Long Weekend
3 days · ~420 miles · from Memphis
The essential first taste: down the Blues Highway to the Crossroads and the Delta's shrines, back through Faulkner's Oxford. Music every night if you time the jukes right.
This trip chains: The Blues Highway · The Hill Country Ramble
Sun Studio and the Lorraine Motel in the morning, then 61 south past Tunica's Gateway museum. Crossroads photo, Delta Blues Museum, dinner at Abe's, juke night at Red's or Ground Zero. Sleep in a sharecropper shack at the Shack Up Inn.
Dockery Farms early (read the plaques aloud, it's allowed), Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Po' Monkey's roadside respects, Kermit's museum in Leland, B.B. King's Indianola — then east to Greenwood: Robert Johnson's grave at dusk, Bryant's Grocery and the Sumner courthouse for the history that can't be skipped.
North on 49E/7 to Oxford: Rowan Oak, an hour you didn't budget at Square Books, catfish at Taylor Grocery (early), then the Hill Country Ramble backward into Memphis. Payne's chopped pork if you beat the close.