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If you had to pick one single spot as the birthplace of the blues, you might say it all started right here," said the late and great B.B. King while standing in front of the Dockery seed house in the 1970s Mississippi Public Television documentary, “Good Morning Blues.”King, who grew up in Mississippi, knew all too well that the sprawling plantation, which at one time covered 40 square miles and was home to 3,000 people, was the home base for blues pioneers over the course of three decades. The legendary musicians who called Dockery home included Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Eddie "Son" House, and Chester Burnett, who later would be known as Howlin' Wolf. Roebuck "Pops" Staples of The Staple Singers lived there in the later years and blues legend Robert Johnson joined in what were sometimes all-night performances on the plantation.

 King, who grew up in Mississippi, knew all too well that the sprawling plantation, which at one time covered 40 square miles and was home to 3,000 people, was the home base for blues pioneers over the course of three decades. The legendary musicians who called Dockery home included Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Eddie "Son" House, and Chester Burnett, who later would be known as Howlin' Wolf. Roebuck "Pops" Staples of The Staple Singers lived there in the later years and blues legend Robert Johnson joined in what were sometimes all-night performances on the plantation.

"All of these guys fed off each other and created this country blues that came out of that part of the Delta," says Luther Brown, the recently retired director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University. "They traveled around. They weren't at Dockery all of the time. But it was pretty much their headquarters.”

The front porch of the commissary, where they often started playing on Saturday afternoons, is still standing at Dockery although the building burned down 50 years ago.

People would begin gathering on the porch on Saturday afternoons where the blues men would play for free before the party moved across the one-lane bridge to what they called the Frolicking House, a sharecropper's home emptied of furniture. With no electricity on the plantation, the musicians would put big mirrors along the walls of two rooms with a coal oil lantern in front of each for illumination and the music would start. They'd play all night, charging 25 cents a head. A musician could earn as much as $250 cash on a good night, far better than making 50 cents a day in the cotton fields.

Today, the farms are a collection of six buildings and a feeling, a destination for blues pilgrims who come from all over the world.

At the center of the Dockery Farms story is Charley Patton, considered the father of the Delta Blues. His father, Bill, and mother, Annie, moved to Dockery with their 12 children when he was about ten years old. By the time he was a teen, he was taking lessons from Henry Sloan, another transplant to Dockery who had started playing a different kind of music some were calling the blues.

By 1910, Patton turned from student to teacher, schooling bluesmen like Brown and Johnson. Later, he would share his style with Howlin' Wolf and Staples, who lived for 12 years on the plantation.

The plantation was founded on the vision of Will Dockery, a graduate of the University of Mississippi, who took a $1,000 gift from his grandmother and purchased tracts of Delta wilderness in 1885. Over a decade, the transformed the land into a cotton plantation. Eventually, the company town had an elementary school, churches, post and telegraph offices, a resident doctor, a ferry, a blacksmith shop, a cotton gin, cemeteries, picnic grounds for the workers, its own currency, and a commissary that sold dry goods, furniture, and groceries. To ship out the cotton, Dockery built a railroad depot and a spur route, named the Pea Vine for its twisted path, was laid from the main station in nearby Boyle (Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues” pays tribute to the line). At one time, roughly 3,000 people lived on the plantation’s 40 square miles.

That concentration of people — a big consumer base — made Dockery an incubator for blues musicians. Howlin' Wolf moved there, Brown notes. Robert Johnson moved there. "Part of the draw was that they could go to the commissary on a Saturday or hang out at the railroad station or street corner and they could draw a crowd and make enough money to make a living," Brown says.

Patton was a flamboyant performer who played guitar with his teeth and behind his head and considered himself a professional musician, not a sharecropper. He and the others were the rock stars of their day. "Honeyboy Edwards played with Robert Johnson and he said if you saw a black man walking down the street in a suit he was either a preacher or he was a bluesman," Brown adds. "They were the only ones who would have enough money."

In 1934, shortly before he died, Patton was in a New York studio cutting what would be his final recordings. Months earlier, he'd been thrown out of Dockery Farms, a consequence of his womanizing. It stung. Like all great blues musicians, he chronicled his pain in song. This one was called “34 Blues:”

They run me from Will Dockery’s, Willie Brown, I want your job

Buddy, what’s the matter?

Ah, one of them told papa Charley

I don’t want you hanging around my job no more

Well, look down the country, it almost make you cry

After the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker in 1944, the Great Migration saw 6 million African Americans emigrate to the industrial urban centers of the Midwest and the Northeast, and the bluesman followed suit. Dockery continued as a mechanized farm, eventually diversifying into corn, soybeans, and rice as the price of cotton fell.

William Lester, the executive director of the Dockery Farms Foundation, is the last man living on the plantation. Forty years ago, he convinced Joe Rice Dockery, Bill’s son, to sell him some land so he could build a home there when he got a job teaching art at nearby Delta State University. During his early years on the farm, he befriended Tom Cannon, Patton’s nephew who told him stories – “All the good stories and all the bad stories,” Lester says – about his uncle’s years on the farm.

Six key buildings remain standing, including three that have been restored – the seed house with the iconic sign listing the farm’s owners, the gas station, and the platform where cotton bales were stored awaiting pickup by the train. Three more buildings -- the original seed house, which became a hay barn, the supply house, and the cotton gin – still need repair. The Dockery family heirs lease the land to farmers who grow soybeans, rice, corn, and cotton.   

As the farm buildings fell into disrepair, the plantation's blues legacy became largely forgotten. In the transcript of a 1979 oral history with Joe Rice Dockery, who worked on the plantation starting in 1926 and took over after his father died in 1936, the blues are mentioned only in passing. In the 1990s, when Mississippi sought to widen the two-lane road running by the plantation to four lanes, the original plans would have destroyed several of the historic buildings on the site, Brown says.

Lester organized a protest on the site with more than 300 people. After they’d finished, a Swedish motorcycle group -- European blues fans have long made the Dockery pilgrimage – rode up and he asked them to sign a petition and pose for a picture. They happily agreed. The shot made the front page of the local Boliver Commercial newspaper the next day. Blues fans and history buffs, as well as politicians, inundated the Mississippi Department of Transportation with calls and letters. The department surrendered. “They said, ‘Tell people to quit calling us,’” Lester recalls. “’We will not tear down Dockery.’”

While we often focus on figures like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as the lone geniuses behind wildly successful companies, the truth is their skills were bolstered by the teams of talented people working for them. Gates himself has said that creativity is less of an individual characteristic than it is an "emergent property" that surfaces when people convene around a problem. This way of thinking is beginning to align more and more with the way people want to work.

By 2020, Millennials will make up 50 percent of the workforce, and 88 percent of them currently say they they prefer an environment that is collaborative over one that's competitive.

The following infographic illustrates how companies are designing their workplaces around this idea.

Spiders are skillful engineers, gifted with amazing planning skills and a material that allows them to precisely design rigorous and functional web. 

The material—spider silk—has chemical properties that make it lustrous, strong and light. It’s stronger than steel and has impressive tensile strength, meaning it can be stretched a lot before it snaps. Scientists have been trying for decades to decode exactly what gives the silk both strength and elasticity, but so far they have found only clues.

Any individual spider can make up to seven different types of silk, but most generally make four to five kinds, says Jonathan Coddington, director of the Global Genome Initiative and senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Spiders use their silk for several purposes, including web-building. That diversity is not hard to imagine, given that Earth hosts 45,749 species of spiders, according to the World Spider Catalog. The number is changing constantly with the frequent discovery of new species.

Why build webs? They serve as “pretty much offense and defense,” says Coddington. “If you’re going to live in a web, it’s going to be a defensive structure,” he says, noting that vibrations in the strands can alert the spiders to predators. Webs are also used to catch prey, says Coddington, whose research has focused in part on spider evolution and taxonomy.

Sometimes spiders eat their own webs when they are done with them, as a way to replenish the silk supply.

Spider silk is made of connected protein chains that help make it strong, along with unconnected areas that give it flexibility. It is produced in internal glands, moving from a soluble form to a hardened form and then spun into fiber by the spinnerets on the spider’s abdomen.

Spiders’ multiple spinnerets and eight legs come in handy for web-building. The architecture of a web is very species-specific, says Coddington. “If you show me a web, I can tell you what spider made it,” he says, adding that spiders “are opinionated” about where they will make a web. Some might be at home in the bottom of a paper cup, while others wouldn’t touch that space.

Most web-building happens under the cover of darkness.

The typical orb weaver spider (the group that’s most familiar to Americans) will build a planar orb web, suspended by seven guy lines attached to leaves, twigs, rocks, telephone poles or other surfaces. Hanging from a leaf or some other object, the spider must get its silk from that point to the other surfaces.

The spider starts by pulling silk from a gland with it fourth leg. The opposite fourth leg is used to pull out multiple strands of silk from about 20 additional silk glands, creating a balloon-like structure. The spider sits patiently, knowing that eventually a warm breeze will take up the balloon, which carries away the first line of silk.

Eventually the balloon's trailing silk strand snags—and, like an angler with a fish on the line, the spider can feel the hit. It tugs to make sure the silk strand is truly attached, then it pulls out new silk and attaches the strand to whatever it is perched on and starts gathering up the snagged strand, pulling itself towards the endpoint, all the while laying out new silk behind it. That new silk is the first planar line. The spider may do this 20 times, creating a network of dry (not sticky) silk lines arcing in all directions.

The spider then has to determine which of those lines constitute seven good attachment points—they must be in a plane and “distributed usefully around the circle the web will occupy,” says Coddington. The spider cuts away the 13 lines that it won't use. “Now that you have the seven attachments you need, you no longer need to touch the ground, leaves, twigs, anything ... you are in your own, arguably solipsistic, world.”

Then the spider starts to spin its web, a relatively simple and predictable process. It begins at the outside and works its way in, attaching segment by segment with its legs, creating concentric circles and ending with a center spiral of sticky silk that traps much-needed prey—all the energy invested in making the web depletes protein stores.

The sticky stuff merely immobilizes the prey. The coup de grâce comes from the spider’s jaws. “Most spiders attack with their teeth,” says Coddington. “They just wade in and bite the thing to death.” That’s a risky proposition, though, because the prey might not be entirely stuck.

A few families of spiders have developed an alternative mode of offense: the sticky-silk wrap attack. Those spiders lay a strand of sticky silk across the ground. When an insect crosses, the vibration alerts the spider, which then attacks, flicking lines of sticky, strong silk around the insect and wrapping it up until it is fully immobilized. The spider then moves in for the death bite. But this is more of a rarity than a rule in the spider world.

Many researchers are studying spider behavior and spider silk in the hopes of some day being able to farm the material or perhaps replicate it through genetic engineering. The silk could be used, for instance, to increase the strength of body armor, or to create skin grafts. “That would be a great thing for the human race,” says Coddington.

A handful of companies are currently invested in spider silk, including Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, a Swedish biotech firm, Spiber Technologies, and a German company, AMSilk, which says it has genetically engineered a protein that is similar to spider silk that is currently being used in shampoos and other cosmetics.

The fierce female warriors – the Amazons – were strong and brave, but did they really exist?

History’s first mention of a race of warrior women is found in Homer’s ILIAD, an account of the Trojan War, probably written in the 8th or 7th century B.C.. Homer’s Amazons, a race of fierce women who mated with vanquished male foes and kept only the female children they bore, were believed to occupy the area around the Black Sea. Amazon women also crop up in Greek myths. One of the labors of Hercules, for example, required him to acquire the girdle of the Amazon queen, Hippolyte. The Amazons of Greek mythology most likely had no connection to the women of the steppes, says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball. “I think the idea of the ‘Amazon’ was created by the Greeks for their own purposes,” she says.

A battle between Amazons and Greek warriors is depicted in a marble sarcophagus on display at the Pio Clementino museum in the Vatican. (Colin/Wikimedia Commons)

A history of sorts:
The works of the Greek historian Herodotus, written around the 5th century B.C., describe a group of female warriors who lost to the Greeks at the battle of Thermodon. Herodotus' Amazons were taken prisoner and put on ships, but overwhelmed and killed the Greek crew. Unable to sail themselves, the women drifted to the shores of the Black Sea, to the territory of the Scythians, a nomadic culture of Iranian descent. The women, Herodotus says, intermarried with the Scythian men, and convinced their new husbands to move northeast across the flat grassy plains, high mountains, and searing deserts of the Russian steppes, where the group eventually evolved into the Sauromatian culture.

Amazons in Eurasia:
The first direct evidence for warrior women of high status on the steppes of southern Russia comes from excavations of burial sites of the Sauromatian culture dating from the 6th to the 4th century B.C. Judging from their grave goods, Sauromatians were nomadic, experts in animal husbandry, and skilled in warfare.

In some archaeological digs in Eurasia, as many as thirty-seven per cent of the graves contain the bones and weapons of horsewomen who fought alongside men. Credit Photograph by Erich Lessing / Art Resource.

Starting around the 4th century B.C., Sauromatian culture evolves into the Sarmatian culture, also a nomadic people that make their livelihood raising animals and versed in the art of war. The culture, which had been expanding its territory, soon shifts its focus. “They become raiders and traders, with forays to the west to interface with the Romans, and they relocate to cities and to areas along large trade routes,” Davis-Kimball says. “Their wealth increases. We see that in their burial items. We see strong, powerful women, but their role changes. We find burials of women that still retain cultic artifacts, indicating that they were a priestess of some sort, but there is much more gold and more secular ornamentation — more golden cups, more golden jewelry, elaborate things — and less weaponry. This type of evolution is a normal manifestation of culture.”

From the 2nd century B.C. to the 2nd to 3rd century A.D., the Sarmatians migrate to the west and north of the Black Sea, and eventually invade Dacia (now Romania). In the 3rd century A.D. the Sarmatians are invaded by the Goths, and in 370 A.D. they are overtaken by Huns and either killed or assimilated. Jeannine Davis-Kimball believes that remnants of the integrated Sarmatian population can still be found in the descendants of that conquering horde of Mongols. The Mongols relocated from southern Russia to western China and western Mongolia 150 to 200 years.

Whether college is still several years away, or just around the corner, we can all use some help with deciding where to apply. Eden gets some expert advice on the plethora of factors to consider.  

We all like to think that we do what we can to make the world a better place and help people in need, but some people choose to make a career of it. Social workers labor tirelessly to help those who need it, without much glamor or glory.

To learn a little of what the daily work of a social worker is like, we spoke with Kate Abramson, who currently works with the Lung Cancer Alliance.

Tell us about your current position and how long you’ve been at it.

My name is Kate Abramson. I have been a social worker for seven years. At the start of my 7^th year—lucky seven—I joined Lung Cancer Alliance as the Support Services Manager.

What drove you to choose your career path? Why social work?

Ever since I was a child I had that clichéd desire to “help people.” My parents were very active volunteering with social service agencies when I was younger. When I found out that a big aspect of social work is advocating for those who don’t have a voice and working on their behalf to make positive change happen in their lives, I knew this was the path for me.

How did you go about getting your job? What kind of education and experience did you need? Did you need any licenses or certifications?

Most social workers have a Masters in social work from an accredited school. Each state has its own individual licensing exam and process. After graduate school, you take an exam to be a licensed graduate social worker (LGSW). Two years later while working in the field under the supervision of a social worker, you take another exam to become a LICSW.

The six years I spent at a community mental health center working with mentally ill and medically compromised individuals prepared me to counsel the types of patients I encounter in my current position; lung cancer survivors and their families dealing with a variety of health issues as they battle a disease.

What kinds of things do you do beyond what most people see? What do you actually spend the majority of your time doing?

The duties of a social worker vary from job to job and differ greatly depending on who we are trying to help. At my previous job, I was working directly with mentally ill patients and individuals battling major health concerns and most of my time was spent doing things like advocating for their care, helping them maintain their correct mental health, helping acquire proper medications as well as continuing ongoing therapy and skill-building.

In these types of roles, you need to be flexible because your schedule can change very quickly depending on the needs of the individuals who rely on you for support. The counseling skills I learned in my first position help my every day that I take a call from a lung cancer patient who is looking for answers to their questions whether it is about a new treatment they are seeking or helping them find a support group in their area. If I had to sum it up, I would say basically social workers are master listeners who try to make the lives of people going through tough times just a little bit easier.

What misconceptions do people often have about your job?

I think when most people hear the term “social worker” they think of people who show up to take away babies from families like the characters you see on shows like Law & Order. The truth is that people have no idea how broad our work can be. Depending on your particular focus area you can make an impact in a variety of professional settings. For example, I started my career working in a local mental health agency and then moved into the nonprofit world working with lung cancer patients across the U.S. These are two very different work environments, but the desire to help people is the same in both settings. Those skills never change. The bottom line is there are no set rules for what you can do with your social work degree. The professional possibilities are endless and are only limited by personal interest and skill set.

What are your average work hours?

Job hours can vary, like many professions, depending on what type of social work you are doing. Now my hours are mostly 9 to 5, but in previous positions I’d have to get up early in the morning to meet clients or get called late at night to go locate someone who hadn’t been seen in weeks.

What personal tips and shortcuts have made your job easier?

I’ve learned over the years is that being flexible and open to change is one of the most important things you can do as a social worker. You might struggle in this field if you worry about a hard adherence to schedules and expect people to behave in a certain way. I’ve learned to embrace the uncertainty and adjust on the fly.

What do you do differently from your coworkers or peers in the same profession? What do they do instead?

I’m not sure I do anything different than my coworkers since we all have the same primary goals. As social workers, we are uniquely trained to help people maximize the opportunity for change in themselves and/or their situations. You are affecting change on a daily basis, whether it be big or small. Also, your daily to-do list can change every day. I don’t think I’ve ever said that I was bored doing a social work job.

What’s the worst part of the job and how do you deal with it? I imagine this work can take an emotional toll.

Sometimes being a social worker can just be straight up exhausting. There are really good days and there are also really bad days. You are working with people who can be happy, excited, depressed, angry, and frustrated all at the same time. Obviously taking time for yourself and knowing your limits is the best. You also have to understand that some people aren’t ready for change and they might have many failures until they have a breakthrough which moves them in a more positive direction.

What’s the most enjoyable part of the job?

The most enjoyable part of the job is probably developing meaningful relationships with patients. The process of advocating for a person or family that does not have a voice is very empowering work which falls in line with what I have always wanted to do. Helping someone who other people have looked down upon work towards their goals and reach their potential makes all the effort worth it.

Do you have any advice for people who need to enlist your services?

I think sometimes people see a social worker when they’re not really ready. If you don’t have any desire to change it will be very hard for us to work with you. It’s okay to not know how to change or what to do to help yourself, but as long as you express that you are ready to move in a positive direction working with a social worker will be effective.

What kind of money can one expect to make at your job?

You will never become a millionaire as a social worker no matter where you work. However, most people who go into this field would probably agree that they aren’t doing it for the money.

How do you “move up” in your field?

As I mentioned before, there is no set “social work” job which actually is a very good thing. The profession offers multiple opportunities for long-term advancement and strong growth potential. Most people straight out of school will work as a case manager, rehabilitation specialist or a similar entry level job. It’s where you will definitely be the most overworked, but it helps you get the best sense of where you’d like to work long-term in a professional setting. Once you figure that out, you need to immerse yourself in that setting to get the necessary counseling skills you will need as you take greater responsibility and acquire a more difficult case load.

For me, Lung Cancer Alliance was an excellent transition and “move up” for my field. I’m working with lung cancer patients from all over the country and able to use my skills I developed during my initial social work training. I’m still supporting patients, but I’m also working as a resource for other social workers who are seeking to create support environments at the local level for the individuals they work with on a daily basis.

What do people under/over value about what you do?

I think that people undervalue the importance of one-on-one interactions that happen daily between social workers and their patients. If an outsider looks at a social worker’s tasks and actions it might be hard to see that anything meaningful is taking place, but this underscores the importance of the relationships that deepen over time. We really are working to lay a foundation to actually make progress.

On the flip side, I think people overvalue impartiality that needs to happen in a professional setting particularly in the face of difficult circumstances. Sometimes we get angry when we take a personal interest in someone’s life as they battle mental illness or a late stage cancer diagnosis. It’s a normal response to stressful circumstances.

Trust me, we feel it, we know some of these situations suck, and we’re also talking to people after it’s done. People need us to be there “in the moment” with them to fight through problems. It’s important that they know they are not alone when they reach out to us.

What advice would you give to those aspiring to join your profession?

I would tell them to make sure they figure out what they are passionate about and how they want to try to make a difference. At the end of the day, social work is a career that speaks to the basic desire to really help others. It isn’t easy work, but it can be so rewarding, impactful and meaningful to so many communities that need open-minded listeners to help solve problems.

It used to be that cakes for special occasions were pretty ordinary.  But TV shows like Cake Boss and Ace of Cakes have changed that…elevating cake decorating to a new art form. Nicole learns from an expert that if you have the right talent, becoming a pastry chef is a piece of cake.