I kept a little spiral notebook in my shirt pocket the whole week, the kind I use on the bus for my route notes. The parts in typewriter letters below are copied out of it word for word, spelling fixed and nothing else. The rest is what I'd add now, three months later, at my kitchen table.

Beale Street is mostly for tourists now, and I was a tourist, so I can't complain. But standing in front of the statue of W.C. Handy, the man who wrote "Memphis Blues" and "Beale Street Blues" and "St. Louis Blues" and put the word "blues" on sheet music all over the country, I felt like I'd at least knocked on the right front door. I was in bed by eleven. Bus drivers don't know how to stay out late. I was about to learn.

The tour at Sun Studio is short, and the room is small, and that's the point. Sam Phillips recorded Howlin' Wolf in that room in the early fifties before Wolf went north to Chess Records in Chicago, which is how Wolf ended up in my father's record cabinet. "Rocket 88" was cut there too, in 1951, by Ike Turner's band, who'd come up from Clarksdale, the same town I was headed to that afternoon. Everything's connected down here. You can't throw a rock without hitting a record.

The drive out of Memphis on 61 is where it hit me that I was really doing this. Once you're past the city it opens up and goes flat to the edge of the world. In Tunica County the casinos stand up out of the cotton fields like something out of a dream, and then they're gone in the mirror and it's just fields again.

That night I found Loretta Pitre's cafe because the motel man said "go see Loretta," and I'm glad I listened. More about Loretta on the main page. More about the catfish everywhere.

My biggest day. I've written about the museum, Stovall, the crossroads and the juke joint on the main page, so I'll just add the Riverside Hotel. The empress of the blues, Bessie Smith, was hurt in a car wreck out on Highway 61 in September of 1937 and died in Clarksdale, at what was then the hospital for Black people in town. Later it became the Riverside Hotel, and it put up a lot of musicians over the years. There's an old story, told for a long time, that she was turned away from a white hospital first. People who've looked into it since say that isn't what happened. Either way she's gone, and it's a hard thing to stand in front of.

And I want it on the record that I, William Laureano, forty-nine years old, was still dancing at one-thirty in the morning. Debra does not believe this.

Tutwiler is a quiet little town, and you'd drive right through it if you didn't know. W.C. Handy wrote in his book that around 1903, waiting there for a train late at night, he woke up to a man next to him playing guitar by pressing a knife against the strings, and singing about where the railroad lines crossed. Handy never forgot it. It's one of the oldest descriptions of the blues that anybody has. I stood by the tracks and tried to picture it. No train came.

The graves I wrote about on the main page. I'll only add that the sun in a country churchyard in the middle of a May afternoon in Mississippi is not a joke, and that I have never been so grateful for a jar of ice water in my life.

The hot tamales deserve their own page. They're smaller than the Mexican kind I know from home, simmered instead of steamed, spicy, and sold by the dozen out of all kinds of little places. Nobody I asked agreed on how they came to the Delta, and everybody I asked was sure. I bought a dozen for the road and they did not make it to Cleveland.

Charley Patton's grave at Holly Ridge has a proper stone now, put up a few years ago. Before that, from what I read, it wasn't marked at all, which is hard to think about for a man who made so much of what came after. I went to Dockery at the end of the day, when the light gets long and gold and the shadows of the old buildings stretch out across the road. That was the right time. If you go, go then.

Coming down 61 into Vicksburg, the land finally rises up after a week of flat, and you feel like you've come out the bottom of something. The national military park is big and quiet and full of monuments to the men who fought there in the siege of 1863. I'm not a Civil War man, but you can't walk through there and not be still for a while.

Then I went and stood on the bluff over the Mississippi, like Anthony told me to, and watched the river go by, wide and brown and in no hurry. Willie Dixon was born right here in Vicksburg, the man who wrote so many of the songs Muddy and Wolf made famous in Chicago. Everything I'd been listening to my whole life went up this river and that highway to my city. And here I was, going the other way.

Driving the whole highway back up in one day was the right way to end it. Every town I'd stopped in went by again in order, like the credits at the end of a movie. I stopped at Loretta's for one last plate and to say thank you, and she told me to come back and bring my wife this time. I intend to. Debra says if there's a pool at the motel, she'll consider it.

I didn't find where the blues came from. I don't think it came from one place. But I found a lot of the places it passed through, and the people who live there now, and I came back with something I can't really put on a web page. Pop would have liked it. I think he would have liked the catfish most of all.