Map: The Great Blues Migration

 

Click here to view full-size map in Google Docs.

            For my midterm project this spring in Cartography & Thematic Mapping, I created this proportional symbol map showing the birth and death locations of deceased Blues Hall of Fame Artists in the United States.  My goal was to create a visualization of the regions important to the development of the blues and to show the general historic patterns of migration among blues musicians.  There are thousands of blues artists, so I narrowed the field to the performers who have so far been inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame, choosing the more than ninety of them who are no longer with us so their places of birth and death could both be used.  I then researched the birth and death locations of each artist on the Blues Foundation website and in the All Music Guide to the Blues.  Then I created this map in ArcMap using the techniques we had learned.  The patterns displayed on this map are clear enough, but of course I still feel compelled to add a bit of commentary on the main things this map shows us:

1.  There aren’t many surprises regarding where the blues came from.  As expected, the distribution of birth locations is almost entirely in the South, and the Mississippi Delta region (the broad, flat, cotton-producing floodplain in the northwest part of Mississippi) shows an especially high concentration.  Only three of the more than ninety artists represented were born outside the South.

2.  Patterns of migration show up very clearly.  Of course there is the expected large south-to-north migration, with Chicago being the most popular destination due to its size, abundance of jobs, and proximity to the Delta.  Not surprisingly there is also a strong trend of rural-to-urban migration, which I find even more interesting.  Almost every death location outside the South is a major city, and so are around half of those in the South.  Memphis, at the head of the Mississippi Delta region, seems to have attracted many artists who wanted to enjoy some urban comforts without entirely abandoning the familiarity of the South.  Helena, Arkansas is the only small town to be the location of more than one death among the represented artists.  And it is interesting to see what a surprisingly large number of performers moved out to the entertainment meccas on the west coast, far more than moved up to the big cities of the Northeast.  However, they show no signs of displacing Chicago as the second home of the blues.