Every week for over the last twenty years, Highway 61 Radio has brought the best in blues music past, present, and future to fans all over Mississippi and the Mid-South. Now, thanks to both streaming shows and Podcasting from our website, www.highway61radio.org, Highway 61 is able to spread its unique perspective to blues fans across the world!
The encyclopedic knowledge and vast music collection of host and renowned blues scholar Scott Barretta are only a couple of the many sources Highway 61 draws its rich content from every week. Highway 61 also features resources from the Blues Archive at The University of Mississippi’s J.D. Williams Library, material from artists featured in another Ole Miss institution, Living Blues magazine, field recordings and interviews with artists, and live shows that Barretta and other Highway 61 staff cull from every juke and cranny of Mississippi.
Over the years, the hosts of Highway 61 have included William Ferris, blues scholar and director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and David Nelson, who, like Barretta was an editor of Living Blues.
In early 2007, the Seattle-based Blues Music Foundation rewarded Highway 61 with a generous $15,000 operating grant, These award dollars will enable Highway 61's staff to continue to travel and record music and oral histories with blues artists for use on the radio show and for ultimate deposit at the Blues Archive, where they can be enjoyed by fans and blues scholars. The grant will also allow Highway 61 to expand into documentary film production.
Highway 61, which has at 100,000 listeners in Mississippi and a potential of over three million listeners in the Mid-South, is based at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Media Production, where it is recorded and produced each week under the supervision of director Andy Harper and producer and engineer, Joe York.
As Highway 61 grows along with the vibrant blues tradition, it will continue to entertain and inform listeners from Memphis to Mobile and beyond, and demonstrate why Mississippi’s oldest and longest continuous running blues radio show is also still the best.
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