"Highway 61:" UF Professor’s Book A Father/Son Look At American Life

March 3, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Some might call it a classic road trip, a father-and-son bonding experience, an odyssey through America’s heartland, a pilgrimage in honor of blues and folk-music icons.

William McKeen would describe the subject of his newest book like this: a three-and-a-half-week blast with one of the coolest guys he knows – his college-age son, Graham.

“Highway 61,” (W.W. Norton and Co.) is scheduled for release March 10. In it, McKeen, chairman of the University of Florida journalism department, chronicles their voyage along the stretch of pavement made famous by Bob Dylan’s 1965 album, “Highway 61 Revisited.”

A nationally recognized expert in literary journalism and rock ‘n’ roll history, McKeen uses “Highway 61″ to bundle his two research specialties with a soul-baring personal tale.

Think Andy and Opie meet Jack Kerouac.

“It was sort of like teaching a class,” McKeen said, “and my son was the only pupil.”

In an already-road-weary 1997 Ford Explorer nicknamed the War Wagon, the pair officially began the trip at Highway 61′s headwaters in Thunder Bay, Ontario, bound for its terminus in New Orleans. The real estate in between is a canvas of beyond-eclectic music, roadhouses, barbecue stands, historic landmarks, natural wonders, roadside oddities, one-of-a-kind characters and talk – lots of talk, the kind one expects as a father takes inventory of his relationship with his first-born son as he steps into manhood.

The story really begins long before, though, when McKeen became a long-distance dad working in Gainesville in the mid-’80s and made a monthly drive to see Graham and his two sisters, who lived with their mother in Indiana.

McKeen and his children were close during those intervening years, but as Graham approached manhood, McKeen sensed a looming deadline.

“I really did feel like this may be my last chance to do this with him,” he said.

Fast forward to May 2001.

The journey became, in part, a cross-generational cultural exchange program. McKeen brought along a healthy sampling of his CD collection – plenty of Bob Dylan, of course, as well as Tony Bennett, Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, to name a few. Graham, who turned 19 during the journey, reciprocated with his own favs – Radiohead, Phish, Mos Def and Jurassic 5.

With that soundtrack, the two set off on what McKeen describes in the book as a “free-fall” alongside the Mississippi River.

“When you’re on an interstate, it’s like looking at a painting,” McKeen said. “When you’re on Highway 61, you’re in the painting.”

While there were few low points in the trip, McKeen said, the highlights still stand out in relief. Like visiting Dylan’s boyhood home in Hibbing, Minn., and spooking around in some of his old haunts. Or spending an afternoon in St. Louis at Blueberry Hill, a bar steeped in proprietor Joe Edwards’ own collection of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia and home of the world’s greatest jukebox. And then there was the lucky catch of a blazing performance by legendary surf guitar king Dick Dale, also in St. Louis, and getting to chat with him briefly afterward.

McKeen says some of the simplest surprises were the best, like when he first heard Graham use the word serendipity – a gratifying discovery for a journalism professor.

The trip takes on a more somber and reverent tone as the two see rural Mississippi against the backdrop of McKeen’s childhood memories of the 1960s civil rights movement. With blues men Robert Johnson and Charley Patton providing the music, they frequently find themselves seemingly the only white people for miles, something McKeen says gave Graham a healthy new perspective on the world.

When they reach the French Quarter and take in its musical and culinary pleasures, the trip has reached its end, and McKeen realizes it is an apt metaphor for closing the book on Graham’s childhood. In fact, the book rounds out with a note McKeen received from Graham several months after the trip.

“Exhausted and weary, we rode into one of the greatest cities in the world, New Orleans,” Graham wrote. “I had aged a year in those 6,000 miles, learning much about this mysterious country, myself and my father.”

Said McKeen: “I went into it thinking, ‘I want to make sure he’s OK.’ I’m so glad we didn’t do that. I got my answers without asking the questions. He’s smart, he’s talented, he’s doing fine.”