Mechanization of agriculture was a major factor behind the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities because it reduced the need for manual laborers. At the Hopson Planting Company, engineers from the International Harvester Company tested and developed tractor-mounted cotton pickers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and in 1944 the company produced the first cotton crop to be entirely planted, harvested, and baled by machine. Cotton and the blues were closely connected in the Delta, where many African Americans labored in cotton cultivation; fieldhands who could play guitar or piano entertained other workers, and some turned to music professionally to escape the backbreaking work, with performers recalling that a Saturday night of playing could pay more than a week of field labor. In the 1940s, blues pianist Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins worked at Hopson as a tractor driver while also performing professionally, appearing in local jukes with Lee Kizart and Robert Nighthawk and on the weekday 12:15 p.m. radio program King Biscuit Time on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, with Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, Rice Miller, when agricultural workers were home eating lunch. Perkins remembered John Lee Hooker sometimes playing at Hopson and later taught Ike Turner to play piano. According to military records, Perkins was inducted into the Army in June 1943, but he recalled that plantation owners removed him from a bus of draftees because tractor drivers were considered essential to the war effort; other bluesmen who served as tractor drivers during World War II included B.B. King, Son House, and Muddy Waters. As a tractor driver, Perkins took part in the mechanization that soon spread across the South, bringing changes such as the replacement of sharecropping with wage labor and the destruction of abandoned homes of displaced workers. After leaving the Delta in the late 1940s, Perkins spent many years playing with Earl Hooker, Muddy Waters, and others, then began returning after appearing at the first King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena in 1986; he became a regular there and at Hopson, where an annual celebration in his honor began in 2001, and he was also honored in his hometown of Belzoni in 2008.
