Get on the road again to experience these tuneful itineraries through the Mississippi Delta
There may be no better way to experience the soundtrack of America than on a leisurely, music-themed road trip, with the windows (or convertible top) down and the hits blasting. And while cities like Nashville, New York, and New Orleans will always be celebrated for their music heritage, you’ll need to head for small towns to truly immerse yourself in the juke joints and honky-tonks, the farms and rural recording studios, where icons honed their craft and invented new forms of expression. Load up a playlist and get ready to hit the road. Feel the blues in the Mississippi Delta.
Start: Tunica, Mississippi
End: Vicksburg, Mississippi
Distance: About 180 miles
Recommended time: Two to three days
Memphis may be a major blues hub, but true aficionados know that you have to make a pilgrimage to the genre’s birthplace in the Mississippi Delta. Highway 61 weaves through the flat, fertile fields and historic farming communities that birthed legends like Muddy Waters and B.B. King—and that have earned the Delta the nickname “the Most Southern Place on Earth.”
Ground Zero Blues Club
Get your bearings at the Gateway to the Blues Museum, housed inside the town of Tunica’s 1890s train depot, near the boyhood home of Robert Johnson, and then continue along to Clarksdale, where he reportedly sold his soul to the devil at the Crossroads. (While the exact location has always been up for debate, there’s a popular Crossroads Monument at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49.) After wandering through the Delta Blues Museum, immerse yourself in the sounds of the South at the Morgan Freeman–owned Ground Zero Blues Club or the cash-only juke joint Red’s Lounge, before checking in at the Travelers Hotel. The hotel originally opened in the 1920s as a bathroom-down-the-hall stopover point for railroad workers, but it’s been reimagined as a shabby-chic boutique hotel decorated with quilts and artwork from Mississippi artists.
Jackie Merritt art, ‘Acoustic Blues Trio’
https://www.hammondmuseum.org/jackie-merritt
As you continue driving south, each town reveals a new chapter in the story of the blues. Rural Cleveland is home to the Grammy Museum Mississippi (the state is home to more Grammy winners per capita than anywhere else in the USA) and Dockery Farms, a cotton gin where blues pioneers like Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Brown worked as they wrote songs. Pick up some hot tamales (a local Delta specialty) at Airport Grocery and make a detour to the gravesite of Robert Johnson in Greenwood and the birthplace of B.B. King in Berclair, 15 miles away, before checking out a museum in King’s honor in nearby Indianola. Back on Highway 61, Leland is home to its own scrappy Highway 61 Blues Museum, a worthy stopping point before finishing up in Vicksburg. The riverside birthplace of Willie Dixon is now a buzzing city of riverboat casinos and restaurants like 10 South Rooftop Bar & Grill, which offers sweeping views of the Mississippi River and the Yazoo Canal.
