That’s in Sharkey County, the lower quarter of the Mississippi Delta. Rolling Fork was where the train stopped, where Muddy’s family would get their mail and do their shopping. Rolling Fork was on the map. But Muddy’s actual birthplace is to the west and north of there, in the next county over — Issaquena, pronounced “Essaquena,” the initial “e” the only thing soft in this hard land. Berta Grant, Muddy’s mother, lived next to the Cottonwood Plantation, at a bend in the road known as Jug’s Corner. It was a tiny settlement in the shadow of the Mississippi’s levee, a cluster of shacks and cabins undistinguished from most others in the Mississippi Delta. Among locals, however, Jug’s Corner was well known: they had the fish fries on Saturday nights. At Jug’s Corner, and throughout the Delta, farmhands partied on the weekend because they’d survived another week, because the land didn’t swallow them, the river didn’t drink them, the boss man didn’t kill them, and the mud, a half step from the dust and ashes from whence they came, did not engulf them.
