Run the Blues Highway - Nashville to New Orleans Photography Tour
Click here to book through our partners Light and Land!
This tour will be taught with my fellow Light and Land tutor Mark Seymour.
Our Blues Tour will start
Jazz and blues music flourished in the segregated night clubs and theatres of Nashville, Tennessee and influenced many other genres that came to life in the Music City, like country, bluegrass and rhythm and blues. We will meet and spend our first night here, listening to good blues music in a historic club. The following day we will explore and photograph the city. Our next stop will be in Memphis: Beale Street was declared the Home of the Blues by an act of Congress in 1977. This city was instrumental for the development of the blues music and its performers. Memphis Blues, the first song based on the classic 12 bar blues structure, was published her by W.C. Handy. That song started spreading the blues genre across the States.
According to the legend, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the guitar. His famous blues song Crossroads refers to that place. We will follow the Highway 61 down to Clarksdale to find the crossroads. This small town was a main stop for the musicians travelling north from their homes. We will visit the most important locations in and around Clarksdale, like Leland, Tutwiler, the Dockery plantation and even Indianola. We will visit the Delta Blues Museum and listen to great live music in the Ground Zero Club.
Our tour will then take us further south to Jackson, visiting and photographing historical locations along the Highway 61. After spending the night in Jackson, we will drive to our last stop: New Orleans, where Highway 61 ends. Here the blues developed into Dixieland and Jazz and mixed with European and Caribbean sounds. Most blues records from the 1920s originated from the Crescent City, as New Orleans is also known.
This tour will be a wonderful full immersion in the history of the blues music, from its inception to the genres that originated from it. We will be telling the story in images, building a body of work that we will then edit and organise in a perfect photo essay that will illustrate our journey and the blues journey. You will come home with a complete documentary essay of your trip, and the newly developed skills will help you become a real visual storyteller, able to build a coherent series of images that create a narrative of any project you want to photograph.
This is a unique opportunity to experience the blues music and its development and to learn documentary photography skills that you will always be able to use going forward in your photography.
