It's late winter in Oxford, Mississippi--colder than you might expect if you're not from these parts--and I'm looking ahead to the publication of Journeyman's Road, my third blues book and one I am planning to publicize with a three-week tour from Mississippi to Portsmouth, NH to Tampa and back. June 1 to June 21, plus scattered hits. Barnstorming. Many different guitar players--Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee, Charlie Hilbert, Orville Davis, Bill Abel--plus Frankie Paris (vocals) and Jason Ricci (harp).

One focus will be Jon Gindick's Harmonica Jam Camp in Tampa, where I'll be coaching in mid-June. (www.gindick.com)

The subtitle of my book is Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York. My tour will give me a chance to pair up with a series of contemporary blues performers who happen to be friends.

I'll share dates, gigs, on-air appearances, and bookstore appearances in the near future. I'll also share my experiences on the road and my thoughts about the strange and marvelous thing that is contemporary (postmodern) blues culture.

Here's one thought for the day: authenticity, in blues terms, no longer exists--if indeed it ever existed. It is a positional term, not an essence. The way we use the term, if we choose to use it, tells us much about the needs, as aficionados, that we bring to the "blues experience," and little about the music and/or performers we apply it to. Authenticity is as much about what we lack, and hunger for, as it is about what actually presents itself for our listening pleasure.

When I was called to the stage at a blues festival held in January 2005 in the small Senegalese fishing village of Jiloor, asked to perform with Senegal's best-known bluesman, Vieux MacFaye, I was introduced as a "Mississippi bluesman," and given the respect accorded to that title. So who was more authentic: Vieux MacFaye, a native of Africa who sang Chicago blues classics in French-accented English, or me: a New York native, now a resident of Mississippi, who worked the streets of Harlem and the clubs of the Eastern Seaboard for many years?

By the same token, what do we do with my current blues-partner, Bill Abel? He's a real Mississippi bluesman if there ever was one. He's a native of Belzoni, Mississippi. He's a folk artist and house painter as well as performer. He makes his own guitars; he brought half a dozen homemade guitars to our gig this past Saturday night. He was a frequent playing partner of the late Belzoni bluesman, Paul "Wine" Jones. He plays with his fingers, Delta style, rather than with a pick. He sings without pretense in a deep and idiosyncratic style that has "Mississippi" written all over it.

Oh yeah: and he's a white guy. Has a full beard and wildman hair.

Who is more authentic: Bill or Vieux? The white Mississippi guy or the black African guy?

Maybe it's time to retire the word "authentic," or at least withdraw our investment in it as a fetish-term.

The moment we do that, we free ourselves to actually hear what we're hearing, rather than vetting it in line with our unconscious needs. We free ourselves to take pleasure in a range of contemporary blues musics, rather than holding each of them up--as various sorts of self-styled purists do--as somehow a falling away from the Good Old Days of "real" blues.

You can't tell a book by looking at the cover. Much wonderful blues music is being made these days--some of it by Mississippi natives like Bill Abel, some of it by "furriners" like Vieux MacFaye. I'll keep trying to tell its story as I go.