The blues emerged from the pain of Mississippi’s cotton fields, going on to shape modern American music as we know it. From B.B. King to Elvis Presley, Jacqui Agate traces its story across the Magnolia State
By Jacqui Agate
The stage at Hal and Mal’s was lit with neon. Not a seat in the house was free as the Blue Monday Band played, charging the room with rough-edged guitar riffs. Mid-song, the frontman stepped into the audience – eyes scrunched, fedora hat tilted – as he poured smooth, syrupy notes into the crowd. This beloved Jackson music joint, housed in an old train depot, has served up fried catfish and live blues since the mid-1980s. It’s one of a handful of venues in Mississippi’s capital that still celebrates the blues, a foundational genre that is considered the root of modern American music.
It’s a poignant moment to pay tribute to the blues in Mississippi. In 2026, the Mississippi Blues Trail – a network of more than 200 historical markers across the state and beyond – will observe its 20th anniversary. Meanwhile, two musical heavyweights from the state would have celebrated milestone birthdays this year: legendary bluesman B.B. King would have turned 100 on September 16, while Elvis Presley – who channelled the raw spirit of the blues into rock ’n’ roll – would have been 90 back in January.
The sound of the blues is rooted in the Mississippi Delta (not to be confused with the Mississippi River’s coastal delta in Louisiana). This is a vast inland floodplain, hemmed in by the Mississippi to the west and the Yazoo River to the east. It was formed over millennia, as the Mississippi repeatedly burst its banks. Each flood laid down another skin of fine silt and clay, and built natural levees, backswamps and oxbow lakes, until a broad alluvial plain took shape. Those sediment-rich soils became fertile ground for cash crops and eventually the blues, which emerged around the turn of the 20th century.
The genre’s bent notes echoed the field hollers of enslaved people and drew on the spirituals sung from makeshift brush arbours and wooden church pews. But my journey begins a little later in the story of the blues, in Jackson, just south-east of the Delta.
In the corner of Hal and Mal’s, a man dressed in a silver-stitched waistcoat tapped his foot to the music. I was told that this was Eddie Cotton, a Mississippi-born blues guitarist and local legend, who had played with musical heavyweights including B.B. King and Little Milton.
“Blues is a feeling – it’s no certain arrangement,” he told me as the band returned to the stage. “You know it when you feel it”
I introduced myself during a pause in the set. Cotton’s tone was soft and lilting as we talked: “Blues is a feeling – it’s no certain arrangement,” he told me as the band returned to the stage. “You know it when you feel it. Like the old bluesmen say: ‘the blues are going to live forever.’”
Another place in Jackson where the blues endures is Farish Street, a downtown artery that was once known as the ‘Black Wall Street of Jackson’. During the area’s mid-century heyday, music flowed from clubs that stood shoulder to shoulder along the pavement, welcoming blues titans such as B.B. King and Muddy Waters. Offstage, businesses ranging from barber shops to barbecue joints thrived. But as integration and economic change reshaped Jackson from the 1960s on, many of Farish Street’s businesses and clubs closed. And yet, even today, traces of the blues remain here.
As I drove north from Jackson, the urban sprawl fell away, replaced by acres of paper-flat plains braided with tight rows of soybean and cotton plants. The occasional grain elevator or cotton gin punctuated the horizon, and crop dusters banked and dived like giant birds. Eventually, I pulled into Greenwood, where the Delta’s big sky tightened into lines of brick-fronted buildings. A bluesy track spilt from the speakers on the street, installed for the express purpose of bringing ambience to the downtown area.
Greenwood was my first brush with Robert Johnson, the bluesman fabled to have sold his soul to the Devil at a Delta crossroads. Many believe that very crossroads lies in Clarksdale, where a guitar-crowned memorial now draws in visitors for photo opportunities; others look to the backroads by Dockery Farms, a historic plantation long touted as the birthplace of the Delta blues. It was here, however, at a venue just outside Greenwood known as the Three Forks, that Johnson died aged 27 in 1938, falling ill after a show.
Blues lore says it was poison-laced whiskey that killed Johnson, but as with many of the stories that swirl around him, little is certain. Even his burial site is disputed, with three competing graves found not far from Greenwood’s centre. The Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church on Money Road carries the official Mississippi Blues Trail marker, so I made a brief stop to pay my respects before heading back into town.
Another important figure is remembered in Greenwood. In downtown, I paused before a bronze statue of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who, in 1955, was abducted and lynched by a white mob after an alleged encounter with a white woman at Bryant’s Grocery in nearby Money. (The grocery store is on the Mississippi Freedom Trail, which commemorates key events and figures from the US Civil Rights Movement.)
Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, and his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. His death was one spark that helped ignite the Civil Rights Movement, and the tragedy is memorialised in songs such as Aaron Kramer and Clyde R Appleton’s ‘Blues for Emmett Till’ (1955) and Bob Dylan’s ‘The Death of Emmett Till’ (later in 1962). It’s a reminder that the story of the blues and civil rights go hand in hand here: both were born of struggle, hardship and tragedy; both were rooted in the Delta soil.
I made my final pit stop in Greenwood on Howard Street, the city’s main drag. Here I found the Blues Trail marker for the WGRM Radio Studio, which marks the spot where a teenage B.B. King was first played over the airwaves as part of a Sunday gospel performance carried throughout the Delta. Although the station is long since shuttered, the memory of the bluesman it helped launch still lingers on.
I picked up B.B. King’s story in Indianola, about 32km from his birthplace in Berclair. The sharecropper cabin in which Riley B King, as he was named, was born a century ago is long gone, but his life and legacy are honoured at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center. The museum roots King’s music in the region, tracing the Delta’s history and social context by telling his life through films, photographs, instruments and artefacts, including the Gibson guitars that he affectionately named ‘Lucille’.
While King was far from the first bluesman, he became a global ambassador for the genre, captivating the world with his expressive bending guitar lines and a voice as warm as Delta dirt. Here, his birthday has been celebrated with vigour. A life-size hologram of the bluesman recently took to the stage at nearby Club Ebony, a historic music joint on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a network of venues that welcomed Black performers during the Jim Crow era.
While B.B. King – rightly crowned the ‘King of the Blues’ – helped carry this music to the masses, the genre itself was born long before his time. A short hop north, in the flatlands east of Cleveland, lies Dockery Farms, a historic site that is widely accepted as a cradle of the blues.
Founded as a vast cotton plantation, Dockery Farms became a hub for hundreds of Black sharecroppers who lived and worked on its land. In the early 1900s, after long days in the fields, they gathered on porches and in makeshift dance halls, trading stories and songs. It was here that itinerant musicians such as Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson honed a raw, new sound that would come to be known as the blues. Today, a Mississippi Blues Trail marker at the site of Dockery Farms reads ‘Birthplace of the Blues?’, the question mark reflecting the genre’s elusive roots. I wandered between a huddle of sun-baked buildings – a baling house and a cotton gin – the last remaining echoes of the blues story here.
In the city, Cleveland looks as much to the present as it does to its past. A giant photograph of Taylor Swift greeted me as I pulled into the car park for the city’s Grammy Museum Mississippi, opened in 2016. Mississippi has produced more winners of Grammy awards per capita than any other state in the USA. It was fitting, then, that this sprawling museum is the only one of its kind outside of Los Angeles.
The museum is a celebration of modern music, unfolding in a string of interactive exhibits, from a recording booth to a console for mixing tracks. During my visit, the ‘Taylor Swift: Through the Eras’ exhibit chronicled the pioneering Pennsylvanian singer’s 18-year career. But the blues underpins every branch of American popular music, from country to rock to pop. Follow that thread far enough and even Taylor Swift’s chart-topping hits can trace their lineage back to the Delta.
As I motored out of Cleveland, I found myself on the legendary Highway 61. This is also known as the Blues Highway, a ribbon of asphalt that once carried guitar-wielding sharecroppers and musicians north to Memphis and beyond, their sounds spilling into juke joints along the way. Today, the highway is honoured in songs by everyone from Dylan to Mississippi Fred McDowell, and it delivered me to Clarksdale by sunset.
Clarksdale is often nicknamed the ‘Home of the Blues’, and it didn’t take me long to learn why. The city may have been weathered by time, but its vacant lots and peeling storefronts are offset by striking art murals, splashes of neon and the insistent sound of the blues. Music is built into the bones of this city, with guitar chords and smoky vocals swelling in juke joints every night of the week. Among them is Ground Zero Blues Club, a music venue co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman, its walls thick with spidery graffiti and colourful concert posters. On the neon-backed stage was LaLa Craig, a pianist whose stomping chords and gravelly voice brought a hush over the crowd.
“In Clarksdale, I always tell folks to go to Ground Zero or Red’s. That’s where you can still hear real blues,”
“In Clarksdale, I always tell folks to go to Ground Zero or Red’s. That’s where you can still hear real blues,” said bluesman Super Chikan, whom I met the next day in his home studio, where he makes guitars out of everything from ceiling fans to cigar boxes. We sat among a kaleidoscopic cluster of instruments, each brightly painted and bejewelled, with some even hewn in the shape of his home state of Mississippi.
Super Chikan explained how blues music was baked into the Delta: “I saw Muddy Waters on my front porch when I was six years old in 1957. Folks said I couldn’t have, but I did. All those old blues musicians from the Delta had ties right here. Blues music comes from slavery, sharecropping, mistreatment; being cheated, underpaid, done wrong. It’s important to keep the blues alive. There are a few younger musicians still doing it.”
I met one of them on the back patio of the Ground Zero Blues Club. Edna Nicole is a singer-songwriter born and raised in Clarksdale, and we talked over a basket of fried okra as the evening sun melted over the Delta. She started singing as a child in church; today, she’s a regular on the busy Clarksdale circuit, performing everywhere from juke joints to festivals.
“For Black people, the blues was our first version of uncensored storytelling. The rest of the world was entertained by it; Black people felt represented by it”
“Growing up, I loved the camaraderie of the blues. I loved that most of the musicians knew everybody in our neighbourhood. People limit the blues to 12 bars, but it’s such a huge genre. I describe the blues as the backbone of American music – you really can’t put it in a box.” Her giant sunflower earrings swung as she gestured emphatically.
“For Black people, the blues was our first version of uncensored storytelling,” she continued. “The rest of the world was entertained by it; Black people felt represented by it. It’s a really important legacy… I’m representing a group of people that were silenced, and I’m going to use my art to tell their story and make the rest of the world listen.”
Image © Visit Clarksdale
I pitched up at Red’s nightclub later that day to see Edna live. I perched on a stool in the down-home juke joint, its walls decorated with flashes of red neon. The club opened as a live venue in the 1980s, following its tenure as a music store, where it’s said rock ‘n’ roll star Ike Turner used to purchase his instruments. Edna took to the small stage, her voice filling every crevice of the snug room, as rich and soulful as the bluesmen who preceded her.
The next day, I strolled around the city, spotting hand-painted signs advertising harmonica lessons and street art depicting musicians from Leo Welch to Big A (Anthony Sherrod), one of Clarksdale’s foremost contemporary blues icons. I wandered into Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art, a store stacked with records and musical art prints, whose owner, Roger Stolle, co-founded the Juke Joint Festival, an annual celebration of the blues.
“When Elvis Presley died, that was the first time I really noticed music as a kid. I’d go to the record department and spend my allowance on 45s”
For Stolle, one man sparked his musical interests: “When Elvis Presley died, that was the first time I really noticed music as a kid. Afterwards, I’d go to the record department and spend my little allowance on 45 rpm records – Elvis on early RCA issues and Sun Records re-releases. Those were blues songs, blues and R&B. So that got me on track… [The blues] is not really a genre, so much as a voice of a culture.”
Elvis Presley was born just north-east of the Delta, in Tupelo. The gospel music he heard in local churches, the country songs he heard on the radio and the echoes of the Delta blues all shaped his musical output.
Tupelo was the final stop on my musical odyssey through Mississippi. Today, the city tells the early story of Elvis through its landmarks, from the church where he first sang gospel music before a crowd to the humble ‘shotgun house’ (a narrow home with rooms lined in a straight row) in which he was born. Both are preserved at the Elvis Presley Birthplace and Museum in East Tupelo, where the displays include black-and-white boyhood photos as well as a striking bronze sculpture titled Becoming, which captures Elvis’ leap from modest beginnings to superstardom.
Downtown at the still-working Tupelo Hardware Company, an ‘X’ marks the spot where a young Elvis received his first guitar in 1946, on his 11th birthday (he’d originally wanted a rifle, but his mother, Gladys, steered him toward a guitar instead).
“The world changed that day, right where you’re standing,” said the white-haired man behind the store counter, standing before shelves of nails and wood glue.
There was time for lunch at Johnnie’s Drive-In, its neon sign and wooden booths little changed since the 1940s, when it was one of Elvis’s favourite haunts. His go-to was the dough burger, a Depression-era speciality that stretched beef with flour. It’s still on the menu today.
My trip was timed to coincide with the Tupelo Elvis Festival. Everywhere I looked, uncanny lookalikes wandered the streets, zipped into rhinestone-studded jumpsuits, their hair slicked into gravity-defying quiffs. There’s a whole subculture devoted to impersonating the ‘King of Rock ’n’ Roll’, I discovered, and I had to remind myself that he wasn’t really in the room as tribute acts lit up the Lyric Theatre, the historic venue where Elvis himself once sang as a child. It was a fitting end to a musical journey.
The road from the Delta to Tupelo is more than a map of Mississippi; it’s the soundtrack to a deep dive into American history. As blues riffs and gospel hymns gave way to rock ’n’ roll, the boy from Tupelo carried that inheritance far beyond the state line. A century on, Mississippi still sings – and the world still listens.
The author was a guest of Visit Mississippi (visitmississippi.org). For more information, explore: visitjackson.com; visitclarksdale.com; visitclevelandms.com, and tupelo.net.
