HAIL ON INTERSTATE 85

I'm in an airport hotel in Atlanta Georgia en route between the gigs I've done in Alabama & downtown Atlanta and those to come in Statesboro & Athens Georgia and then up on the east coast.

Last night they kept interrupting the TV programmes to give out tornado warnings for a patch about 18 miles southwest of here, and severe storm warnings all over. The weather stations were also reporting record-breaking hailstones, allegedly up to 4 inches across (bigger than your usual golfballs), that had fallen somewhere else, and showing pictures of I-85 South, not far from the patch I'd been driving on the day before, with the hail lying so deep it looked like several inches of snow.

I flew out here on Tuesday, and on Wednesday drove the 205 miles southwest to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to sit in on a Thursday morning World Music class, have a lunchtime chat & sandwiches with some interested students, and give a Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues talk at the end of the afternoon. The academic who had been so keen to arrange my visit was away with a bad back, so I couldn't complain to him about his complete failure to read the info I'd sent him about it. He put me in a room with two walls filled with windows and no way to darken it, at a brilliantly sunlit time of day, so the film footage he might have noticed I'd be showing was near-invisible. The room also had the worst sound system I've ever been given anywhere. Which is saying something. It wasn't the fault of the poor woman who had to look after me all day in his place, nor of the students, who were terrific.

On Thursday I drove back to Atlanta, found my way to a very interesting arty/bohemian enclave very close to downtown, just off Highland Avenue (one of the places Blind Willie McTell had once lived), where in the old Stove Works on Krog Steet I was the second half of an evening about McTell, the first being Mark Miller's gospel trio performing some of Willie's gospel material, plus a live 'Statesboro Blues'. Fine guitar-work and a brilliant harmonica player.

Back on the road tomorrow, heading for Thomson GA and then Statesboro. Weather permitting.