The latest issue of Living Blues Magazine takes a long trek down the entire Mississippi Blues Trail, including a close look at nine markers in and around Greenwood.
The magazine, which hit newsstands last month, provides a marker-by-marker guide to the trail in Mississippi. It also covers the blues trail markers outside the state, from Los Angeles to Maine and in Norway and France.
The magazine includes four pages on the blues markers in and around Greenwood, as well as mentions of a few other attractions in town. WABG radio station as well as local eateries Lusco’s and the Crystal Grill are featured in sidebar articles.
The lengthy, double-issue feature was authored primarily by Scott Barretta, a part-time Greenwood resident and an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi.
Barretta, a longtime fan of the blues, has developed a reputation as a respected writer and expert on the music. He’s a past editor of Living Blues and also hosts the weekly MPB blues music radio program “Highway 61.”
The extensive project to chronicle the Mississippi Blues Trail for Living Blues totaled more than 40,000 words of writing for Barretta. The author also accompanied photographer Bill Streber on many of Streber’s thousands of miles of travel documenting the markers.
“It was a huge undertaking,” Barretta said. “It was probably half of a book.”
Barretta, along with Jim O’Neil, one of the founding editors of Living Blues, work as the primary researchers and writers for the blues trail markers.
Summarizing the markers and the blues personalities and clubs that the markers honor was the easiest part of the project, Barretta said. Far more difficult was capturing the local color and the other attractions along the way.
Even though he’d been intimately involved in the Mississippi Blues Trail project, Barretta said the magazine piece helped him realize just how extensive the trail is — and how long it would take to travel to every marker.
“I had not seen a lot of the markers physically. I'd not seen a lot of the locations,” Barretta said. “That was exciting to me.”
Wanda Clark, creative director for the Greenwood advertising firm of Hammons & Associates, which is responsible for designing and coordinating the blues trail program, said she was very pleased to see the issue of the magazine.
“We were just delighted that it was going to be focused on the trail,” Clark said. Hammons & Associates as well as state tourism officials worked with the magazine to help put together the issue.
Clark said the trail has 183 markers — including 169 in Mississippi, 12 more in other states and two at festival locations in Europe.
The 184th marker on the trail, dedicated to the blues musicians along the Gulf Coast, is set to be unveiled Jan. 9. Clark said another marker, commemorating composer and musician W.C. Handy’s birthplace in Florence, Alabama, is in the works.
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
