In Robert Johnson’s 1936 recording “They’re Red Hot,” tamale-vendor imagery was used to describe a woman, reflecting how hot tamales had become part of Delta life through the region’s cultural diversity. Made of corn meal and meat, tamales were a staple for Mexican migrant laborers in the Delta and became popular local cuisine, though some historians trace tamale recipes brought home by U.S. soldiers from the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 or to older indigenous American Indian food traditions. Local Native Americans had long prepared a tamale-like maize dish cooked in cornhusks, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Delta foodways were further shaped by Anglo-Americans, African Americans, and immigrants of Lebanese, Chinese, and Italian origin. By the 1920s, after many African-American agricultural workers had left the Delta for northern destinations, planters recruited Mexican laborers for harvest seasons, and another wave of Mexican migration came with World War II through the Bracero Program, created to address labor shortages caused by military drafting and wartime migration. Although likely introduced to the area by Mexican laborers, the tamale was quickly embraced by African Americans and endured in the Delta through family tradition, public demand, and necessity. Delta tamales, unlike the usually steamed tamales of Mexico, were often simmered and served with their cooking water, with many variations, including a Sicilian family recipe in Helena, Arkansas, that used traditional Italian meats and spices. Their appeal to laborers included the way cornhusk wrapping kept them warm through the day, and they were first sold by street vendors and later at stands, groceries, restaurants, and blues clubs such as Ruby’s Nite Spot in Leland. Tamales also appeared repeatedly in blues and related music, including Robert Johnson’s “They’re Red Hot,” Moses “Old Man Mose” Mason’s “Molly Man,” Lucille Hegamin’s “Hot Tamale Molly,” and F. W. Lindsey’s “Hot Tamales (Street Vendor’s Cry),” recorded in Greenville in 1939 by folklorist Herbert Halpert. While Mexican music may not have had a strong direct relationship with blues, early Texas bluesmen likely recognized parallels with Mexican street singers, and Latin music more broadly helped shape the blues and jazz, from Jelly Roll Morton’s “Latin tinge” and the habanera rhythm in W. C. Handy’s 1914 “St. Louis Blues” to the post-World War II influence of Afro-Cuban clave, rumba, and mambo rhythms on rhythm and blues performers including Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed.