States: Tennessee · Mississippi
Start near: Memphis (starts here)
Old 78 and MS 7 through Faulkner country
The Hill Country Ramble is a ~130-mile back-roads route from Memphis to Tupelo on MS 178, MS 7 and MS 6, driven in 1–2 days, that stays off I-22 through the 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.
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.
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.
Birthplace tribute to the journalist who documented lynching when doing so was a death sentence — a small museum with an enormous subject.
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.
MS 7 to Oxford: Rowan Oak's cedars, Square Books, catfish at Taylor, then Water Valley's revived Main Street — Yoknapatawpha with espresso.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
A railroad town reborn without getting cute: the BTC Old-Fashioned Grocery, art spaces in feed stores, and a watermelon carnival since 1931.
East through Pontotoc ridge country to Tupelo, where the hardware store still sells the spot where a mother bought a $7.75 guitar.
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.
The Hill Country Ramble is about 130 miles and takes 1–2 days at a back-roads pace.
It runs from Memphis to Tupelo.
It follows MS 178, MS 7 and MS 6.
It avoids I-22, using MS 178, MS 7 and MS 6 instead.
10 stops are mapped, including Holly Springs Square, Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum, Graceland Too (in memoriam), Junior's Juke Joint Site and Gravel Springs Picnic (spur).
Delta 101 (3 days) and The Long Way to the Opry (21 days).
The atlas’s seasonal note for this route: “Foxfire Ranch (Sundays) and Gravel Springs (late August) are the living hill-country sound — schedule around them.”
Delta 101 (3 days) · The Long Way to the Opry (21 days)
Connects with: The Blues Highway · Highway 64: Shiloh to Lookout Mountain · The Bootheel: US 61 North
More in the Deep South: The Blues Highway · Natchez Trace Parkway · Grant's Vicksburg Campaign · The Civil Rights Trail · Hank's Lost Highway · Sherman to the Swamp · US 11: The Valley South · The Shoals · The Black Belt & Gee's Bend · The Old Federal Road · US 84: Wiregrass to Mockingbird · The Free State of Jones · US 49: Jackson to the Sound · Sherman's March to the Sea · US 41: Dixie Highway & the Atlanta Campaign · The Chattahoochee Trace · Plains & Andersonville · US 341: The Golden Isles Highway · North Georgia Gold & Apples · The Trail of Tears: Georgia to Kentucky