61 Highway

The rise of the automobile and the development of a national highway system in the 1920s and 1930s coincided with the initial boom of blues, jazz, and spiritual recordings by African American artists, and songs about riverboats, trains, and railroads were soon joined by records about highways, cars, and buses. U.S. Highway 61, often called "61 Highway," became the most prominent highway in blues lore, serving as both a lyrical symbol of travel and the actual route by which many artists moved northward. Its original route, mapped in the 1920s, ran from downtown New Orleans to Grand Portage, Minnesota, on the Canadian border and connected cities including Memphis, St. Louis, and St. Paul. In Mississippi the highway was initially mostly gravel and ran about four hundred miles through the downtown areas of many communities, while today's route largely bypasses city centers, is straighter, and is about eighty miles shorter. The blues likely emerged in the late 1890s and early 1900s around the same time as the introduction of the automobile; cars were at first a novelty and luxury, with reportedly only twenty in Mississippi in 1900, but that changed dramatically after the Ford Motor Company's introduction of the Model T in 1908 and the moving assembly line in 1913, and by 1920 there were eight million registered cars on the road. Growing demand for roads from commercial interests and citizens' groups, along with concerns raised by World War I about interstate transportation of goods, led the federal government in 1916 to initiate aid to states for road building, and the Federal Highway Act of 1921 mandated a national highway system. U.S. Highway 61 was one of nine numbered highways through Mississippi officially designated in November 1926, and construction on the initial road continued until the early 1940s. By then at least seven blues singers had recorded songs about Highway 61, and later artists on the theme included Johnny Young of Vicksburg and Bob Dylan, whose 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited" was influential. African American singers and musicians who lived in communities along the southern stretch of Highway 61 in Mississippi included Willie Dixon, Louisiana Red, Artie "Blues Boy" White, Percy Strother, Greg Osgood and Cee Blaque, Little Joe Blue, Milt Hinton, and the Red Tops from Vicksburg; Muddy Waters and Johnny Dyer from Rolling Fork; J.D. Short from Port Gibson; Hezekiah and the Houserockers, Pap Lightfoot, William "Cat Iron" Carradine, Jimmy Anderson, Elmo Williams, and the Ealey brothers from Natchez; and Scott Dunbar, Polka Dot Slim, Robert Cage, Lester Young, and William Grant Still from Woodville. For decades Highway 61 often served as the main street in many communities, including Washington Street in Vicksburg, and the stretch leading into Vicksburg from the south was among the first parts of U.S. Route 61 to be paved with concrete. The highway became so iconic in American music history that tourists often photographed its signs and many products, businesses, and events were named in its honor. The Sparks Brothers, twins Aaron and Marion, also known as Milton and as "Pinetop and Lindberg," were the first artists from Mississippi to record a song about Highway 61, doing so in 1933 while living in St. Louis after being born near Tupelo in 1910; like many other blues songs about Highway 61, their version was inaccurate about the route, which ran north to Minnesota and south to New Orleans rather than to the Gulf of Mexico.

Vicksburg, Mississippi · United States