Two Trains Runnin'

In June of 1964, hundreds of college students, eager to join the civil rights movement, traveled to Mississippi and started what would be known as Freedom Summer. That same month, two groups of young men ­ made up of musicians, college students and record collectors ­ also traveled to Mississippi. Though neither group was aware of the other, each had come on the same errand: to find two old blues singers and coax them out of retirement.

Finding them would not be easy. There were few clues to their whereabouts; no one knew if the singers were even alive. And Mississippi was a tense and violent place. It was easy to mistake the young men for activists. When the two groups finally converge, Two Trains Runnin' becomes a powerful meditation on the origins of an African-American musical genre and the painful reasons for its existence.