Secret of the Mississippi: The River That Made America

It has brought great wealth to the country, making it the richest nation on earth. But great suffering and hardship too, making it in many ways the most impoverished. It is also a river which rocked a nation. The blues, rock and roll, gospel and jazz, they all flowed into America on the muddy waters of the Mississippi. And out again to the rest of the world as a revolution of song. Stars, spangles and suffering, the Mississippi made America what it is today. There's no place in the world like the Mississippi. It's a mysterious place, full of contrasts and paradox. North, south, black, white, poor and rich. And where music has always been played, even when there was very little to sing about. The story and song of Old Man River comes through in the voices of people such as David Honeyboy Edwards, who is the last living Delta bluesman. Reverend Noah Smith, who works all the hours God sends to find some hope for his dirt poor congregation. And Ellis Smith, the oldest survivor of the worst flood in American history. The Mississippi begins its journey in Lake Itasca and runs south for 3,700 kilometres before reaching the sea in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a river which dominates the whole of the American landscape. But it's the southern stretch, also known as the Lower Mississippi, which has dominated American culture and life. Our story starts here, where the pea-green flow of the Ohio merges with the muddier waters of the Mississippi. On this confluence lies the little town of Keru. There's no signpost or frontier fence, but this place marks the beginning of the Lower Mississippi, and also the border between America North and South. Today, Keru looks more like a film set from an old western than a place where people live and work. A modern-day ghost town, it's like many other places in the American South, where poverty is a killer disease, wiping out whole communities. In recent years, Keru's mainly black population has shrunk from 15,000 to less than 3,000, leaving it a city of abandoned buildings and dead hopes. There's no hospital here, no park, no restaurant. Drugs are common, and decay is dominant. This is Commercial Avenue, which would have been the major commerce centre throughout Keru's history. If I could travel back in time, I'd love to see it in different decades, like the 1880s and 90s, when the riverboats were plying this area, into the 30s, when the blues first started migrating northward. It had to be just a magnificent, multicultural, fun, exciting place. Stace England is a local musician who grew up not far from Keru. He's always been fascinated with this place, and has spent many years here researching and writing songs about its rich past. It's hard to believe that this place used to be one of the busiest and richest ports in the country. But something happened here to make Keru's wealth disappear in recent years. This building was a bar, Duke's Bar, which opened in 1933 and just closed a couple of years ago, which broke my heart. I loved that place. That was my office in Keru during my research. A bar here, the Fat Boys, has always been a bar for many, many, many years, and changed hands and names. There's a very famous neon maker here in Keru, and most of the signs were in neon, so in the 40s you would have seen this place blinking and lighting up like Las Vegas, basically, as you walked around. So it's very emotional for me to be in a spot like this and have a sense of that history. Stace believes that Keru should be celebrated and preserved, because of the unique role it has played in American history. It was here in this town, which marked the start of the American North, that black African-American slaves could claim their liberty. For over 300 years, slaves were sold to white masters all along the Mississippi. But the harshest conditions were always found in the southern states, and so many tried to escape to Keru, their gateway to a better life in the North. Imagine if you're a slave in the South, or right after the Civil War you're a freed slave, or son of slaves, you're coming up. Crossing into the North would have been a dramatic, ever-changing life event, to finally find yourself on free soil and say, I'm a man now, nobody can tell me what to do. So this was a dramatic point for that activity. In fact, even into the 40s, in Keru, this was a demarcation point. If you were coming from the South on a train car, you had to ride in the black car. But in Keru, you could switch and ride in the mixed race car. Before the days of modern transport, fleeing slaves travelled to Keru via a network of secret river routes and safe houses, nicknamed the Underground Railroad. Their journey was fraught with danger, and if they were caught, they'd be sold downriver, a notion which became synonymous with receiving a death sentence. The lucky ones reached Keru, where they were greeted by people who gave them help and refuge, and it is said that once the slaves arrived here, they fell to their knees and kissed the free ground. If you stand on the docks in Keru today, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the town is still as busy as ever. But there's one big difference. These days, bigger ships mean bigger fuel tanks, and fewer pit stops. The result for Keru has been devastating. Nothing stops here anymore. Stace believes that not all is lost, and that if Keru could celebrate and cash in on its past, then maybe it would have some chance of a future. 220 kilometres downstream, there's a place that's doing just that. Once a little town smaller than Keru, Memphis grew to become the capital of the Mississippi River and the music mecca of America. Blues, soul and rock and roll, Memphis has it all. Locals claim that all this music originated here, but the truth is that all the notes and the riffs and the rhythms were carried into Memphis by the Mississippi herself, a by-product of all the river and slave trades. Memphis's golden age of music goes back to the 1940s, 50s and 60s, when musicians like Elvis Presley, B.B. King and Otis Redding made Memphis their home, and when places like Stax and Sun Records gave street kids the chance to become international superstars. Its creative hub at that time was Beale Street, and today it's one of the leading tourist attractions in the state of Tennessee. But long before it opened its doors to visitors, Memphis was the original Wall Street of America. During the 1800s, the city developed into the most important trading centre in the country. Its strategic position right on the banks of the Mississippi attracted huge investment, making it the largest cotton centre in the world and the largest slave market in the Mid-South. King Cotton, as it was known then, was a hugely profitable cash crop, grown on the southern plantation farms and traded here. Hundreds of thousands of people travelled to Memphis along the Mississippi to buy, sell and be sold, forming what was in effect a huge melting pot of cultures. This unique sharing and mixing of black and white experiences on the one hand sowed the seeds for Memphis's rich musical legacy, but on the other created a deeply rooted racial intolerance, which exploded during the violent civil rights protests of the 1960s and 70s. The assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis during the spring of 68 is seen by many as the beginning of the end of Memphis's golden era. During the late 60s and 70s, musicians stopped coming to Memphis, travelling further north to places like Chicago and Detroit instead. All the bars and juke joints on Beale Street had to close down. The recording studios stopped recording and the city seemed to lose its heart, but perhaps not its soul. Just a stone's throw from the Mississippi is Stax Records. This place used to be one of the largest African-American businesses in the United States and an oasis of black and white integration. Stax was always a place where the color of your music was far more important than the color of your skin. For those of you that don't know this lady, she is, I consider, the mother of Stax. Let's give a big hand to Miss Deanie Parker. I was with Stax Records, in fact, from about 1961 when I came in to be a superstar. And I realized that I didn't have the soulful delivery of Aretha Franklin. And I wasn't nearly as talented as Gladys Knight. And my legs were never going to be as long and as gorgeous as Tina Turner's. And so I decided that I had to do something that would put me behind the desk where it really didn't matter. When Stax was forced into liquidation in 1976, former Stax secretary, Deanie Parker, refused to give up hope. She grew up on the tough streets of Memphis and so knows better than most how important it is to hold on to the dream. Over the past few years, she has been instrumental in rebuilding Stax, not as a recording studio, but as a music academy, which once again gives street kids the chance to shine. It is unfortunate that for the last 15 years, children have thought they were listening to music when in fact they weren't. What they were listening to was rhythm and rhyme, also known as hip-hop, and that god-awful rap. And so they've just not had the exposure, they've not had the encouragement, and they've not had the training, because we're determined to do for children today and children in the future what Stax Records did for us. But much like it was in the 60s, Stax is just an oasis within a much harsher environment. On the streets outside Stax, the African-American community is still struggling with endemic racism in a city which is considered the most violent in America. Apart from its role as the support act to some of the best music in the world, the Mississippi's claim to fame is that it's the world's flattest river, where water skiing was invented, and where early river trade and traffic made it the first superhighway of the New World. Because it's so wide open and even, travelling up and down the Mississippi is plain sailing for these tugboats, which can stretch up to a mile long and carry the same amount of freight as a thousand railroad cars. These are the power horses of the Mississippi, and they're a very different animal to the elegant vessels of old. The Mississippi paddle steamers are as famous as the river itself, evoking a nostalgic sense of romance and carefree adventure. On these decks, 200 years ago, there'd be a very different crowd. There'd be sassy women rubbing skirts, with cigar-smoking men and rugged riverboat captains keeping a lookout for any Mississippi rogues or pirates. All right, see that big sandbar there? That's one. Well, quit looking that way, will you? This lady keeps looking that way. Quit! Don Lancaster has been a riverboat pilot for over 30 years. As a young man, he worked as a police officer patrolling the mean streets of Memphis, but always fancied himself as the romantic lead in an epic riverboat adventure. I think I've lived most of my life on the river. I thoroughly enjoy it. I do it six days a week. Sometimes as many as five trips a day. Some people like racing, some people like flying. I love the river. And that's where I spend most of my time. Don began his training in the parlor houses of the great steamers and worked his way up to captain. He now runs day trips for Sunday sailors who seem more interested in taking it easy than in tearing up the Mississippi. At one time, my youngest son was the youngest pilot on the Mississippi River. We used to have a lot of fun. We worked for a company that had two paddle wheelers. And we'd get out there and we'd load in the passengers and then we would challenge each other to a race. Everybody just had a fit, you know. Oh, we're racing, we're racing. And sure enough, we'd go by downtown Memphis wide open with the paddle wheels flying. I always won, though. You see, I taught him everything. I taught him everything he knew, but I didn't teach him everything I knew. And we used to have a lot of fun. Mark Twain was also a riverboat pilot and one of America's most famous authors. He wrote about the original steamboat races and about all the gambling and dodgy deals which happened here before gaming was outlawed in 1870. In the lawless days before the big expansion into the Wild West, the Mississippi was America's last frontier and thus becoming a popular hangout and hideout for all sorts of cowboys and chancers. In those days, there would be music to accompany all the action. And legend has it that jazz was invented on a Mississippi paddle steamer by an itinerant musician called Jasbo Brown, who gave his name to this style of playing. They say that some parts of the river have not changed much since Twain and Jasbo's time. But life on the river has certainly begun to alter its course. This used to be a completely rural farming area run by a few wealthy white families who made their fortunes by growing cotton and using slave labour. But it's now changing with big corporate farms moving in and with strip malls, motels and burger bars appearing where there used to be shotgun shacks and juke joints. Up until ten years ago, Tunica was just about the poorest town in the country. It used to be called America's Zimbabwe because of its harsh third-world living conditions. But now it has hit the jackpot thanks to some of the strangest-looking boats ever to take to the river. When Tennessee legalised gambling in the 1990s, it stated that all activity must take place on the Mississippi. And so Tunica, lying a few miles away from the river, diverted some of the Mississippi's flow to create small pools on which they could float their modern-day pleasure palaces. They don't look like boats, and you can't even see the water, but it is there, underneath all the flashing lights and spinning wheels. And it's allowed Tunica to become the third-largest gaming region in the United States. The World Poker Championship has been held here with $10,000 set as the minimum buy-in. Fortunes have been made and lost, but the biggest winner is Tunica itself, with the casinos now providing work for 10,000 people and generating enough tax revenue to provide better schools, better roads and a better quality of life. What effect all this glitzy, theme-parked wealth will have on the culture and music of the Mississippi, we'll have to wait and see. One thing is certain. Tunica's overnight success story seems to be the exception. Not the rule. As the river seeps deeper into the south and into the famous region known as the Mississippi Delta, what we will see is a place that may no longer be bound by slavery, but is still today bound by the chains of modern-day poverty. We'll also catch glimpses of its cotton-rich past, the mansions and vast estates, and see how they sit now in the 21st-century South. The Delta was formed over thousands of years as the Mississippi flooded and receded, leaving behind it a rich, silty deposit which formed some of the best soil in the world. This gift of the Mississippi allowed the Delta to develop into the most productive and richest cotton-growing centre in America. The dollar wealth from this land and its cotton plantations was always enjoyed by a minority of local white masters, but its rich cultural heritage found its way to the rest of the world. Right in the heart of the Mississippi Delta lies the Hobson Plantation. It's still a working farm, which has been owned by the same family for nearly 150 years. But life isn't easy here, even for the once wealthy white population. Ever since the demand for cotton decreased with cheaper crops being produced elsewhere in the world, Hobson's has had to diversify and is now a struggling tourist attraction as well as a struggling farm. David Honeyboy Edwards remembers this place when it was a busy plantation, with his family, along with many others, doing all the cotton-picking work. At 92, Honeyboy is the last living Delta bluesman and the true embodiment of the Mississippi River and its culture. Honeyboy was part of a subculture of blues artists who were refugees from the plantation system. These men lived on the wild side, but their songs came out of pain and suffering. In the back-breaking, hot, sweltering days, they would communicate with each other by calling and answering in rhyme and song. They'd work all day long and they'd have to say something or sing or do something to make the day easy to pass by. And they'd do holler songs. And the holler songs turned into the blues. You get the low-down, dirty shame blues, then you get the up-tempo blues, meaning rock and roll blues. You can play a low-down, dirty shame blues like, my mama dead, my papa crossed the sea. I ain't dead, but I just was to be. That's something, you know. And that's the low-down blues. Honeyboy grew up with the blues. He was born in these fields, the grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper. Sharecropping was a tenancy agreement which allowed former slaves to rent out a thin strip of land and work it themselves. But in effect, it bound the black workers ever more closely to their masters. The sharecroppers had to give half their crop to the plantation owners and pay back nearly all their profits in rent. They ended up owing money and so were kept in chains as effectively as they ever had been as slaves. He'd take ten off the 20 for him for the land and stuff. You only got ten, but you got to pay him for everything you got out of your ten. When you pay him back, then you ain't got nothing. He got all of it. Then he'd turn and ask you, do you need some money for Christmas? Honey Boy knew he had to get out somehow and so, on his 17th birthday, he picked up his guitar, kissed his mama on the cheek and went out to follow his dream of becoming a bluesman. Ever since slaves travelled upstream to the freedom of the North, African-Americans always chose to follow the river route whenever they went travelling. Honey Boy did the same, knowing that the black communities which had settled along the banks of the Mississippi would provide him with a safe haven after dark. If I was a Kansas baby Leave me alone Deep blue sea Oh, deep blue sea Today, Honey Boy is still travelling up and down the Mississippi, playing his blues to Delta folk and is still enjoying his rock and roll lifestyle with women dancing at his feet. Cotton is still grown in these fields but most of the farms are now run by big corporate organisations and the mansions have been bought up by rich businessmen who fancied a holiday home in the South. Machines do most of the harvesting work with many Delta dwellers having to move out to find jobs elsewhere. For those that remain, it still seems that it's the African-Americans who do the hard work while white managers look on. Over the years, many people have reaped the rewards that the Mississippi has brought. The rich soil, the trade, the diverse culture. But all this is just part of the story. There's also a very dark undercurrent that flows through these waters. This is an awesome river which can cause death and destruction on a massive scale. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the world realised the full extent of its force. But it was only after the waters had receded that the real truth finally surfaced. The flood was not just an act of God. It was a man-made disaster which should have been averted. A system of levees, ostensibly built to protect the population, had actually put them in the gravest of danger. A lesson which should have been learnt from the past because all this, and worse, had happened before. In 1927, a massive flood engulfed the whole lower Mississippi region with its epicentre in the little delta town of Greenville. From Cairo to New Orleans, 70,000 square kilometres became covered in up to 15 metres of water with hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes, their land and their lives. Two of those who survived the flood are Catherine and Ellis Smith. The Mississippi has no prejudice. It displaced and killed black and white alike. I had no idea where my folks were. I saw them in April and I didn't see them anymore until October. Ellis and his family were poor subsistence farmers who had worked this land for generations. Living on the outskirts of Greenville, right in the heart of the delta, they were used to the floods, grateful to them, in fact, for irrigating their crops and renewing their soil. But that fateful winter, the rains came in biblical proportions. They fell from the sky like crashing waves, beating down on those most vulnerable. The rich townsfolk and plantation owners had the means to move away to higher ground. But the poor were left behind as the rain fell and the river rose. I was seventeen and I had to learn a lot. Picking up dead people and all like that, it wasn't too good, but I got used to it. Nothing I could do about it but pick them up and take them somewhere and I brought a lot of them to the levee. It was two of us, a friend of mine. He went south and I went north. Every day we'd bring somebody back in and we kind of got used to it. Some of them were in terrible shape and a bit of that water just, they were just floating. And mules, horses and pigs and all that stuff going down the river. Catherine Smith lived on higher ground, away from the levees. As a young girl of six, she watched in horror as whole families scrambled to find anything that would float. My mother had a friend close to Scott who had three or four children and they were trying to move to another place that was higher and in the move, one of her children fell over in the river and drowned, they couldn't get her. It was just terrible. I remember how awful I felt about that. You know, it's just, I couldn't understand it. But they lost her. The Mississippi has flooded these lands for thousands of years. But in the past, excess water simply got soaked up by the river's natural floodplain. From the 1800s, however, man decided that he wanted to control the river and so flood defences, or levees, were built by the Army Corps of Engineers to confine the Mississippi in a narrow channel. These solid banks of earth were designed to prevent future flooding. But just two months after the flood system was completed, the rising waters forced into a narrow channel by the levees turned the Mississippi into a volcano of a river which erupted onto the land like an angry sea. As the waters gradually subsided and the poor and destitute made their way back to find their families and rebuild their broken lives, it was clear to all that the Mississippi was not to be enslaved. If man was foolish enough to try and control nature, Old Man River would always, sometimes violently, break free of his chains. But some lessons are never learnt. One of the major structures along the lower Mississippi is the Old River Control which was completed in 1963. To its east is the state of Mississippi and to the west, Louisiana. For a hundred years or so, the Mississippi had been diverting more and more of its flow to a smaller distributary channel. But the Army Corps of Engineers warned that if this process were allowed to continue it would destroy the whole country. All the heavy industries along the lower Mississippi use huge amounts of water in their production. If they lost their supply, they'd lose their business. And so the Old River Control was built with giant floodgates that could be opened and closed as needed in order to ensure that the Mississippi stayed on track. The Atchafalaya River that the man had not interfered. This small distributary channel of the Mississippi flows out of the delta and into the state of Louisiana, one of the most culturally diverse regions in America, but like the delta, also one of its poorest. There are 37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty and most of them live in the south. Many families here live in abject poverty. In a place like this where salvation is in short supply, hope has to come from somewhere on high. Gospel has always been the sister music to delta blues. Some say the blues is just gospel without the God factor. But whilst blues songs describe the hardship and its real consequences, gospel tends to use the story of deprivation and suffering and turn it into one of empowerment and salvation, often using the Mississippi as a metaphor for washing away the pain. Let us go into the house of God. How many of y'all mind? I'm just so happy by just being. Reverend Noah Smith is the pastor of a small church on one of the Mississippi basin's little rivers, or bayous. Gospel music was born out of a condition because the people, especially I can speak from a black perspective, they went through so much and they had to get something to try and comfort them in whatever situation was in their need. And they would find hope, they would find peace, they would find strength, they would find power, they would find joy, and they would get songs to deal with their situation and to rise them above it so they can be able to still praise God. During slavery, African Americans were forced to abandon their own faiths but Christianity eventually came to be embraced by the African American community with the Baptist faith growing to become particularly prevalent in the deep south today. Down by the riverside, down by the riverside, won't study war no more. You follow me? Because once I get down to the river, that's where I can find peace and tranquility by the river. As late as the 1960s, river baptisms were quite common in the delta with gospel quite literally being sung down by the riverside and the faithful being cleansed by the Mississippi waters. I was 12 years old when I got baptized and when I got baptized, I got baptized in the river because back then there was no such thing as we have now. But these days the Mississippi and its smaller channels are too polluted to wash away anybody's sins and so Reverend Smith's congregation along with most of the others in the area have had to install a private pool to do the job. Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. Bacteria and contamination or leaks and everything start to flow in the bayou and it become unsafe for people to get baptized in the bayou now. The river today along its entire length is showing signs of decline. 58 million tons of toxic discharge travels down the Mississippi every year with strong claims that river and industrial pollution are directly responsible for many cancer related illnesses every year. The Mississippi serves as the primary source of water for 18 million people but because it's the poor who have to drink it nothing is being done to address the problem. Reverend Smith however still sees a purity of spirit most of whom live on less than $10 a day. The river means a lot to the gospel and I'm thinking about right now at my church just having a boat trip where I can get everybody on the water and that would bring peace and tranquility to their mind because they may be going through some rough times in their life but I know that once I get them on the water I'm bringing trouble down in your life. Because it's all about Jesus y'all got to understand it's all about Jesus y'all know that. And let me tell you something I told y'all last week y'all ought to have some shout in y'all. Everybody ought to have some shout in here. You ought to come here looking around at nobody else you ought to have your own faith. Never. So when we come back we'll show you what we've got. And we'll go with the and began arriving in Louisiana ten years later. 250 years on, and they're still here, better known these days as Cajuns. Butch Herbert is quintessentially Cajun. He still tries to keep the old traditions alive, but he is one of a dying breed. I'm proud to be a Cajun. I'm proud to be a Louisianan. I'm proud to be from South Louisiana. The further south you go, the prouder I am. That's my heritage, I feel that way. My mother couldn't speak French, and my father could, and he couldn't teach it. We never could speak French. And when I started school, I was forbidden to speak French. Yes. You couldn't speak French in school. No. Couldn't. That's how they were. Like right now, they're trying to ban Spanish. And I think, really and truly, if a person can speak bilingual, he's better off. Only a very small percentage of Cajuns still speak French, but they keep their heritage alive in other ways, through their music and their cooking. Whether you're making gumbo or jambalaya, shrimp seems to be the main ingredient in most of the dishes. It's hardly surprising that fishing for shrimps around the Louisiana coastline used to be a way of life and a family tradition for many. But today, the fishing industry is netting an ever smaller catch, with many fishermen having to look for work on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. For the diehards like Butch and his 18-year-old nephew, it's becoming increasingly difficult to make a living from shrimping. Cheaper imported shrimp from South America and Southeast Asia have greatly cut into the local fishermen's market. Fuel is also becoming more expensive, and pollution in the waterways is taking its toll. All this has caused great resentment amongst the Cajuns, who feel even more bitter now that a new wave of immigration is adding to their problems. They come from Vietnam, they're refugees, and the United States subsidises them. The Catholic religion subsidises them. Give them money, give them places to stay, give them housing, food, and they have a discount on all their equipment. I can't compete with the Vietnamese. I can't. But I don't hold that against him. I hold that against our country. The Cajun way of life may soon be lost in the bays and bayous of Louisiana, with the legacy living on only in the stories that Butch and others like him will tell their children and grandchildren. The Cajun culture won't exist in 50 years. I can't hand it down to my grandkids. And a simple reason is because of progress. That's what they call progress. A simple reason is progress. 50 miles east of Butch's home, through the swampy wilderness of its basin, the mighty Mississippi again becomes an urban river, flowing thick and fast into its last port of call. New Orleans is a city which doesn't just lie on the banks of the river, but is largely surrounded by it. It is here, in the aftermath of the devastating storms of 2005, that the true divisions in modern American life became shockingly clear. This old port is still a vibrant, colourful city, with music at its heart. After suffering one of the worst natural disasters in US history, New Orleans is gamely giving the impression that the good times are rolling again. But a couple of miles to the north or east, the Cajun bravura and the voodoo spells fall away like a Mardi Gras mask. The streets fall quiet and the city becomes a dead zone. This is the Ninth Ward, one of the lower-lying and consequently poorer parts of town. Many, perhaps most of the city's dead, came from here. As was the case in the flood of 1927, these people simply had no means of escape. The bodies were washed away with the floodwaters, or left to rot in attics, with the number of dead later found here eerily recorded in black paint on the carcasses of their homes. The members of the New Wave Jazz Band were born and brought up in the city. Julius Lewis remembers how things used to be. Before Katrina, this place was alive and up and running. There was people everywhere, businesses booming, and, you know, most people down here owned their houses. They were small, but they were, you know, mostly owners. Unfortunately, they didn't have the insurance, but it was very busy and very lively, very spirited. They had their own type of culture down here, you know. And it's so sad today that, to see it this way, with no houses and no people. On 29th August 2005, as Hurricane Katrina passed to the east of the city, the flood protection system in New Orleans failed in 53 different places, with nearly every levy in the metro area breached. Percy Ellis Sr. was lucky enough to own a car, and so he piled it high with as many people as he could and raced out of the city. Once the flood hit, like I said, I went out to the country, and I tried not to look at the television because it was too depressing, and I knew eventually I'd have to come back and face the reality that everything was gone. So my thoughts were basically on rebuilding my life from starting from scratching all over again and making it much better. But the disaster part, you have to put that behind you and move forward. You can't dwell on it, because all it'll do is make you depressed. You've just got to pick up and start over and say, hey, God does everything for a reason, and keep going, go with the flow. Julius had no way out. He got trapped in the city and was lucky to escape with his life, but he lost his home, his friends and his family. Like most of New Orleans' musicians, he's now relocated in one of the other towns upstream, but comes back to play with his band. Today, New Orleans is fighting for its life. The flood killed nearly 2,000 people and washed away many more. Only half its population and its musicians have returned to start rebuilding their city and their lives. It's a struggle, but like many of the other places we've seen along our journey, hope lives on here, in the minds and the hearts of those who have suffered and lost the most, and in the music of the younger generation. The belief on the streets is that if the music survives, then the spirit of New Orleans will live on. Music is New Orleans. Without music, New Orleans would be no New Orleans. The music, the tradition, the brass, the jazz, the sound, the flow, it's what New Orleans is all about. The tradition must go on. You must pass it down and keep it going, regenerate it, keep the energy and the fire going. This is New Orleans. New Orleans is jazz. When you think of jazz, it's here is what you're thinking about, New Orleans. And so, as we come to the end of our journey along the Mississippi, and as Old Man River quietly retires to the sea, weary from the centuries of trade, travel, and injustice that he has seen along the way, it is the music and the spirit of the place that we take with us. A reminder that no matter how hard the struggle, or how harsh the conditions, the true spirit of both man and the river just keeps rolling along.