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Garry Burnside Plays The Hill Country Blues at Booneville’s Fall Fest
Garry Burnside Plays The Hill Country Blues at Booneville’s Fall Fest

Garry Burnside Plays The Hill Country Blues at Booneville’s Fall Fest

Most Mississippi towns have some sort of community festival, so when Hill Country bluesman Garry Burnside told me he would be playing the Booneville Fall Festival, I imagined the typical small-town festival. To my shock, the Booneville Fall Festival was massive on a scale beyond anything I could have expected. People jammed nearly every downtown street, and most of the streets were lined with various kinds of food trucks. A small stage had been set up on the east side of the courthouse square, which was where Garry Burnside performed in the morning, but he was also scheduled to play on a larger stage which had been set up on the west side of downtown, and there was a larger crowd in front of that stage. When I walked back to the smaller stage, there was a good Black gospel group performing there. Although I would have been content to stay all afternoon, Garry Burnside had another show in Oxford that evening, so I left and headed to Tupelo for a cappuccino before heading on to Oxford for dinner and the other performance.

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