“Smell that sweet magnolia blooming….” —Bob Dylan The last time the United States Postal Service honored Mississippi...
Rafael Alvarez
Rafael Alvarez is a reporter, short story writer & screenwriter based in Baltimore. He has been visiting & writing about Mississippi since 1984. A former staff writer for HBO's "The Wire," his new book is a collection of short fiction called "Tales From the Holy Land."
“Watching Son House perform bottleneck guitar was akin to seeing a locomotive on a downhill run…” –...
I took some criticism for this bit of travelogue. Not for participating–after all, the Meat Man was...
Bob Koester, 83, is the founder of one of the greatest one-two punches in American music: the...
“The melancholic music of Negro American folk origin, the blues emerged slowly at the turn of the...
We were pulled over by about six police cars just outside downtown Oxford not long after a...
In the 1962 movie Kid Galahad, Elvis Presley belted it out like so. “A poor man wants the...
Marc Ribot, the well-traveled guitarist best known for his work with Tom Waits and the Lounge Lizards,...
“Sugarman done fly away, Sugarman done gone …” – Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon The confounding and...
“Muddy’s actual birthplace [was not Rolling Fork but] to the west and north of there… Issaquena, pronounced...
“Their agate eyes opened to reflect a pinpoint of dazzle, closed again…” The description of the...
“ …we didn’t have no place to go, so we just walked around and lived in them...
Back in 1984—when Stevie Ray Vaughn supplied the biggest bang to the blues since hippies mixed acid...
The name kept coming to me near the end of the summer. Lucia Berlin. Short story writer....
This is the tale—as brief as it takes the evening sun to set in Avalon, Mississippi—about a...
Though I rarely play tapes, this summer I bought four, still-in-the-cellophane cassettes at Bob Koester’s Jazz Record...
I passed through Mississippi twice in early 2005, headed west from Baltimore to Los Angeles in February...
I thought I was pretty cool back in the first grade—1964, white-hot ground zero of global Beatlemania;...
“And my head is my only house unless it rains…” – Don Van Vliet Willie had just lost...
A Tombstone Is My Pillow “In Johnny’s voice I could hear the manifestation of my essence …”...