Catfish Row Music Festival

Vicksburg hosts periodic blues and roots music events centered on the Catfish Row district, the historic African American commercial corridor along Levee Street. The name is often mistaken for a link to George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess -- Gershwin's opera and its Catfish Row are modeled on Charleston, South Carolina, not Vicksburg, a mix-up the Vicksburg Post itself has had to correct. Vicksburg's own Catfish Row name traces instead to a 1948 essay by David Cohn describing the district. The music and the history here don't need Gershwin's help -- this was a real Black commercial corridor with its own working musicians, its own story.