ROSEDALE – The Mississippi Blues Trail honored a Delta culinary favorite on Friday in Bolivar County, marking their first tribute celebrating a food item. The hot tamale was recognized as an official part of Mississippi’s blues heritage with an unveiling of the marker in front of the White Front Café at Main and Brown Streets in Rosedale.
MDA officials said hot tamales were immortalized in 1936 in the recording “They’re Red Hot,” where Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson employed the imagery of a tamale vendor to describe a woman. Made of corn meal and meat, the tamale was a staple in the diet of Mexican migrant laborers in the Delta and became a popular item of local cuisine. Some historians maintain that U.S. soldiers brought tamale recipes home with them from the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) or that tamales date back to indigenous American Indian cultures.
Hot tamales may seem an odd food to encounter in the Mississippi Delta, but their presence reflects the fact that the region has long been a cultural melting pot. Hundreds of years ago local Native Americans prepared a tamale-like dish of maize cooked in cornhusks, and in the late 1800s and early 1900s the culinary traditions of Anglo- and African-Americans in the Delta were complemented by the foodways of newly arrived immigrants of Lebanese, Chinese and Italian origin. By the 1920s, many African-American agricultural workers had left the Delta for points north, and planters responded by recruiting Mexican laborers, who generally only stayed through the harvesting season. Another wave of Mexican migration to the Delta came with the onset of World War II, when the federal government started the Bracero Program to regulate and address labor shortages resulting from many local workers being drafted or having moved north to work in wartime industry jobs.
The tamale was likely introduced to many Delta residents via the first wave of Mexican migration, but it was soon adapted to local tastes via countless variations. Whereas tamales in Mexico are usually steamed, tamales in the Delta are often simmered and served with the cooking water.
In nearby Helena, Ark., the Sicilian St. Columbia family altered the recipe to incorporate traditional Italian meats and spices.
A major appeal of the tamale to laborers was that they would stay warm during the day because they were wrapped in cornhusks and bundled tightly. Tamales were initially sold by street vendors and later from stands, groceries, restaurants and blues clubs including Ruby’s Nite Spot in Leland.
In addition to Robert Johnson’s song, later covered by artists including Johnny Shines and Cassandra Wilson, tamale imagery was featured in early blues recordings “Molly Man” by Moses “Old Man Mose” Mason (1928) and “Hot Tamale Molly” by Lucille Hegamin (1925). Library of Congress folklorist Herbert Halpert also recorded street vendor F. W. Lindsey in Greenville in 1939.
Mexican music may not have had a strong direct relationship with blues, though early Texas bluesmen probably saw parallels between themselves and the Mexican street singer, the trovador or guitarerro. Latin music more generally played a significant role in the development of the blues.
Jelly Roll Morton spoke of the “Latin tinge” that helped shape blues and jazz in New Orleans. The habanera rhythm appears in the 1914 composition “St. Louis Blues” by W. C. Handy, who had visited Cuba with a minstrel troupe around 1900. In the post-WWII years, Latin music had a strong influence on rhythm & blues, as evidenced by the Afro-Cuban clave rhythm in the music of Bo Diddley and the rumba and mambo rhythms in songs by Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, B. B. King, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed.
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