By Michael Gray
Publish 12 months note: First released September thirtieth 2007
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Evoking the turbulent prior of the subject's time and position, this odyssey to rural Georgia peels again the numerous layers of Blind Willie McTell's compelling, sometimes surprising, yet eventually uplifting tale. Portraying him as the most proficient artists of his new release, this account uncovers the secrets and techniques of McTell's ancestry, the hardships he suffered—including being blind from birth—and the successes he loved. touring during the South and past, this own and relocating trip finds a misplaced international of black track, exploring why he drifted out and in of the general public eye, how he was once “rediscovered" repeatedly via probability conferences, and why, before, so little has been written in regards to the lifetime of this impressive guy. half biography, half travelogue, half social heritage, this atmospheric, unforgettable story connects the subject's existence to the tumultuous sweep of historical past, exploding each stereotype approximately blues musicians and revealing a susceptible milieu of poverty and discrimination, demonstrating that little could have replaced within the Deep South, even this present day.
Awards
James Tait Black Memorial Prize Nominee for Biography (2007)
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Additional resources for Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell
Sample text
Then 35 Grant changed strategy. He abandoned his assault on the well-defended approaches to Richmond and, using a 2,200-foot-long pontoon bridge at Windmill Point, hurried his army south across the James River to attack Petersburg instead. Petersburg had already been attacked by smaller Union forces on 9 June, and the result had been a modest Confederate success. Now the big guns arrived. This small, strategically important Virginia town came under siege as Grant and Lee once again hurled the whole Army of the Potomac and the entire Army of Northern Virginia against each other, in the terrible series of battles that, in time, would push the war shuddering to its close.
39 THREE T h e f i r s t t i m e I went to Thomson, Georgia, to look for Willie McTell was in late October, 1998. I went by bus from Atlanta, something Willie had himself done many times in an earlier era. There's a widely held, mistaken view that only the poor, incompetent, and scuzzy take busesÐbut you can disabuse yourself of this notion from the safety of your sofa simply by reading Irma Kurtz's radiant, humane book The Great American Bus Ride, published in 1993. The efficiency of the whole system; the warmth and wit of the drivers; their solicitude in making sure everyone alights where they mean to; the variety of age, class and style of the passengers: these long-haul buses are upliftingÐeven literally so.
You more or less have to leave Atlanta on the interstate, but twentynine miles out you can escape at Covington, the main town in Newton County, and move onto Highway 278. Under its old name, Highway 12, this was the main road before the interstate was built, and it runs all the way east to Augusta, where the Savannah River divides Georgia from South Carolina. Highway 12 follows the route made by all the little roads that linked up the towns between the two cities before the highway was built in the 1920s.
