I’d been out of New Orleans for the past three days and had only left Greenwood with about two hours of tape from a childhood friend of Eddie Jones, a.k.a. Guitar Slim, one of the greatest blues guitarists I’d ever heard and the subject of my often-delayed book. A book I’d delayed so much since joining the faculty at Tulane that they gave me until the fall to wrap up the project. I agreed. It was October and I was reworking chapter two.

As I cranked the jack, I looked at the countryside surrounding the highway. Besides the church, there wasn’t much. A rotted barn with a rusted roof, a defunct convenience store among a row of three other storefronts. Even the church looked abandoned in this Delta ghost town. About the only thing around here was cotton, and being that it was mid-October, the fields were brown and bursting with white bolls. A complete sea of those little white dots blowing under a cloudless blue sky in a wind that quickly dried my sweat from working the jack. My biceps swelled and heated with exhaustion.

I grunted and clenched my teeth when I finally got the truck up and began concentrating on the tire. As I worked, I thought about where I’d start looking for Loretta’s brother in Memphis.

Taking a break from Slim would be a welcome distraction. Of course, I’d become kind of an expert on these distractions. When I finished up playing defensive end for the New Orleans Saints about ten years ago, I found myself kind of lost for a trade. Hitting people really hard wasn’t something that you used on your resume. So, I went back to Tulane, which I attended as an undergrad, got a masters, and then kept rolling on to the University of Mississippi for my doctorate in Southern Studies.

My specialty was recording oral histories or hunting information on long-lost or dead musicians. That meant crisscrossing the Delta or Chicago or parts of Texas searching for hundred-year-old birth certificates or trying to find folks who’d rather stay hidden. Among music historians, I was what you’d call a blues tracker.