Highway 61 revisited

[acmavm]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE29Aa01.html

May 29, 2004

<snip>

DOWN ON HIGHWAY 61, Mississippi - Satan drank his last shot of bourbon, threw the velvet cape over his shoulders and hit the road. The moon was too scared to show up on that night in the Deep South in the 1920s, but the wind has howling like a hellhound. The meeting would be at a solitary Delta crossroads. No witnesses. Robert Johnson, a young black cat from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, grandson of slaves, a bad eye contaminated by cataracts, delicate fingers, gorgeous hands and wavy hair, pinstripe double-breasted suit and pork-pie hat, arrived on time. No words exchanged. No blood spilled. Lightning struck a Gibson Kalamazoo, and the whole Deep South heard the most satanic guitar sound ever extracted by human hands. Robert Johnson didn't even blink his bad eye, Satan excused himself with a smile, and the whole future of Afro-American popular music was set in stone.

Robert Johnson's spirit is still here - down on Highway 61, the ultimate blues trip. It's a very quiet road, especially at night, when the only sound is the car stereo playing "Crossroads". Definitely not like in the 1920s and 1930s, before the mechanization of agriculture, when it was booming with roaming crowds.

<snip>

When we're talking to a black man in a juke joint on Highway 61, inevitably there'll be a discussion of the fact that blacks are only 12 percent of the US population, but they make up the absolute majority behind bars. As a fellow says in a Greenville bar, "A black man has one chance in three to go to prison at least for one year during his lifetime. A white man has one chance in 23." Works by Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett have demonstrated that incarceration reduces the US unemployment rate: but for the rate to be maintained at such a low level means non-stop expansion of the penal system.

<snip>
Commenting on Abu Ghraib, writer Ed Wethers stresses that "Americans don't read. And we love both sex and the shame it makes us feel. What else can you expect from a nation that, on the one hand, has made Internet sex sites the biggest industry on the web and, on the other, falls into a red-faced faint over Janet Jackson's Superbowl boob?" At the Stax legend Isaac Hayes' ("The Black Moses") superb restaurant and nightclub near blues-as-Disneyland, former honky-tonk Beale Street, Raymond, a writer, says that "Bush has proven he's unqualified to lead. Kerry has to prove he's qualified to lead." He's very worried about the future: "We are living in moral decline. We need someone to uplift us among the greedy and the gutless."

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Okay, there's my allotted four paragraphs. I hope that these little snippets intrigue you enough to read the whole story (which amazingly is printed in the Asia Times no less).

[reprehensor]

1. Pepe is a good writer, but...

I posted the article 'In the Heart of Bushland' which is part of the same series at another website, in which Pepe claims that there is not a single bookshop in Midland, TX.

Well, that's not true. There are several. And they're not all Xtian bookstores, there is some variety.

That said, his 'Silk Road Roving' series is an interesting portrait of Central Asia, and the outskirts of China.

[bemildred]

2. Nice piece.

Thanks for posting.