The Mississippi Delta
Most of our plans were already coming together on this journey. After all, we’d been in a tornado (sort of), got hit by lightening (almost), taken The Mississippi River for ourselves (in our dreams), and generally ate a lot of good food (true). Now it was time to do the most important thing we could do: create the musical genre known as The Blues!
How do we do that? That question is easy to answer: follow historic Highway 61 (The Blues Trail) and play our music until someone hears it and likes it and gives us a record contract and a museum that bears our names. Piece of cake. I mean, The Blues Highway was so named because people before us had done just that.
Like B. B. King, whose museum we stopped at in near his hometown in Indianola.
Like Muddy Waters, whose hometown of Rolling Fork was nearly abandoned (because everyone left to create The Blues, of course).
Like in Clarkesdale, where countless Blues-Men were born, and where Morgan Freeman now has his very own Blues Club. Rob and I were actually asked to play there (okay, we were sort of invited to a party at his club) but we had another gig (hotel reservations in another town).
Though fame and fortune eluded us (the music we had set out to invent already existed), Rob found great solace in the town of Greenwood, the former cotton capital of the world, roaming the wide, empty streets strewn with cotton and magic, and our first Wal-Mart in some time.
We were told by a local before we left on this route that it was “a whole lot of nothing.” Oh, nice southern lady, you could not have been more wrong. It was another beautiful drive, perhaps the best vistas I’ve seen, and a whole lot of living history on the way.
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