Highway 61 A Father-and-Son Journey through the Middle of America [Paperback]

Long-distance father William McKeen watched his son grow up during summers, holidays, and long weekends. Now, with Graham in college, the two take a summer road trip down Highway 61, the legendary road of the blues, from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. In cheap motels and smoky bars, with obscure bluesmen and barnstorming guitar heroes, they discover how the highway links rich and poor, black and white. In Minnesota and Iowa, William shows his son where he spent boyhood summers with his father, who died a decade before Graham was born. In St. Louis, there's another nostalgic return to a former haunt, a slice of rock-and-roll heaven called Blueberry Hill. In Memphis, they find the genuine, uncommercialized side of the city's legendary music world, and deep in the heart of the Mississippi Delta they stand over the grave of legendary bluesman Charley Patton, listen to the murmur of wind over the cotton fields, and offer silent benediction. As they venture together through magnificent country, walking the hometown streets of Bob Dylan and Mark Twain, standing at Robert Johnson's haunted crossroads, journeying from the Delta Blues Museum to Doe's Eat Place to the Alachafaya Caf? of New Orleans, father and son come to realize that they have a permanent connection that can never be broken by age or distance.A father-and-son road trip through some of the most musically fertile and diverse landscapes in America.