Shreveport, Louisiana

Waking up on day two of my trip, I depart at 8:00 AM for Shreveport, Louisiana. One of the oldest and largest cities in Louisiana, Shreveport is a city filled with history. For a period of time during the Civil War, the city actually served as the capitol of Louisiana. Since the war, the city has adopted a rich heritage of innovative music and bizarre outsider art.

Downtown Shreveport
Credit: http://www.extendedstayhotels.com/media/137440/shreveport,%20la.jpg

Lead Belly's Grave
Credit: http://www.deltablues.net/lead3.jpg

My first stop would be the gravesite of legendary Blues guitar player, Lead Belly, just outside Shreveport.  Blues and unique forms of music have an inescapable presence in Wolf Whistle, often serving to strangely bridge the gap between racial divides and temporarily placate the racist subtext frequently present in the characters' dialogue.

Moving along, I would make a quick stop at the now decrepit, Fannin Street, previously the seat of blues culture in Shreveport. Now there remain few remnants of the street's previous seedy glory (blues clubs, dive bars, brothels, and the like). Nonetheless, the area would give me a fleeting glimpse of the innovative subculture that erupted in the wake of Civil War violence as well as a brief taste of the kind of Southern seediness that Nordan revels in exposing.

Fannin Street
Credit:http://www.cr.nps.gov/delta/blues/images
/sites/fannin_street.jpg

Finally, I would spend the remainder of my time enjoying the elegant R. W. Norton Art Gallery that showcases over four centuries of art. This gallery would be a relaxing way to mull over the relationship between art and the South that is so frequently examined during this road trip.

Rather than spending my day peeling back layer after layer of the innovative Blues sound stemming from the city, I would slowly work my way through The Residents' God In Three Persons. One of the paragons of artistic integrity in American music, The Residents have long been said to have been formed in Shreveport. The band fuses the cryptic and the catchy in a baffling flurry of art-rock weirdness and post-punk skepticism and remains one of the most important and unexpected developments of American underground music. Their whimsically dark music would be a good companion to the intense otherworldliness of Nordan's writing.