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HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED
by Bill Fitzhugh
William Morrow, April 2005
368 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0060597615


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

HIGHWAY 61 RESURFACED is Bill Fitzhugh's love letter to the Mississippi delta blues. The title is a reference to Bob Dylan's arguably perfect album Highway 61 Revisited. The album, in turn, was a tribute to the highway that begins in New Orleans and runs through Mississippi, continuing all the way north to Hibbing, MN (Dylan's birthplace) and ends up in Canada.

Highway 61 figures in all kinds of blues lore. As the story goes, Robert Johnson, who many credit as the father of the blues, sold his soul to the devil in return for mastery of the music at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49. Bessie Smith died in a car accident on that highway. Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley traveled Highway 61 bringing the blues to the north.

If all of that lost you, you probably won't like this book much. There are long, leisurely excursions into all kinds of blues lore and the text is rich with references that will warm the hearts of the initiated, but might lose those less schooled in the music of the delta.

The story concerns Rick Shannon, a part-time disc jockey and private investigator, who is contacted by a woman who says she's Lollie Woolfolk and that she wants to find her grandfather, Tucker. As Rick searches for Tucker, he learns that the man was a record producer during the heyday of the juke joints that nourished the development of the blues.

Rick finds Tucker, all right, but not until he's already dead. When the next man Lollie asks him to find also turns out to be a recent murder victim and Lollie vanishes, Rick figures he's been used like a hunting dog to sniff out the whereabouts of these two men. He's not happy to have been set up to be an accomplice to murder.

Another woman claiming to be Lollie Woolfolk turns up in Rick's office and asks him to investigate her grandfather's murder. This Lollie earns Rick's trust, and together they set off across the delta discovering all kinds of things about her grandfather, local history and the blues along the way.

They conclude that it's likely these murders are related to a session which may or may not have ever actually occurred where Blind Billy Cotton, Crippled Willie Jefferson and Crazy Earl Tate played together. These tapes, dubbed the Blind, Crippled and Crazy sessions, are the driving force behind the story.

In HIGHWAY 61, Bill Fitzhugh has created some very fine characterizations of the guys who lived and sang the blues. The romance that develops between Rick and the second, real, Lollie is sweet and their banter is some of the strongest dialogue in the book. There's a lot of humor here, and I laughed out loud at some of it. On the other hand, the cat named Crusty Boogers, who was supposed to provide comic relief throughout the story, stopped being funny pretty early on.

If you're looking for the kind of humor Fitzhugh wrote in PEST CONTROL, ORGAN GRINDERS, and the other books belonging to his first series, what you'll find here is pretty tame by comparison. The blurb Carl Hiaasen provided for the dust jacket says it better than I can, "You will seriously dig this book if you like classic rock, southern blues, clever mysteries and cats with loathsome sinus infections."

For the right reader, this book is heaven. For the wrong one, I'm afraid it's a tedious trip down dusty back roads to nowhere. I hope this review will help you figure out which camp you belong in.

Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, October 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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