Tommy McClennan — Yazoo City, Mississippi

Tommy McClennan was born around 1908 near Yazoo City in Yazoo County, Mississippi, and made some of the most ferocious and uncompromising Delta blues recordings of the late 1930s and early 1940s. His Bluebird recordings from 1939 to 1942 — 'Bottle It Up and Go,' 'Cross Cut Saw Blues,' 'Whiskey Head Woman' — were raw, urgent, and rhythmically propulsive in a way that pointed directly toward electric Chicago blues. His guitar playing was relentless and percussive, and his voice had a roughness that matched the intensity of the performance.

McClennan moved to Chicago in the late 1930s but found the city hostile to his country blues style and his unfiltered manner. He was reportedly ejected from the Bluebird recording sessions at one point for using language on a record that the label found unpublishable. He continued recording until 1942 and then disappeared from the music scene entirely — his death date and circumstances are not reliably documented, suggesting he returned to Mississippi or died in obscurity in Chicago.

Yazoo City is the seat of Yazoo County in central Mississippi. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker acknowledges McClennan's connection to the area. The town's name — from a Choctaw word — was associated in American political discourse with the term 'Yazoo fraud,' a 19th-century land speculation scandal, but its blues connection is its primary musical claim.