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Traveling the Blues Highway—‘the root of all American music’

Traveling the Blues Highway—‘the root of all American music’

Samuel Reuben Kendrick, my great-grandfather, was born a slave in Alabama. In 1888 he founded a farming community called New Africa on 160 acres he bought from the railroad near Duncan, Mississippi. Among the tribulations he faced—floods, boll weevil infestations, bank loans due—one incident finally persuaded him to leave Mississippi. When a sharecropper on a nearby plantation asked to live and...

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Traveling the Blues Highway—‘the root of all American music’

Samuel Reuben Kendrick, my great-grandfather, was born a slave in Alabama. In 1888 he founded a farming community called New Africa on 160 acres he bought from the railroad near Duncan, Mississippi. Among the tribulations he faced—floods, boll weevil infestations,...

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