Where the Blues Was Born: A Beginner's Guide to the Mississippi Delta

The flattest, most musical place in America

The Mississippi Delta is where the blues was born, and with it almost everything you have ever danced to. Rock 'n' roll, soul, R&B, hip-hop and most of British guitar music can trace a line back to a few hundred square miles of cotton country between Memphis and Vicksburg.

It is also one of the most atmospheric places to drive in the United States: dead-straight roads, enormous skies, tiny towns, and the real possibility of hearing a 70-year-old bluesman play in a corrugated-iron shack on a Saturday night. This guide covers where the Delta is, how the music started, the names worth knowing before you go, and the towns, museums and juke joints that make the trip.

If you would rather we built it for you, our Mississippi Blues Road Trip: From Elvis to the Delta covers the whole state in 13 nights, flights and car included.

Where the Delta is (and isn't)

First, a correction most visitors need: the Mississippi Delta is not the river delta. The river's actual mouth is 300 miles south, below New Orleans. The Delta is the diamond-shaped floodplain in north-west Mississippi, roughly 200 miles long and 70 wide, bounded by the Mississippi River on one side and the Yazoo on the other.

The soil here is some of the richest on earth, which is why it was cleared for cotton in the 19th century and why so many people came, willingly or otherwise, to work it. That history is the reason the music exists.

Getting there from the UK is easier than it sounds. Fly to Memphis, Tennessee, collect a hire car at the airport, and Clarksdale is 75 miles straight down Highway 61, about an hour and a half. Highway 61 itself is the spine of the trip: it runs the length of the Delta and Bob Dylan named an album after it for good reason.

How the blues started here

Nobody can name the first blues song, but almost everyone agrees on where it came from. In the decades after the American Civil War, African American field workers on the Delta plantations took the work songs, field hollers and spirituals they already knew and set them to guitar. The result was a raw, personal music, usually one voice and one instrument, built on a 12-bar pattern that would go on to underpin most of popular music.

If the Delta blues has a birthplace, it is Dockery Farms, a cotton plantation between Cleveland and Ruleville. Around 1900 a guitarist named Charley Patton lived and played there, and the musicians who learned from him, among them Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson, carried the sound out across the South. The plantation's buildings still stand on Highway 8 and you can wander them for free.

The music left the Delta the same way the people did. From the 1920s, the Great Migration took hundreds of thousands of Black Mississippians north to Chicago, Detroit and St Louis. The blues went with them, got plugged into an amplifier, and became the electric sound that the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton would copy wholesale 40 years later. The Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song. Muddy Waters learned to play on a plantation outside Clarksdale.

Five names to know before you go

You do not need to be a blues expert to enjoy the Delta, but knowing these five will turn a lot of roadside markers into stories.

Each of them has a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail, a network of more than 200 blue signs across the state that tell the story at the spot where it happened. Collecting them is half the fun of the drive.

Clarksdale: the capital of the blues

If you only have one night in the Delta, spend it in Clarksdale. It is a small, slightly battered town of about 15,000 people, and it has more live blues per head than anywhere on earth.

Start at the Crossroads, where Highways 61 and 49 meet under a sign of three crossed guitars. This is where legend says Robert Johnson met the devil at midnight. The truth is nobody knows which crossroads, if any, but this one has the best photo opportunity and Abe's Bar-B-Q on the corner has been serving pulled pork since 1924.

The Delta Blues Museum on Blues Alley is the essential stop. It is housed in the old railway freight depot and its star exhibit is the actual cypress-wood cabin Muddy Waters grew up in, moved here from Stovall Plantation. Give it an hour and a half.

Then the main event. Clarksdale's juke joints are the real thing: unpretentious bars where local musicians play for a few dollars on the door and whoever turns up.

• Red's Lounge is the one people cross the world for. A one-room shack with a hand-painted sign, Christmas lights and some of the best blues you will ever hear from a few feet away. Cash only.
• Ground Zero Blues Club is bigger and easier, a warehouse-sized venue co-founded by Morgan Freeman with live music most nights and a proper kitchen.
• Hambone Art & Music and the Bluesberry Cafe fill the gaps, and the Clarksdale tourist office publishes a weekly gig list so you can see who is playing where.

For somewhere to sleep, the Shack Up Inn at Hopson Plantation puts you in a restored sharecropper's shack with a tin roof and a porch. It is three miles out of town and about as Delta as accommodation gets.

Beyond Clarksdale

Clarksdale is the headline, but the Delta rewards a couple of extra days. The distances are short and the roads are empty.

Cleveland is the Delta's college town and home to the GRAMMY Museum Mississippi, a sister to the one in Los Angeles. It is modern, interactive and surprisingly good at explaining why a cotton field in Mississippi matters to Beyoncé. Dockery Farms is 10 minutes east.

Indianola is where B.B. King grew up and where he chose to be buried. The B.B. King Museum is built around the old cotton gin he worked in as a teenager and is the best-told life story in the state. Afterwards, the Blue Front Café in nearby Bentonia is the oldest surviving juke joint in Mississippi, run by Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, who still plays there.

Greenwood has the most visited of Robert Johnson's three graves, under a pecan tree at Little Zion church, and a handsome downtown that doubled for 1960s Jackson in the film The Help. It also has the Delta's best hotel, The Alluvian.

Greenville and Leland are hot tamale country (more on that later) and Leland has a small, lovable museum dedicated to the Highway 61 blues and, improbably, to Jim Henson, who grew up here and based Kermit on the frogs in Deer Creek.

And a serious one. Sumner, half an hour from Clarksdale, has the courthouse where the murderers of 14-year-old Emmett Till were acquitted in 1955. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center opposite tells the story with great care and should be on every itinerary.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the sweet spots. April and May bring warm days, green fields and the biggest weekend of the year; October has cooler evenings, cotton harvest and the best festival on the Arkansas side of the river. July and August are hot and humid enough to make a mid-afternoon walk hard work, though the juke joints do not care.

If your dates are flexible, build the trip around the Juke Joint Festival. If they are not, do not worry: Clarksdale has live music somewhere every night of the week, year round.

Tips for first-timers

• Carry cash. Red's and most of the smaller juke joints do not take cards, and the door charge is usually $10 to $20.
• Go late. Nothing much happens before 9pm and the best sets are often after 11. Plan a lazy morning.
• Eat the hot tamales. The Delta's signature dish, brought by Mexican field workers a century ago and now sold from roadside stands and petrol stations. Doe's Eat Place in Greenville is the classic, and it does a steak the size of a hubcap too.
• Allow for distance. The Delta looks small on a map but towns are 30 to 45 minutes apart and there is not much in between. Fill the tank when you see a petrol station.
• Talk to people. Delta hospitality is real. The person next to you at the bar is as likely to be a retired sharecropper who knew B.B. King as a blues fan from Norway.
• Respect the history. Much of what you will see was built on slavery and sharecropping, and the civil rights story is as much a part of the Delta as the music. Visit Sumner and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson with the same seriousness you give the juke joints.

How to do it

The Delta is the heart of our Mississippi Blues Road Trip: From Elvis to the Delta, a 13-night fly-drive that starts in Memphis and loops the whole state: Elvis's birthplace in Tupelo, the civil rights museums of Jackson, the Gulf Coast at Ocean Springs, the antebellum mansions of Natchez and the Vicksburg battlefield, before finishing with four nights in the Delta itself, split between Cleveland and Clarksdale.

Return flights from the UK, 14 days of car hire from Memphis airport and seven hand-picked hotels are included, along with skip-the-line entry to the GRAMMY Museum Mississippi. Prices start from £2,695 per person, based on two sharing, with deposits from 10%, and because every trip is tailor-made we can add a night in Clarksdale, time it for the Juke Joint Festival or swap in the Shack Up Inn.

Call our USA specialists or enquire online and we will build the trip around the music you want to hear.