I saw Yazoo City, Mississippi, in the mid-1980s. It was the ugliest town I had ever seen. It was hard to imagine that people actually lived in a place that looked so much like a dump. I wonder if it has cleaned itself up in the years since. It really was a horrible place. I saw my first cypress swamp not far from there, and it was absolutely beautiful; but Yazoo City was ugly.

It was a real challenge to work on the "Blues" chapter of the Rise Again songbook, and I think it ended up being a pretty good piece of work. We did our best to get copyright permissions from the right people, but sometimes that was impossible. Many times, three recordings of the same song came out in the same year, and it was almost impossible to tell who deserved the credit for the song.

-Joe-