Last Night in Jackson

2026-04-25, Thalia Mara Hall, Jackson, MS

Photo via @jbsapp89

Bowling Green and Chattanooga were supposed to be it for me this tour, but, thanks to an invitation to speak to some journalism classes in Oxford a couple hours away—shoutout professor RJ Morgan and all the great Ole Miss students I met—I tacked on an extra show in Jackson, Mississippi. It was Dylan’s first visit here since 2016, and my first ever. (I teased Prof Morgan about inviting someone from northern Vermont to speak to a class titled “Bob Dylan and the South.” I mean, I’m pretty close to the south of Canada.)

Dylan has played Oxford exactly once, back in 1990. That show became famous as the only time he played “Oxford Town,” his song about the deadly campus riots when James Meredith became the first Black student to matriculate at Ole Miss. So, driving from Oxford to Jackson, it was not lost on me that Dylan also has an early song about this city’s most famous Civil Rights figure too. (Hint: I’m currently writing this from the Medgar Wiley Evers Airport.)

No, I did not really expect Dylan to bust out “Only a Pawn in Their Game” last night, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that, on one of Bob’s trips here, he made one of his anonymous hood-up tourist visits to Medgar Evers’ house. It’s still there. The driveway you walk up is where Evers was gunned down by a Klansman who, as Dylan’s song controversially noted, was part of a bigger racist system. As I was leaving, I met a young man going door-to-door pitching AT&T service. He’d only vaguely heard of Evers, but seemed amazed to find this piece of history on a random side street in a fairly rundown neighborhood. He said he’d skip trying to sell them broadband service, but would come back later to take the tour.