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few verses then doubles in tempo while the singing maintains the original tempo. The intensity grows and the clapping becomes faster and more syncopated until the song ends with a wild flourish – at exactly the same tempo in which it began. The Top Forty at the time was full of Motown, whose churning beat under ballad melodies was inspired by bass player James Jamerson, a Gullah who learned his music in a church not far from Moving Star Hall.
    I spent the following afternoon at Guy’s house with Bessie Jones, John Davis and the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Bessie was a fount of folklore, a key figure in Alan Lomax’s documentation of the region’s music five years earlier. The Rolling Stones learned ‘This May Be The Last Time’, originally a children’s ring dance, from Lomax’s recordings there. Carawan encouraged the preservation of local dialects and traditions, helped to register voters and organize against the developers pushing aside residents lacking deeds to their homes. There were already golf courses on nearby Hilton Island and the big money boys were eyeing Johns. By bringing attention to the music, Guy hoped to build local pride and an organization to halt the destruction of this unique culture. Many of the fishermen and farmers on these islands were descendants of runaway slaves from the Bahamas and other West Indian islands. Their ebony skins and sharp features told of African lineages undiluted by the rapacious practices of American slave owners. Guy’s festival was sparsely attended but full of great singing and warm feelings from an audience of determined Southern liberals and brave local blacks.
    My next stop was Albany, Georgia, where Peter deLissovoy, a friend from Harvard, was working for SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee). At nineteen, Pete had been kicked out of South Africa for paying an illegal visit to Albert Luthuli, the pre-Mandela anti-apartheid leader. Rather than fly back, he hitch-hiked from Johannesburg to Cairo, getting arrested as a spy in Tanganyika, becoming infected with bilharzia on the Nile and spending months in hospital after his return. He took me to a chicken dinner at a nearby church and I was struck by the gentle courage of the local people and the Northern volunteers. For two nights I slept in the bunk below Pete’s in a wooden house on one of the many unpaved roads in the black district. When I asked him about the marks on the wall above my bed, he said they were bullet holes from a nocturnal drive-by a few weeks earlier.
    When I was ready to leave, some of the local activists were worried that my New Jersey number plates had been visible in town for a couple of days. The implications of my meeting a cop on the highway out of town might be more unpleasant than just a speeding ticket, so they led me down dirt back roads through the red-earthed pine forests of south-western Georgia. I rejoined the highway across the state line in Alabama. (Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were doing work similar to Pete’s not far away in Mississippi; they were murdered three months later.)
    New Orleans, my next stop, was – and has remained – a law unto itself: in the South but not really of it. The struggles of my friends in Carolina and Georgia seemed far away once I hit the French Quarter. I located Preservation Hall and spent the next seven evenings there.
    Twenty-five years before the blues and folk booms of the sixties, there had been a Dixieland revival. As jazz moved from swing towards bebop in the late ’30s, a group of white fanatics set about rescuing traditional New Orleans jazz from obscurity, much as we were trying to do for blues. There are generally two strands to white fascination with African-rooted music. First, dance floors fill with people excited by a new way to shake their behinds. Then, as the fashion shifts and the beat changes, the intellectuals and wallflowers who have admired the music’s vitality and originality