A local music favorite cranked out hits from R&B’s golden age. Sunglasses shielded sun-baked, road-weary tourists from a cloudless sky. Children ran and romped.

All the makings of a summertime blues festival, right? Not really.

Mississippi Welcome Center’s staff called Osgood & Blaque to give a down-home backdrop for a veranda lined with onlookers who watched a pair of towboats push and push on a sunken grain barge for nearly five hours Thursday.

“They called us and said they wanted some music for the people out here,” vocalist Cee Blaque said before belting out a set of tunes ranging from ’70s soul to Delta blues. “We’ve never played for a barge-raising before, but there’s a first time for everything.”

For people passing through Vicksburg, staying put for nearly three of those hours because Interstate 20 was closed brought a subdued feeling.

“I don’t know when they’re going to open it back up,” said David Manina to family back in Texarkana, Ark., where he was headed Thursday en route to a deployment to Kuwait with a military contractor. “There’s a boat in the water.”

As the sounds of Commodores and Otis Redding flowed from amplifiers, the barge was turned over and readied to be removed. Word of mouth about bringing a crane downriver to pull the barge from the water sent people home at the usual quitting time, but Manina and others couldn’t leave yet.

“What does that mean for the cars, though?” Manina said.

It was a golf game interrupted for Buddy Lofton, who scurried back to Vicksburg after a trip to the links in Tallulah.

“I had shot a 43 on the front nine, then the manager of the course said they’re about to close the bridge,” Lofton said.

It was news to Britt Simon and Noriae Morimoto when they felt the buzz of anxious onlookers spying the barge and swirling river. Simon, a Simpson County native, and Morimoto, of Saitama, Japan, visited Thursday before their wedding Saturday.

“We’re here to see Mississippi, to see the river,” Simon said, before hurrying off to hit the road with several of Morimoto’s friends and family, fresh off a plane from Japan. “I didn’t know about the barge.”

Crowds lined the edges of Navy Circle to watch the barge as a park ranger stood guard to keep people off the hill itself. Something of an all-star cast of locals found their way to the best viewing spots — former mayor Laurence Leyens, Warren County Port Commission member Mike Cappaert, District 1 Supervisor David McDonald, Sheriff Martin Pace and the Rev. Michael Nation, who donned a yellow chaplain’s vest as part of his position with the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey. Marquette Transportation, the owner of the towboat that broke apart on the Mississippi’s high water, is one of the church’s clients, Nation said.