Highway 61 Visited

Following the Blues Trail in the Mississippi Delta. By Tony Russell

A voice and a guitar on a Clarksdale street corner… a piano pounding in a Leland tavern... a harmonica wailing on the airwaves from some small-town radio station... if you are a blues lover of a certain age, such music will have been part of the soundtrack of your life. If you’ve ever been moved by Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II and the rest of that astonishing company of blues musicians born and raised in northwest Mississippi, you owe it to yourself to see where they came from, the topography of their lives. Visiting the Mississippi Delta, you can paint in a backdrop to that music, create a stage set in your imagination for Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters to walk out on.

But not only that: you can people your stage with living musicians, too. There is blues in the Delta yet, if you know where to find it. Johnson has done with preaching the blues and the Wolf howls no more, but their work is carried on by sturdy exponents of oldfashioned blues values like T-Model Ford and Super Chikan, Big George Brock and Little Howling Wolf. It’s not just a journey of remembrance, going down Highway 61.

There is any number of ways to travel in the Delta, but for a blues lover it’s logical to move within the outline of a long, thin triangle (a …

by Tony Russell
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