3. Cypress Grove
This isn’t played in Skip James’s open minor tuning, but is my
adaptation in dropped
D, and I did a little something different on the guitar behind each verse. The
biggest trouble I had with
singing this was finding a way to identify with the line “to love somebody
I never can control.” I
thought, why would I want to do that? I thought about changing the words a bit
. Then I thought of
some very out of control people I have known, and I could get behind the words
and do the song.
4. 61 Highway
If you take this road through the Mississippi Delta and make a turn at Leland
onto
82W, you end up in Greenville where blues musician Eugene Powell used to live.
I first visited him
in 1992 with my German friend Axel Kustner. Eugene was in his 80's then, and
he could remember
almost everything that had ever happened to him or to anybody else he’d
ever known. He could
tell stories all night long and transport you back to the early days of the
century, when parts of the
Delta were still forest and swamp and you could still come across bear tracks
and hear panthers
call out in the night. Eugene was also a fine musician, and I had a great time
playing music with him
in between stories. next page