With the gin inside me, I began to regret my restraint in not bringing a guitar. I’d had a good time in Chicago playing Country songs with veteran guitarist Dave Myers, who’d made my day when he called up a friend and told him: “This boy showed me some licks I ain’t never seen before.” On the other hand, there was the time I’d duetted with Jimmie Walker, a stalwart of the Chicago music scene since Al Capone. I was contributing a two-note bass line on the piano, but as he switched chords I got too ambitious and changed to a four-note pattern. Walker stopped playing, shot me a withering look, and said “you need to practise some” Owens’ version of the Blues, though, was best played solo. The only accompaniment was the cicadas and the occasional howl of his dog, who’d turned up one day and stayed “He don’t have a name.

I just call him Boy.”As the sun went down I popped back to the store to pick up some food for Boy, and cornmeal and doughnuts for Jack I felt guilty about leaving. With only Boy for company, Owens was lonely, and paranoid about being robbed by his neighbours. But if I stayed longer we’d both be drinking more Seagrams than we needed, and I had to get to Greenville by nightfall.Over subsequent weeks I zig-zagged across the highways of the American South, and encountered more musical riches than I’d ever hoped for. In Greenville I met Eugene Powell, who’d recorded with The Chatmon Brothers in New Orleans back in the Thirties, while over in Louisiana I found the zydeco accordion tradition in the rudest of health, with a 600-strong crowd packed into Slim’s Yai Ki Ki roadhouse in Opelousas. I went to Baton Rouge clubs with Larry Garner, one of the city’s finest songwriters, and was driven round Slidell by bluesman and honorary sheriff Clarence Gatemouth Brown, in full cowboy regalia and police badge, his .45 between us on the bench seat.

Then there was New Orleans, despite its tasteless commercialism a magical source of jazz and R&B. But I had to get back to the real Blues, and for that I had to head north again.Most people think of of Mississippi as endless flat cotton fields, and for the most part they are correct. But the north-east boasts green fields and hills, and suffered far less from the migrations of the Forties and Fifties that emptied much of the rest of the state. So there are places where the music has survived unchanged for 60 years; around the Como area there’s a tradition of fife and drum music that is a hangover from black Americans’ African roots. I wanted to track down Jessie Mae Hemphill and Otha Turner, two of the best-known fife and drum players.

I was given Turner’s address by his daughter, Bernice, whose number I got in Clarksdale “Turn up any day,” she said “But make sure you get there by seven in the morning. Otherwise he’ll be out hunting ‘coons.”I drove through a luminescent Marshall County dawn to get to Turner’s house at the allotted time. It stood alone in the featureless landscape, a few broken chairs on the porch and a barking dog the only sign of life He was already up and out, but turned up an hour later. He was brusque: his chickens and cow had escaped from his small yard and he was trying to enlist his grandchildren to catch them.

My offer of help was rejected, but he’d spare me some time if I could pay for it, he said “I’m like an old mule. Give him something to chew on and some water and he’s gonna hold out. But keep working him for nothing and he’s gonna fall over and die, that’s right.”Turner learned how to make a “fice”, or fife, from a length of bamboo before he reached his teens. Local musicians would also make their own drums from strips of tin, cow hide and hickory wood. The fife and drums were unbeatable for raising a crowd: “The fice and drums, they go back to African times It’s a calling thing. When they give a picnic, they’d get up way early, take the drums right up over that hill, and play them.