Food, Fun, Blues, Soul and Fellowship at the Mason Jubilee Fall Festival
Mason, Tennessee is a unique town in the middle of Tennessee’s most Delta-like region, close to the junction of Fayette, Tipton and Haywood Counties. Its …
juke joints
A Renaissance For South Eighth in West Memphis
Beale Street is one of the most storied streets in African-American history and folklore, but its sibling across the river, West Memphis’s Eighth Street has …
Old Highway 61 from Marion to Turrell
Since the building of I-55, most folks breeze on their way from West Memphis to Blytheville without seeing any of the old East Arkansas towns …
Celebrating Fayette County’s Blues Legacy in Moscow, Tennessee at the Inaugural Ghost River Blues Festival
Fayette County, Tennessee is historically a twin of Marshall County, Mississippi which lies to its south, both demographically and geographically. Both counties had Black majorities, …
Big Memphis: Big Don Valentine is a Living Link with Memphis’s Blues Past
Long before rap music was a thing or synthesizers, drum machines or sequencers were invented, Memphis was a blues town, but despite the city’s long …
Mason, Tennessee Celebrates Its Heritage With The Annual Fall Jubilee
Every fall, the small town of Mason in Tipton County, Tennessee holds an annual fall festival with vendors food trucks and live music. It generally …
The Blues’s Last Outpost in an Out of the Way North Memphis Bar
Visitors to Memphis’s Beale Street are usually disappointed. Although the street is famous for blues, blues is rarely heard there these days; the street’s fate …
The Field Is Empty, The Drums Silent
A friend of mine in Senatobia had heard that there might be fife and drum going on at a party on the Compress Road between …
The Marianna Cut-Off: Singing the Blues in Hughes
The St. Francis County, Arkansas town of Hughes looms large in the blues world. Alan Lomax visited in 1959, recording musicians like William Brown, Roland …
A Delta Afternoon: The Sad Death of Parkin
The Cross County, Arkansas town of Parkin is yet another rural town ravaged by Arkansas’s forced school consolidation law. The loss of its local schools …