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Champion Jack Dupree: Travelling North

Philip Norman, The Sunday Times, 1971

AROUND 1920, Champion Jack Dupree left the Coloured Waifs Home for Boys, New Orleans, and started walking. He had nobody. His father and mother were burned in their house by the Ku Klux Klan. "All my life, from six years old," he says, "I wanted to work and save up enough money and git enough ammunition and catch them in a meeting and spray them and let 'em spray me – "long as I could lay down dead in the field with a few of them I'd be happy."

Total word count of piece: 2709

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