Highway 61 Resurfaced
By (Author) Bill Fitzhugh
Duckworth Books
Farrago
2nd December 2021
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Esoteric thriller
Comic (humorous) crime and mystery
Humorous fiction
Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary
Satirical fiction and parodies
Music industry
813.6
Paperback
320
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
It all starts when Southern Belle Lollie Woolfolk sashays into Rick Shannon's office at Rockin' Vestigations in Vicksburg. She hires him to find the grandfather she never met, one-time blues producer Tucker Woolfolk. The day after Rick finds him, the old man is murdered. A couple of days later, Tucker Woolfolk's former partner is killed too. Then Lollie Woolfolk disappears. Things start to get weird when another woman claiming to be Lollie Woolfolk shows up and hires him to find out who killed the two men and why.
Rick's investigation turns up evidence pointing to the legendary Blind, Crippled, and Crazy sessions, a fabled blues recording date featuring Blind Buddy Cotton, Crippled Willie Jefferson, and Crazy Earl Tate. Blues scholars have been searching for these tapes for fifty years. But no one has ever killed for them. Until now.
Rick and Lollie soon find themselves looking back half a century to solve the case and it takes them up famed Highway 61 to places rich in the history of the blues. A place where, for the past fifty years, certain people have worked very hard to keep the lid on some unsavoury business.
Reviews of the DJ Rick Shannon series
'Hilarious and dead on. Fitzhugh treats us to a tragicomic tour of regional black-and blues history'New York Times
'Fast, funny, and fabulous. This is Fitzhugh's finest and that's saying a lot!' Jill Conner Browne
'A lost-tapes mystery - all blues mysteries are lost-tapes mysteries - but unlike the rest, this pays off witha climax so rich you want to hear the tapes as much as the people hunting them down' Greil Marcus
Bill Fitzhugh is the author of eleven satiric novels, including Pest Control which has been translated into half a dozen languages, produced as a stage musical, and a German radio show; Warner Brothers owns the film rights. He lives in Los Angeles.