Gaining Ground is focussed on the lower Mississippi delta, but strikes me that this approach may have broader application - particularly in an Australian context where we have a seemingly endless struggle trying to work out how we are going to manage major economic and ecological assets like the Murray/Darling river systems.
Michael Loyd Young, documents the 150 miles of Highway 61, the famed blacktop road snaking from Memphis, TN down to Greenville, MS. At the halfway point, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, sits Clarksdale, MS, the city considered the birthplace of the blues and the location of Robert Johnson’s famed “Cross Road Blues” intersection of Highway 61 and 49. The Delta has been home to blues legends such as Charley Patton, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Cadillac John Nolden, B.B. King, T-Model Ford, Mississippi Slim, Big Jack Johnson, and Willie King, among countless others whose music has become the glue that holds these communities together as they struggle to survive.
My previous posts have looked at various aspects of my most recent trip to Canada & the USA – here are a few incidental point and shoot photos from my wanders around various cities, towns, rivers, bayous and forests over the past month or so… […]
The river was up 40 feet at the Greenville Bridge by the time we got there - swelled by the normal snowmelt in many of the 37 States and 2 Canadian provinces that drain into it and also from the floodwaters that flowed down from the Cumberland River that had trashed Nashville, Tennessee a couple of weeks ago - all of this made for some exciting canoeing - with many of the sandbars and islands under water.
