LOCATION: Marengo County, Alabama
PERIOD: 1965
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Billy Joe Sparks (1930-1999); Mason Sparks (1899-1956); Mary Hooper (1932); Archie Lee Sparks (1815-1887); Harold Lamont Sparks (1842-1901); Mason Sparks (1899-1956)
Billy Joe Sparks (1930-1999) was thirty-five when this song is set. His family has been share-cropping the same land for five generations going back to his G-G-Grandfather, Archie Lee Sparks (1815-1887). This land was rich, dark, and provided a decent living for all those generations of the Spaks family.
So, during the fifties and sixties when the Civil Rights Movement began to fill the newspapers and finally reaching Marengo County, Alabama, certain resentments appeared in Billy Joe’s mind.
Billy Joe’s G-Grandfather, Harold Lamont Sparks (1842-1901), fought in the Civil war, and was among the first members of the Ku Klux Klan, ridding along with Nathan Bedfor Forrest – never surrendering to the Yankees. And his father Mason Sparks (1899-1956) was killed in a KKK raid in 1956, and Billy Joe absorbed all of this history, although he did not think of himself as a racist.
THE BLACK BELT
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)
The Black Belt is known for the richest dirt
But it’s drenched in a history of hurt
Cotton is king and defines life round here
Row after row under the gun of an overseer
The Black Belt runs across this whole state
The Alabama River carries tons of freight
Down to Mobile and the markets cross the seas
The Black Belt reaches 360 degrees
The Black Belt got its name from the color of the soil
But also by the color of the skin of those who toil
Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863
But a hundred years later looks ’bout the same to me
I’m white and poor as they come
I ain’t got nothin’ but I ain’t dumb
I know that just by being white I’ve have more
Than what a better black man can ever hope for
The Black Belt got its name from the color of the soil
But also by the color of the skin of those who toil
Lincoln freed the slaves in1863
But a hundred years later looks about the same to me
A hundred years later looks about the same to me
© 2022 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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