Lula was an important center of Mississippi blues, associated with performers including Charley Patton, Son House, Frank Frost, and Sam Carr. In 1930, Patton and House met in Lula while Patton was living with Lula vocalist Bertha Lee Pate, and Patton, House, Willie Brown, Louise Johnson, and the Delta Big Four traveled from Lula to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount. Among the songs recorded that year, Patton’s “Dry Well Blues” and House’s “Dry Spell Blues” addressed the severe Delta drought, with Patton’s song focusing specifically on the hardships it brought to Lula’s citizens. Patton also referenced Lula in “Dry Well Blues” and “Stone Pony Blues,” and Bertha Lee later sang of “livin’ at Lula town” in “Mind Reader Blues.” In the 1960s and ’70s, Lula’s blues scene gained new energy through the band known variously as Frank Frost and the Nighthawks, the Jelly Roll Kings, and the Little Sam Carr Rhythm and Blues Revue, featuring Frost, Carr, Big Jack Johnson, and for several years Arthur Williams. Frost lived in Lula, and the group performed at Joe’s Place in Lula and Conway’s on Moon Lake, while manager Lee Bass helped secure recording opportunities in the 1960s. Together or individually, Frost, Carr, and Johnson toured internationally and recorded albums, and Frost later appeared in the 1986 film Crossroads. The Lula area also included blues and gospel performers living on nearby plantations, and in 1942 Roxie Threadgill and Mary Johnson recorded on the Mohead plantation for a Fisk University-Library of Congress project. Later local musical connections included John Mohead, who named his first CD Lula City Limits, and a casino that opened in 1994 with blues as a theme and later sponsored regional blues and gospel festivals.
