{"id":28776,"date":"2015-11-02T17:07:48","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T22:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=28776"},"modified":"2015-11-23T18:29:49","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T23:29:49","slug":"when-i-first-stepped-foot-in-mississippi-greenville-bound-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/when-i-first-stepped-foot-in-mississippi-greenville-bound-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"When I First Stepped Foot In Mississippi:\u00a0Greenville Bound, 1984"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vol7Alvarez\"<\/a>Back in 1984\u2014when Stevie Ray Vaughn supplied the biggest bang to the blues since hippies mixed acid with the\u00a0mud\u2014I was asked by my editor how I\u2019d like to be rewarded for a year of good work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chase politics?<\/span><\/p>\n

Write portraits of\u00a0white collar criminals with their blue-veined hands in the cookie jar?<\/span><\/p>\n

The transportation beat?<\/span><\/p>\n

No, no, and good God\u00a0no.\"ButchRuthGreenvillePhoto\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted to write about a land I had long dreamed of in guitar-haunted reveries,\u00a0the reverse of the Great Migration so beautifully chronicled in The Warmth of Other Suns<\/em>\u00a0by Isabel Wilkerson.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u00a0wanted to go to\u00a0Mississippi and see for myself where the music came from. True to\u00a0his word,\u00a0Gilbert L.\u00a0Watson III (one of the last of America\u2019s great newspapermen, dead at age 70 in 2015) sent me.<\/span><\/p>\n

There, I ate barbecued turkey necks down a long dirt\u00a0road, sipped bourbon from a plastic cup in a tin shack, and filed dispatches from the annual Delta Blues Festival in the Freedom Village section\u00a0of Greenville, passing up Stevie Ray\u2019s fireworks\u00a0to watch an aging farmer named Cleveland Jones play the broom.\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 1984\u2014when Stevie Ray Vaughn supplied the biggest bang to the blues since hippies mixed acid with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":249,"featured_media":29307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[3819],"class_list":["post-28776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-writing","tag-rafael-alvarez"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Vagabond7FEATEuphusRuthpartial.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}