The great Mississippi River flood of 1927 inundated much of the Delta after a levee broke 2-3/4 miles west of this site on April 21, 1927, near Mounds Landing, where water poured through a half-mile-wide crevasse and within ten days covered a million acres with ten feet of water, displaced thousands of people, and destroyed the cotton sharecroppers’ tenant shacks on the Delta and Pine Land Company property here. Blues singers responded powerfully to this disaster and to other river floods, with Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere – Part I” and Barbecue Bob’s “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues” portraying the 1927 flood, while Big Bill Broonzy, who claimed Scott as his hometown, told vivid stories of how the flood devastated and disrupted his family and thousands of others. Recording companies sought flood songs in the aftermath, and blues recordings from the following years addressed the flood’s destruction and human loss, with some also alluding to the social injustices faced by African Americans who were forced to labor on levees and live in refugee camps. Broonzy, whose real name was Lee Bradley, was born near Lake Dick, Arkansas, outside Pine Bluff, on June 26, 1903, later moved to Chicago in the 1920s, became one of the most popular blues musicians of the 1930s and ’40s, mentored Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Memphis Slim, influenced British musicians including Eric Clapton and Ray Davies through his European tours of the 1950s, published his autobiography Big Bill Blues in 1955, spoke out against racial inequality in works including “Black, Brown and White,” took part in the landmark album Blues in the Mississippi Night with John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson and Memphis Slim, died in Chicago on August 15, 1958, and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980.