She watched him as his taillights disappeared around the bend
The road goes on forever, and the party never ends

— Robert Earl Keen

The story of American music is a tale of travel — of styles and performers whose paths have crossed and connected, forked and intersected. It’s the story of settlers and slaves who brought the songs of their homelands across the ocean, then across the land. And it’s the story of the traveling minstrels of the 19th century who wandered the countryside and played their songs for anyone who would listen.

In the early 1900s it was the story of A.P. Carter, who drove his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle out of the Appalachian Mountains in a broken-down Ford so they could sing their songs into a microphone and create what we now call country music. It was the story of a mediocre blues musician named Robert Johnson who, legend has it, met the devil at a Mississippi crossroads and sold his soul to become the greatest guitar player who ever lived. And it was the story of hundreds of other blues and jazz musicians who escaped the sharecropping and poverty of the deep South and lit out by train, bus, or thumb for the big cities of the North, where they began brewing the concoction of influences that eventually became R&B, soul, bebop, and rock ‘n’ roll. (more…)