Freedom Village, a rural community founded as a refuge for displaced agricultural workers and later incorporated in 1970 after African American families moved to the site in 1966 to build a self-sustaining community, was the home of the first Mississippi Delta Blues Festival on October 21, 1978. The festival grew from the Civil Rights movement through the Delta Arts Project of Greenville-based M.A.C.E., founded in 1967, and was conceived by Charles Bannerman and Kay Morgan to honor a musical form born in the Mississippi Delta cottonfields and shaped by workers and their hardships. The first event, staged on a flatbed trailer for about 3,500 people, featured mostly traditional artists including Big Joe Williams, Furry Lewis, James “Son” Thomas, Sam Chatmon, R.L. Burnside, Eugene Powell, Jack Owens, Bud Spires, and Joe Willie Wilkins, with Bobby Ray Watson, Worth Long, and Alan Lomax as emcees. Under the direction of Malcom Walls and others, the festival soon drew tens of thousands of visitors from around the world and expanded to include performers such as Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Milton, Johnnie Taylor, Tyrone Davis, Bobby Rush, and Lynn White, while also providing a platform for many Greenville-area artists. In 1987 the festival moved to a location closer to Greenville.
