Blues Highway

Jan 17:  US Route 61 is also known as the Blues Highway. "As the major route northward out of Mississippi, U. S. Highway 61 has been of particular inspiration to blues artists."   

In keeping with the spirit of the road, we were listening to the B.B. King channel on Sirius radio as we drove I61 south from Memphis, TN.  This is not a musical genre with which either of us is very familiar, but it certainly is intriguing and now we both want to hear more and learn more about the blues.  We stopped in Clarksdale to visit the Delta Blues Museum; while interesting, this museum is more of a memorial to blues greats than an institution that educates attendees about the blues genre and its artists.  We'll have to learn more about this music before we can truly appreciate the artists celebrated in this museum.  

Driving this historic road however reinforced how/why the musicians from this area gave birth to the blues; this is a very poor region by and large, with huge farms field interspersed with small, run-down towns - hardly towns really, collections of shabby, small residences with a small church and an occasional "juke joint" along the road or a hard-up auto-repair shop.   Hard to know where (or if) children who live here go to school; we saw a few boarded up school buildings, but the active ones were few and far between.   Life certainly is far from easy here for the majority of the residents.

When we travel like this, periodically we like to stop at a small local cafe both for the local atmosphere and also for what are inevitably simple and good meals.  Along this stretch of 61, there were no such places, no grocery stores, no gas stations, no stores - period.  It would be a bad place to run low on gas, that's for sure.  We finally stopped in a larger town at a Subway store; while there, a fellow came in and asked us if the Airstream parked out front was ours, then asked a few questions about it, ending with "Would you be interested in sellin' it?  I've been lookin' for something like that."  We turned down his offer, finished our sandwiches, and headed back down the road, heading toward Vicksburg, our destination for the day.