Mississippi Music, Events & Festivals

Rick Stein Tastes the Blues - If the raw sound of the blues makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you'll want to watch Rick Stein on this pilgrimage to the Mississippi Delta. Click the icon below to watch (BBC iPlayer is only available if you are watching in the UK)

Travel along Highway 61, also known as The Blues Highway, and you are touring the Mississippi Delta, a region that stretches from Memphis, Tennessee down to Vicksburg, Mississippi; the Mississippi River over to the Yazoo. The blues is a musical genre were legends like B.B. King, WC Handy, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson dot the musical landscape and continue to influence musicians all over the world.

A must when visiting Mississippi is the B.B. King Museum and Interpretive Centre in Indianola featuring interactive exhibits dedicated to a blues great.

Located in the heart of the Delta, on the Sunflower River, is Clarksdale, a city with a huge Blues heritage and home to the Delta Blues Museum, Ground Zero Blues Club, the Sunflower River Blues Festival, Juke Joint Festival, the Riverside Hotel and many original juke joints, including Po' Monkeys.

The Mississippi Blues Trail takes you on a journey through the state that produced the most important root source for popular music and current artists today. The Blues Trail is an ongoing project to place interpretive markers throughout the state that tell stories through words and images at historic sites related to the blues. Today there are over 100 markers that make up a unique history book on the blues.

Mississippi is also home to Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born and grew up. Fans can visit his small shotgun childhood home, an impressive museum and the hardware store where he bought his first guitar. The self-guided tour takes you around many of the most significant locations in Elvis’ life in Tupelo.