Robert Bilbo Walker News Today

Clarksdale, Mississippi, is the home of the Juke Joint festival, near the site where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul

The Great Migration In Reverse In the early 1990s, I often took a cheap Southwest Airlines flight from my native Dayton, Ohio to Chicago in search of down-home blues venues like Lee’s Unleaded and Rosa’s. Then, in 1995, my advertising career moved me to St. Louis. A year later, I was sitting in Junior’s Place — a rural juke joint in Chulahoma, Mississippi, a.k.a. the middle of nowhere. And my life was changed. Old bluesmen, young bluesmen. Folk art on the walls, moonshine in plastic jug...