"take everything down highway 61"

Our first trip for the USA Rough Guides was planned about two weeks ago. I was madly trying to fit a week long Rough Guides trip in a 2 day time slot and Jamey was slaving away at ESPN and hardly even thinking of Rough Guides or spending a hot 105 degree weekend on the Mississippi Delta. After all the frenzy, we kicked back and decide we didn't want to go that weekend. Instead we held off for another weekend when the Sunflower Blues and Gospel Festival was to be held. What a fantastic ending to our procrastination. We headed east this past weekend and for authenticity we packed some beer and our hound dog and headed to the Delta.

We had a few days to travel about 3 hours over the River to Clarkesdale, Mississippi where the festival is held each year in early August. And just our luck, a cool down descended upon the deep south and we even felt saw some rain drops scatter across our windshield. Traditional team JK style, we found some cheap i.e. free accommodations at an RV park. The highway to one side, an old Christmas float, waiting to be ridden down sunflower ave., on the other side. In addition to this magnificent float there was plenty of wide open space, homeless dogs and random people in gigantic RV's who offered us coffee and walked around shirtless. It was exactly where we needed to be.






There is so much to say about this town I dont even know where to start. What I can say is that there is at least 20,000 people from Mississippi that are voting for Obama. Clarkesdale is an awesome little liberal enclave in the deep conservative south. Anyway, I'm going to write less and instead post some pics of the weekend and let them do some of the talkin' and let Jamey do the rest. Yes, that's right, Jamey was so inspired by the Crossroads that he has committed to writing about the trip on the blog. If you have ever crossed out states like Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas or any other southern place from your cross country itinerary, you should have reconsidered. We met a blues playing, harmonica jamming man and his son from Holland, taking a cross country trip from Florida to L.A. He told us that he wanted to give his young son this memory and specifically to give him the gift of blues music where the Blues was born. He told us his son was enjoying the music but more importantly he really wanted to come over and pet Alfie. He came all the way from Holland and purposefully visited the south, and in the dead heat of summer. That's serious dedication. Dutch people are so cool. Never met one we didn't like.















Mississippi is alive with culture and gives you a history lesson that you will never forget and one that should be mandatory for every American. To visit a place with such a dark, heavy history and to see that history alive in music and song and dance and in peoples faces and even the signs on the highway, its inspiring and humbling all at once. It was a crazy experience and almost made me feel that I was in a different country all together. People were more or less unimpressed that we were from Little Rock. They actually tended to be disappointed that we were from LR because they viewed it as more unauthentic than other places in the south. Agree or not, Mississippi probably does take the prize for music culture and a bit more scary and interesting American history.









Enjoy the pics, the link to the right gives you access to the whole album on Flickr.com. A blog from the big JB coming soon............





Oh, and P.S.- yes, that is authentic cotton from the field hanging out of Alfie's slobbery mouth in the pic at the top.