Highway 61
There’s a highway - or what’s left of one - that runs over 1600 miles, from New Orleans to Canada, mostly following the Mississippi river. Three hundred years ago, it was a path used by local indians, part of the Natchez Trace.
By the 1930s, as Highway 61, it was an escape route from the grim poverty of the South to the cities and jobs in the industrial North.
Men and women who made music and a million others traveled the two-lane, and over the years, it garnered more stories than any road in America.
The tale of Robert Johnson selling his soul in exchange for his musical genius at a crossroads on Highway 61 has become folk legend.
in the early 1960s, a teenager named Bob Zimmerman hitched-hiked down the highway to Duluth, Minnesota, where he launched his career. As Bob Dylan, he named his fifth album “Highway 61 Revisited.”
Though there’s not much left of Highway 61, the shadows of the souls and the echoes of the music that traveled that long, lonesome road road remain to this day.
