The Hill Country Ramble

Old 78 and MS 7 through Faulkner country

Drive: Memphis → Tupelo
Distance: ~130 miles
Time: 1–2 days
Highways: MS 178 · MS 7 · MS 6
Avoids: I-22
Region: Deep South

North Mississippi's hills sound different from the Delta — a droning, hypnotic blues (R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, fife-and-drum picnics) that never needed Chicago. The same hills grew Faulkner, Ida B. Wells and one very famous Elvis. Memphis to Tupelo the old way: courthouse squares, catfish in a leaning store, and the best bookstore porch in the South.

📍 Blues Trail markers go hill-country here; Oxford layers on literary landmarks.

The drive, segment by segment

Kudzu & Juke Country

Memphis → Holly Springs · ~45 mi

Out of Memphis on the old Pigeon Roost Road into Holly Springs — antebellum square, hill-country blues HQ, and the ghost of the greatest Elvis shrine that ever was.

🏘️Holly Springs Square — Holly Springs
Sixty-some antebellum buildings survived the war (Grant headquartered here); the square is the hill country's parlor. Kimbrough and Burnside made the county the loudest quiet place in blues.
✊Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — Holly Springs
Birthplace tribute to the journalist who documented lynching when doing so was a death sentence — a small museum with an enormous subject.
🎬Graceland Too (in memoriam) — Holly Springs
Paul MacLeod's 24-hour, all-Elvis shrine-house, open to anyone who knocked, any hour, for decades — until his death in 2014. Gone now, but road-trippers still drive by to pay respects to the patron saint of obsession.

Faulkner's Postage Stamp

Holly Springs → Water Valley · ~50 mi

MS 7 to Oxford: Rowan Oak's cedars, Square Books, catfish at Taylor, then Water Valley's revived Main Street — Yoknapatawpha with espresso.

🎸Junior's Juke Joint Site — Chulahoma
Junior Kimbrough's legendary Sunday-night juke burned in 2000; the pilgrimage continues. For the living tradition, Foxfire Ranch in Waterford hosts hill-country blues on Sunday evenings.
🎸Gravel Springs Picnic (spur) — Senatobia
Othar Turner's fife-and-drum picnics — goat, cane fifes, drums older than the blues itself — continue under granddaughter Sharde Thomas each late August. The deepest root on the tree.
📚Rowan Oak — Oxford
Faulkner's cedar-alley home (1930–62), with the plot of A Fable penciled on the office walls. His grave across town accepts whiskey; pour, don't chug.
📚Square Books & the Square — Oxford
Three storefronts of one of America's great bookstores on one of its great squares; shrimp & grits upstairs at City Grocery. The Meredith statue at Ole Miss marks the 1962 riot the town has slowly learned to talk about.
🍽️Taylor Grocery — Taylor
'Eat or We Both Starve' — catfish in a gloriously leaning 1889 storefront, brown-bag your own bottle, live pickers most nights. Worth planning a day around.
🏘️Water Valley Main Street — Water Valley
A railroad town reborn without getting cute: the BTC Old-Fashioned Grocery, art spaces in feed stores, and a watermelon carnival since 1931.

To the Birthplace

Water Valley → Tupelo · ~55 mi

East through Pontotoc ridge country to Tupelo, where the hardware store still sells the spot where a mother bought a $7.75 guitar.

🎸Tupelo Hardware Co. — Tupelo
X marks the floorboard where Gladys Presley redirected her son from a .22 to a guitar, January 1946. Staff will show you; buy a wrench out of gratitude. Dough burger at Johnnie's Drive-In after, in the Elvis booth.

Worth a detour

New Albany — Faulkner's actual 1897 birthplace, with a fine little Union County museum — twenty minutes from Tupelo.
Sardis Lake — Levee sunsets and crappie shacks west of Oxford.

Spurs & side-roads

Chulahoma juke country
Gravel Springs (fife & drum)