Mississippi, 4 places we take you
Mississippi Delta blues tours go to the flat cotton land between the Mississippi and the Yazoo rivers, where Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and B.B. King learned the blues, and where juke joints still open on a Friday night.
From $2654 tours that go there
The Delta is not the river's mouth but a wide alluvial plain in northwest Mississippi, 200 miles long and as flat as a table. For a century its plantations ran on the labor of Black sharecroppers, and the blues grew out of their work songs, field hollers and Saturday nights. When the machines came, they took the music north on Highway 61 and the Illinois Central to Memphis and Chicago.
Clarksdale is the center of it now, a small town with more live blues per head than anywhere in the world. The Mississippi Blues Trail has put up more than 200 blue markers across the state, and our tours follow them with a guide who grew up here. Days go to the museums and the crossroads, nights to the juke joints.
4 tours
Nashville, Muscle Shoals, Memphis, Mississippi Delta and New Orleans
Nashville, Florence, Memphis, Clarksdale, New Orleans
Ten days down the road from Nashville to New Orleans, with the studios of Muscle Shoals, Sun and Stax, two nights in the Delta and three in the jazz city at the end.
From $4,890 per person, double room
See the tourNew Orleans, Mississippi Delta, Memphis and Chicago
New Orleans, Clarksdale, Memphis, Chicago
The Great Migration route in nine days: from New Orleans jazz up through the Delta and Memphis, then overnight on the City of New Orleans train to the Chicago blues.
From $4,590 per person, double room
See the tourMississippi Delta and Memphis
Memphis, Clarksdale
Five days on Highway 61 from Memphis into the Delta, with two nights of juke joints in Clarksdale and the B.B. King Museum on the way back.
From $2,290 per person, double room
See the tourMississippi Delta
Memphis
A day down Highway 61 to Clarksdale and Dockery Farms, with Blues Trail markers on the way, hot tamales for lunch and back in Memphis for dinner.
From $265 per person, lunch included
See the tourPrices per person sharing a double room; day tours per person. Flights to the start city are optional and priced on each tour.
The places
Clarksdale is where Highways 61 and 49 cross, the crossroads of the Robert Johnson legend, now marked by a sign with three blue guitars. The Delta Blues Museum fills the old freight depot, with the log cabin Muddy Waters lived in on Stovall Farms rebuilt inside.
At night the town comes alive. Red's Lounge is a real juke joint with a pool table, a barbecue smoker out front and a band in the corner. Ground Zero Blues Club, co-owned by the actor Morgan Freeman, has bigger shows. In April the Juke Joint Festival fills every street with music.
Tours that visit Clarksdale
Dockery was a cotton plantation of 25,000 acres on the Sunflower River, with its own store, church and railroad station. Charley Patton lived here from about 1900, and the younger players who learned from him, Howlin' Wolf, Tommy Johnson, Roebuck Staples, carried the sound across the Delta. Many people call it the birthplace of the blues.
The cotton gin, the seed house and the old Coca-Cola service station survive and are open to visitors, with signs and recordings in the barns. It is a quiet place, with a big sky and nothing around it, and our guide brings the stories.
Tours that visit Dockery Farms
B.B. King grew up near Indianola and worked in the town's cotton gin as a young man. The B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center is built around that brick gin, and tells his story from the plantation to Beale Street and the world's stages, with his guitars, his tour bus and his studio.
King is buried in a garden on the grounds. Across town, Club Ebony, where he played for decades and which he later bought, still has music on some weekends. The museum is one of the best in the South and deserves two hours.
Tours that visit Indianola
Highway 61, the Blues Highway, runs from New Orleans to the Canadian border, and its Delta stretch is the one in the songs. Leland, a small town on Deer Creek, has the Highway 61 Blues Museum with a wall of photographs of the bluesmen born within 50 miles, from Johnny Winter to Jimmy Reed.
The town is covered in blues murals and is also the boyhood home of Jim Henson, with a small museum to the Muppets by the creek. We stop for an hour and lunch on the drive south between Clarksdale and Indianola.
Tours that visit Leland
Getting around
The only way to see the Delta. Clarksdale is 90 minutes south of Memphis on Highway 61; Indianola another hour.
Our day tour from Memphis covers Clarksdale and Dockery in about ten hours.
The road trip continues south through Jackson, about five hours to New Orleans.
Loading the map
Tour vanAmtrak trainRiverboatShort flight Map tiles: © Esri, HERE, Garmin © OpenStreetMap contributors. Lines join the stops in tour order in simplified form.
What is included
Best time to visit
April brings the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, and the cotton is in flower in July and picked in October. Summer is very hot, and winter is gray but quiet and cheap.
At a glance
Questions
A day trip gives you Clarksdale and Dockery. To hear the juke joints, which only get going after nine, you need to stay the night; our five-day tour has two nights in Clarksdale. Our Clarksdale guide covers the clubs, the museum and where to sleep.
At the Shack Up Inn, converted sharecropper shacks on the old Hopson plantation, or a small hotel downtown, depending on the date.
Thursday to Saturday for sure; earlier in the week it depends on the season. We plan our Clarksdale nights for the weekend.
There are three, near Greenwood, Morgan City and Quito. We visit the Little Zion church site when time allows.
Yes. Distances are short, the van does the work, and the juke joints have chairs.
Nearby
Beale Street, Sun Studio, Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Graceland
4 toursFrom $2,290Explore
Frenchmen Street, Preservation Hall and the French Quarter, Tremé and Congo Square, New Orleans Jazz Museum
5 toursFrom $189Explore
Chess Records, Buddy Guy's Legends, The Green Mill, Kingston Mines
2 toursFrom $1,990Explore
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