We’ve been busy.

Digging deep into the noteworthy spots that tell the story of the Delta blues. We stood by the tracks in Tutwiler where W.C. Handy first heard the strains of that “new” strange form of music called the blues – the seminal event that took the blues from porch front and field songs to something that was written and marketed.
At the excellent Railroad Heritage Museum in the pretty town of Cleveland we learned how the railroad up and down the Mississippi spread the blues outward from the Delta.

At Dockery Farms we interviewed the director (a genuinely nice fellow), toured the property and really came to appreciate why this spot was where first generation bluesmen like Charley Patton birthed a new music form (the next day we took a bumpy dirt road to the rural cemetery at Holly Ridge where Patton is buried).
We toured the new Grammy Museum | Mississippi – the celebrity angle does not interest us much but there is a great display on the blues of the Delta and Mississippi musicians.
In Greenville, we walked the levee, spent time at the small, but fascinating, 1927 Flood Museum to bone up on what was one of the defining events that shaped America – the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. If you don’t know about it, read up – it’s an amazing, heartbreaking history and will be a big part of our book.
Finally, in Indianola it was B.B. King and all B.B. King – one of the best blues museums around, his gravesite onsite and a guided visit to Club Ebony, a local nightclub associated with B.B. that specialized in the blues of the Delta.