Blues Heritage Tourism Orientation and Workshop

The Alluvian Hotel

August  18, 2004, 9-5

 

The Mississippi Blues Commission defines the Blues as African American roots music and the culture that produced it.  The Blues is widely recognized as one of the first truly American art forms, and is also known as the ancestor of many forms of popular music.  Tourist interest in Blues and heritage sites is increasing.  The Alluvian Hotel is a boutique hotel, a destination in its own right.  It hopes to promote the Blues and the Mississippi Delta by offering its guests several Blues/heritage tours that provide exciting, entertaining, and educational ways to explore the Blues and the culture that produced it.  This orientation and workshop is designed to introduce potential tour guides to the policies and expectations of the Alluvian Hotel in preparation for Alluvian Blues Heritage Tours.

 

Welcome and Introduction to the program (Amy Evans)

 

Introduction of participants (Participants)

 

Over view of heritage and blues tourism in Mississippi, and the Mississippi Certified Travel Professional program (Sharon Robinson, Mississippi Tourism Authority)

 

Practicum in Blues Heritage Tourism (Luther Brown, Amy Evans, John Martin)

 

  • The importance of knowing your audience
  • Ways to introduce people to the Delta
  • Dealing with pre and mis-conceptions
  • Being honest and dealing with the good, the bad, and the ugly
  • Reading place as text:  The Tangled Bank, Charlie Patton, and Joe Rice Dockery    
  • Text Box: Historiography: the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials, and the synthesis of particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods            The roles of facts and historiography
  • The roles of opinion, passion, politics, and objectivity
  • Preparing for questions, learning stories
  • Show and tell
  • Handouts, bibliographies, video and discs

v     Readings required of all Alluvian guides

v     Recommended reading for visitors (Break out groups)

  • Don’t forget the museums and galleries
  • The Delta Center as a resource for heritage tourism
  • Problem solving and worst case scenarios:  when things go wrong
  • Reading and viewing assignments, follow up discussion, quiz, and practice tour
  • Proposed tour routes and topics/ Nuts and bolts business issues and Certificate of Accomplishment

 

Lunch Break

 

A Delta tour

 

Return to The Alluvian for wrap-up, debrief, and questionnaire/evaluation.  Where do we go from here?

 

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.—Charles Darwin, last paragraph of The Origin of Species.  – the significance of this quote as it applies to Blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta will be revealed!

 

 

Biographies of presenters:

 

Luther Brown is the Director of The Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University.  The mission of The Delta Center is to promote the understanding of the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta and its significance to the rest of the world.  Before coming to the Delta, Dr. Brown directed The Center for Field Studies at George Mason University.  In that capacity, he developed and led field classes and public research trips, and escorted hundreds of people to The Bahamas, Ecuador, Kenya, and places in the United States.  He has developed Delta tours for Living Blues Magazine, the Southern Foodways Alliance, The Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and dozens of university classes and professional associations. 

 

Amy Evans is a Special Projects Consultant for Viking Range Corporation. Originally from Houston, Texas, she has a B.F.A. in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. She also serves as Associate Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Oral History Initiative, teaches photography at the University of Mississippi and is co-founder of PieceWorks, a non-profit community arts and outreach organization based in Oxford, Mississippi.  She has developed Delta tours for Living Blues Magazine, The Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and the Southern Foodways Alliance, and is working for the Alluvian Hotel to develop Blues tours in the Delta.

 

John Martin, Coordinator for Community & Student Engagement at Delta State, has worked in the Delta Center for Culture & Learning to present tours of the Mississippi Delta.  He has also organized and run heritage education programs that take Delta school children on fieldtrip tours to various cultural sites and museums in region.  Martin graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with degrees in English Literature and Spanish and is pursuing a master’s degree at Middlebury College in Vermont.  His experience in the Delta also includes a two-year stint as a reporter for the Greenwood Commonwealth.

 

 

The Mission of The Delta Center for Culture and Learning is to promote the understanding of the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta and its significance to the rest of the world.