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This is not a gravel ride with a band booked at the end of it. The route runs through the country the blues came out of, past the towns where it was played first, and the music is on the itinerary the same way the miles are.
The King Biscuit Blues Festival
Day 3 is thirty-four miles — the shortest of the week, and deliberately so. You ride the low road into Helena on the festival's opening afternoon, clean up, and walk in. Admission is covered by your registration: no separate ticket, no gate line, no arranging anything.
A town that
knows what
it gave away.
Levon Helm grew up here, and the town has not forgotten it — his face is painted on a wall downtown. Helena sits on the Mississippi at the point where Delta music traveled north, and the radio show the festival is named after went out from here.
You will have ridden thirty-four miles and have the whole afternoon and evening in it.
All six host towns →Music at camp
Local players, booked town by town, playing close enough that you feel it in the chair. Nobody is on a stage forty yards away.
Each host town brings players from that part of the Delta, so the music changes as the country does.
A flatbed, a corner of a field, a pavilion. Near enough that conversation stops.
It starts when the plates are cleared and runs as long as people stay up, which is longer than anybody plans.
