Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues

If you are going south on a blues trip, you need this book. It is full of great info and directions to many, many graet sites of the blues. Highly recommended.

I highly recommend this book for anybody considering a Blues trip into the Delta. It is the best available resource on the market. Looking at its competitors, they all miss the mark due to either outdated, incomplete, or just plain incorrect information.I have just completed a Delta blues trip and read the book after I returned. Having actually done such a trip provides a very authoritative vantage point from which to judge any such work. Our trip was preceded by 6 months of online research into every aspect of the Delta and surrounding areas. Over 100 pages of information were accumulated prior to departure. The trip itself covered nearly a 1400 mile loop by car that began and ended in New Orleans. So many of the stops we made along the way ~ Jackson, Ms.; Greenwood, Ms.; Clarksdale, Ms.; Helena, Ark.; Memphis, Tenn.; all the historic gravesites; the prisons and the plantations were all covered in Steve's book. He certainly did his homework. (For goodness sake, he moved there as part of the overall immersion process, LOL!) We met Steve in Helena while he was lecturing and playing at the `Blues on Main Street' exhibit opening at the Delta Cultural Center on Cherry St. He is proficient at both. It was there we bought the book that got carried home and subsequently read after the fact. If you don't have 6 months to do your own research, just buy his book and read it in a week. He covers everything. Then take it with you and use it as a guide on the road. (p.s. Plan your trip so it somehow involves the WC Handy awards in Memphis in late April, as well as the Beale Street Music Festival that follows that weekend).

Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites Of Delta Blues by Steve Cheseborough (an independent music scholar and a performer of blues music) showcases the contributions of John Hurt, Jimmie Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Fred McDowel, Howlin's Wolf, B. B. King, Little Milton, Elvis Presley, Bobby Rush, Junior Kimbrough, R. L. Burnside and other notables essential to a proper understanding and appreciation of this authentically American music tradition. Blues Traveling is a literary and historical excursion through the Mississippi delta taking the reader on a kind of pilgrimage to juke joints and churches, birthplaces and graveyards, dusty roads and levees, where down-home blues music was born, nourished, and evolved. Blues Traveling is a unique guidebook enhanced with photographs, maps, easy-to-follow directions. If you are a fan of the blues and will be finding yourself in the delta country, the begin your trip planning by a serious perusal of Steve Cheseborough's Blues Traveling!

I thoroughly enjoyed 'Blues Traveling'. It came along just as I was planning my trip to the Delta this summer, so I constitute a sort of 'road test'. The book contains a wealth of information on little-known historic buildings and the like, and it's conveniently arranged by a very logical itinerary. With lots of little-known facts (did you know that the Great Wall of China is *not* the largest man-made structure in the world?), it's a great read whether or not you're actually traveling to the Delta. FWIW, I'm not in any way related to the author. :)

Since he was a 12 years old, Steve has had a passion for bluesmusic. He has listened to it, read about it, played it, and mostrecently, lived it. Residing and traveling in Mississippi has given bodyand soul to what was once only spirit for him. This book is anopportunity for anyone who can't be with Steve personally to get aguided tour of a region and its people by a man who can now call thesemusic sites "home". I am his sister. This is a great book.