Book Talk: Black music, white culture and a legendary U.S. highway

By Randall Mikkelsen BOSTON (Reuters) - Author Dennis McNally accompanied the Grateful Dead as a publicist and historian on the band's “long strange trip,” and he chronicled Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation author of “On the Road.” For his latest book, “On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom,” McNally twice drove every mile of U.S. Route 61, the legendary Mississippi River road, to document the influence of black music on white America. McNally spoke to Reuters about the music and the “freedom principle” underlying more than a century of American experience. Q: What is the common thread in your writing on American counterculture, and now the influence of black music?

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