Mississippi Catfish: Blues Musician Video (DVD)

This 20-minute video examines the life and times of a little-known blues singer called Mississippi Catfish. He’s an 83-year old man who grew up in the poverty stricken African-American communities of the Mississippi Delta region as the son of a sharecropper. As such, the documentary illustrates the life of the people in the area over the lifespan of Catfish, especially during the desolation during the economic depression in the 1930s. Catfish plays harmonica and sings, and the DVD gives viewers a glimpse of his talent, heretofore unrecorded, though the singer and the documentary’s producers claim that Catfish made several recordings before he quit singing the blues in the 1940s. The documentary can be an enlightening look at the kind of lifestyle that inspired the more famous blues musicians to come out of the Mississippi Delta, like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson.