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Documentary Explores Murders, Disappearance of Blues Musicians

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A remarkable coincidence of three events on the same day during the Civil Rights Movement is the subject of a new documentary that was years in the making, reports Rolling Stone. On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, were brutally murdered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan while they participated in the Freedom Summer voter registration initiative. Racially-motivated killings were nothing new in that part of the country during the Jim Crow era, but two of the victims were affluent, young, white males from the north. That was enough to turn their deaths into major national news, attracting the attention of the FBI and President Lyndon Johnson and acting as a catalyst for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On the same day the killings, known as the Mississippi Burning murders, took place, another trio of young males from the north were driving through Mississippi with a different agenda. Led by guitarist John Fahey, the three men were obsessive fans of 1930s Delta blues musicians. Many of the key figures from that era had disappeared without a trace decades earlier, and they were determined to track down Skip James, whose sole recorded output was a handful of scratchy 78-RPM records in 1931. Through a combination of luck and guile, they found James at a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. Amazingly, another threesome of young, white males from the north were driving through Mississippi that same day in 1964 seeking out Son House, another Delta blues icon from the 1930s. They tracked him down via telephone and met up with him at his house in Rochester, New York, two days later. The remarkable coincidence of these three historic events taking place on the same day in 1964 is the subject of the new documentary, “Two Times Runnin’.” The film is making its way across the country in theaters now.

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