So red the rose, so rich the blues.

Stark Young, the novelist whose antebellum epic So Red the Rose was a smash hit only a few years before Gone With the Wind, was born and buried in Como; he spent the years in between in Oxford (Mississippi) and Manhattan, where he served as drama critic for the New Republic and made a significant contribution to American letters when he took his stand as one of the 12 Southern Agrarians.

Young isn’t Como’s only significant alumnus: it may be a tiny town, but Como has encompassed a broad swath of cultural territory, as the home base of some of the most important Hill Country blues artists in the nation. Mississippi Fred McDowell settled here in the 1940s, working as a farmer but playing blues on the side at parties and picnics, with a slide guitar and a pocket knife. Later he fashioned a slide from a rib bone that he wore on his ring finger. McDowell famously declared “I do not play no rock and roll,” but that didn’t prevent the Rolling Stones from performing a cover of his work.

Otha Turner, one of the last great fife and drum artists, lived and played around this area as well. While the term “fife and drum” may conjure a vision of George Washington in a tri-corned hat, the fife and drum music championed by Otha Turner was a richer, less militaristic, more multicultural strain of music, borrowing as much from African heritage as it did from Colonial history. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese recognized both influences, tapping Turner to provide music for his soundtrack for the movie Gangs of New York, while also including him in his landmark PBS series entitled The Blues.

Although Turner and McDowell have both passed away, their descendents are keeping their traditions alive. When Turner died in 2003, only weeks before he was scheduled to record an album, his 13-year old granddaughter and protégé, Sharde Thomas, took his place.

Old or new, traditional or stubbornly individual, one or the other—the choices along the great divide are never a simple either-or. Instead, here where the Hills meet the Delta, the choices seem to multiply, divide, and sometimes merge, as in the case of the most famous resident of the town of Southaven, a writer who understood how hard a choice can be. Like what’s a young lawyer to do when he finds out his firm is tied to the mob?