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Jimbo Mathus | Delta Magazine, January-February 2022
The Seeker
How Squirrel Nut Zippers frontman Jimbo Mathus discovered his path and found his way back to Clarksdale.
By Jim Beaugez
Sitting behind the wheel of his pickup truck, James H. “Jimbo” Mathus was crisscrossing America in search of something. Not for anything he could put his hands on, necessarily, and not for anything he could see. But he thought he would recognize it when he found it. At 19 years old, he was looking for a place to begin.
His life to that point—his youth spent in Corinth and Clarksdale; his brief stay at Mississippi State University, where he dabbled in philosophy; and his stint traveling Old Man River with the Merchant Marines—were all preamble to the real Jimbo Mathus, the person he began looking for sometime between thumbing a borrowed paperback of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and dropping out of college.
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