had been sharing bottles of wine and hearing tales of Mississippi River history as they cruised along, speedboats occasionally racing by on either side.

Then the boat captain pulled over to an island and cut the motor. It was time for the water song.

Moving and unforgettable, “Water Song” urges listeners to think about how they treat the natural resource, so vital for life on Earth. The tune was written in 2015 and came together in minutes, recalled Big Blue Sky singers and songwriters Jon Stravers and Sophia Landis. Much of the group’s music is about the river and the surrounding region, a place of curiosity, adventure and solace for Stravers and his late son, Jon-Jon.

Big Blue Sky’s work adds to a centuries-long tradition of music inspired and transported by the Mississippi River. The river’s role as a major shipping artery and a force of nature, as well as its historical and cultural significance to the nation, make it an easy thing to write about. And riverboats not altogether different from this one carried songs north and south, spreading jazz and the Delta blues across the heart of the country.

Most importantly, the music describes people’s personal connections to the river — something intensely evident in Stravers’ words on the boat.

In song, he and Landis rhapsodized. In speaking, he kept it simple: “This is a good stretch of the river. It’s important. And people love it.”

Mississippi River moved and shaped jazz, Delta blues

Perhaps no style of music is as intertwined with the Mississippi River as the Delta blues, rooted in the musical traditions of enslaved Black Americans who were forced to work long hours in the fields of the Mississippi Delta region. Though slavery had technically ended, many Black Americans remained in unfair and oppressive working conditions at the turn of the 20th century.

Unlike gospel music sung in church, blues reflected their real lives and real feelings, said Maie Smith, group tour manager and operations manager at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

“Delta blues music is a music that works from the heart to the outside,” Smith said. “It starts with your most inner being and helps to lift you up and rise you above whatever circumstances you were in.”

Lots of Delta blues musicians worked on the river, Smith said, including those forced to build levees to protect fields from floodwaters. They endured the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which killed upwards of a thousand people and displaced almost 640,000 people from Illinois to Louisiana. Many songs were written about this historic disaster and other river floods, including Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” Barbecue Bob’s “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” and Big Bill Broonzy’s “Southern Flood Blues.”

A woman in a black short-sleeved shirt plays a flute-like instrument in the foreground. A man in a purple shirt plays the guitar. — Big Blue Sky member Sophia Landis plays a Native American-style flute during a Sept. 13 music cruise on the upper Mississippi River. (Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

But the river also provided opportunities for blues musicians to travel, taking their songs with them. Blues and later jazz music came north to Memphis, Kansas City and Chicago, building a following and mixing with other music styles. Today, blues riffs underpin much of American popular music, Smith said, like rock and roll and hip hop.

Music was moving on the Mississippi even before then — during the so-called “golden age of steamboats” in the 19th century. Thousands of steamboats traveled the river and its major tributaries during that time, said Steve Marking, a river historian and guest performer for American Cruise Lines on its Mississippi River cruises.

The boats took on passengers as well as freight, and companies sought to hire the best musicians to entice people to pay to board, Marking said. Later, even influential jazz musician Louis Armstrong performed for a few years on the Streckfus Steamboat Line.

Other forms of music that arose and were popularized on the river include ragtime in St. Louis and river folk music that featured banjo, fiddle and percussion. Dixieland, a form of jazz, and country music also owe a debt to the river.

Two hands hold a cellphone that is recording musicians playing on a boat. — A man records a video of music group Big Blue Sky performing during a Sept. 13 music cruise on the upper Mississippi River. (Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Why capture the Mississippi River in song?

Rivers in general “have inspired almost as many songs as love,” Marking said.

Many people have some sort of connection with them, whether it’s traveling them by boat or simply watching them run. Marking pointed to the song “Watchin’ the River Go By,” by John Hartford, which depicts two people who get together each night on the porch to watch the Ohio River. It’s an experience anyone, young or old, can relate to, he said (well, maybe not completely — the people in the song do so in the nude).

But more than lakes, forests or prairies, rivers are captured in song over and over again. Why?

It could be their heavy symbolism. For Marking, rivers signify the passage of time, reminding us of our journey through life.

“If you’re standing on the shore,” he said, “upstream is the past, downstream is the future.”

People sitting on a boat clap their hands. — Audience members applaud music group Big Blue Sky during a Sept. 13 music cruise on the Mississippi River. (Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Rivers also make a connection — between places, or even between the past and the future.

The musicians who still travel the river today are helping make that connection, Marking said, including the ones who make up Big Blue Sky. He described taking the boat tour and listening to them play “Water Song” as “one of the top five events of my entire life.”

It’s easy to see why. The group’s music both honors the river’s musical traditions and adds something new: an eye toward its ecological importance. In between songs, passengers got to hear about Stravers’ decades of bird research on this stretch of the river, including monitoring of the cerulean warbler, one of the rarest nesting warblers in Iowa. They stopped to watch a beaver on an island waddle through the sand to make his way back to the water. And they were granted what the captain called one of the best sunsets of the summer: a bright, show-stopping pink.

Though most of their songs evolve over time, Stravers said, “Water Song” pretty much gets played the same every time. The exception is in his echo to Landis’s main melody, where he regularly inserts the name of whatever water body they’re playing on to remind listeners they need it to live.

Sacred Mississippi River water, indeed.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Rollin’ on the river: How the Mississippi flows through song and still inspires today is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds in Iowa and Wisconsin

Wisconsin Watch

By: Madeline Heim ／ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Frank Vaisvilas ／ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

23 October 2024 at 11:30

A woman in a park ranger-like uniform stands between two logs and a river next to a small green hillside.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The Sny Magill Unit of Effigy Mounds National Monument near Clayton, Iowa, is a hidden wonder.

A dozen miles downstream from the park’s visitor center along the Mississippi River, the path starts with a turn you might miss if you’re not looking closely. Follow that path under a railroad bridge to a boat landing, then go by foot through the woods until the floodplain opens out flat in front of you, revealing more than 100 sacred mounds built by Native Americans thousands of years ago.

These ceremonial and burial mounds are one of the densest collections still existing in North America. It’s clear the people who built them had a special connection to the river valley cradled between the bluffs of the Driftless region and wanted to add their own features to it, said park superintendent Susan Snow.

Today, though, that river has significantly eroded the bank they built on, eating away at some of the mounds at the water’s edge.

It’s a product both of climate change, which is causing wetter conditions across the upper Midwest, and engineered alterations to the river’s flow. There’s now an urgent need to protect the mounds from further damage, Snow said. A multimillion-dollar bank stabilization project proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could accomplish that.

Since mounds should not be rebuilt by modern hands, once they’re gone, they’re gone, said Sunshine Thomas Bear, tribal historic preservation officer for the Winnebago Nation of Nebraska, who are descended from the mound builders.

“All we can do is try to save what we can,” she said.

Fast-flowing Mississippi River causing mound erosion

Nineteen tribal nations are affiliated with the mounds that make up the Sny Magill Unit, including the Ho-Chunk Nation, which has a strong presence in Wisconsin.

“The area itself is part of our homeland,” Bear said. “Our connection to these lands goes back thousands of years.”

Bear said the area around Effigy Mounds National Monument used to have more ancient Indigenous mounds, but many were destroyed in the last 150 years by developers as towns were built. And many other mounds were destroyed in the last century by amateur archaeologists who desecrated the burial mounds and stole artifacts and human remains.

Most of the approximately 106 mounds that are part of the Sny Magill Unit are conical — or round — which are likely burial mounds, said Sheila Oberreuter, the park’s museum technician. Others are effigy mounds taking the shapes of birds and bears. It’s likely that ancient people returned to the area for hundreds, if not thousands, of years for mound building during the Woodland period, Oberreuter said, which occurred between 2,500 and 900 years ago.

Because it is low-lying, the land on which the mounds were built floods seasonally when the Mississippi floods. Sometimes, the mounds themselves are completely underwater, Oberreuter said — something that would seem unbelievable while walking among them, if not for visible high-water marks on nearby trees.

A woman in a park ranger-like uniform points next to a mound in a green and wooded area. — Museum technician Sheila Oberreuter walks along mounds in September 2024 in the Sny Magill Unit of Effigy Mounds National Monument near Clayton, Iowa. (Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

The serene backwater adjacent to the mounds is connected to the Mississippi River’s main channel by Johnson Slough. In recent decades, more water has rushed through the slough and hit the river bank, which Snow estimated has eroded the bank by five to 10 feet since the 1940s.

That’s happening in part because of the construction of the lock and dam system on the upper Mississippi River during the 1930s, which transformed the way the river ran to make shipping easier. By converting the free-flowing river into a series of pools, the lock and dam system causes consistent high water levels in some areas. On top of that, heavier rainfall and more severe, longer-lasting flooding events driven by climate change caused more water to move through the upper Mississippi in the last few decades.

Notes from park staff as early as the 1980s mention mound erosion, Snow said, with the first project proposed to stop it in 1994. Wooden support beams were placed along the bank, but were washed out. Reinforcing those beams didn’t work either. In 2022, large logs made of coconut fiber were placed along the parts of the bank experiencing the worst erosion. The following spring, the river saw near-record flooding, and many of those logs were swept from the bank immediately.

Army Corps project would stabilize bank with 2,000-foot rock berm

As park staff considered a more permanent solution, they were approached by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has managed the Mississippi River for decades and recently unlocked a new pool of money that funds ecosystem improvements along the river in addition to improvements to navigation for shipping.

The Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, or NESP, as it’s commonly called, also supports the protection of cultural resources along the river, said Jill Bathke, lead planner of the program. The Sny Magill project would be the first to access it for that protection.

After consulting with tribal officials, the Army Corps put forth a proposed fix: a 2,000-foot-long berm the height of the floodplain, made of large rocks. The corps would place sand scraped out of the main channel behind the rock wall as an added barrier between the water and the mounds. The berm would be designed with current and future climate conditions in mind, Bathke said, a long-term solution to stop the erosion.

Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as are William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, including removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.

Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.

But, she pointed out, “the bank is (already) no longer what it was.”

Logs are lined up between a green, grassy area and a sandy area next to a river. — Coir logs filled with coconut fiber are shown in the Sny Magill Unit of Effigy Mounds National Monument along the Mississippi River near Clayton, Iowa. The logs were placed as a temporary fix to prevent the river from eroding the nearby mounds. (Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Construction of the rock berm should begin in 2026. As they build, they’ll have to take care not to harm a population of federally protected freshwater mussels that live buried in the sand at the river bottom. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the land around the Sny Magill Unit and Johnson Slough as part of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, will help with that.

When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.

The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.

For Bear, that education is key to the mounds’ survival. She believes many of those who visit leave with a better understanding of the mounds, and why they need to be protected.

The Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds in Iowa and Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.