Getting Ready

I’m not quite started my the trip down the Blues Highway yet.  Here in Minneapolis, ‘blues’ reminds one more often of subzero temperatures (except this year) than the first true American music.  When we hear blues today, it is usually modern, electric Delta blues, incubated in the first third of the 20th Century in the 100-mile stretch of flat country running along the Mississippi from Memphis south to Vicksburg, MS and refined in Chicago.  My trip, starting Tuesday, will take me through many of the legendary towns of the delta, places like Tutwiler, Clarksdale, Greenwood, Helena, Avalon and several of the places that claim to be the crossroads where Robert Johnson tendered his soul to the Devil. In Avalon, where John Hurt lived, I’ll rub elbows with the southwestern edge of the Piedmont.  I play that Piedmont style more often than others.   Then I’ll be on to New Orleans and Storyville that gave us the more sophisticated, jazz-flavored blues of New Orleans blues that white audiences heard well before Delta blues, back in 1910 − 1920, from Ma Rainey, Jelly Roll Morton and Bessie Smith.

Anyway, I’m excited to start!  I hope you’ll join me.