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
Starting in Memphis, this 3-day itinerary connects The Blues Highway and The Hill Country Ramble. It suits travellers interested in blues, country, jukes & jamborees; battlefields, the movement & the past. The day-by-day bases let you split roughly 420 miles into a sequence of visits rather than trying to cover every linked route end to end. Use the daily highlights to decide which places deserve your longest stops.
Budget an average of about 140 miles per day across the whole trip, or roughly 3.1–4.7 hours behind the wheel at an assumed 30–45 mph back-roads pace. This is a planning estimate, not a measured time for each leg: transfer days can be longer and rest days shorter. Add meal stops, tours, ferries, traffic and hikes separately; use each day's navigation link for current driving estimates.
Use these day-end areas to plan lodging; the map pins are orientation points, not hotel recommendations. The final day can be your departure day.
Choose your dates around the experiences below rather than assuming one season fits the entire trip. These notes come from the linked route guides; check current forecasts and official schedules.
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.
A proper primer museum in an 1895 rail depot right on 61 — learn to hear what you're about to drive through.
Where 61 meets 49 — Robert Johnson's alleged bargain. Delta Blues Museum (with Muddy Waters's cabin), Ground Zero, Red's juke joint, the Riverside Hotel where Bessie Smith died (1937), beds at the Shack Up Inn, and Abe's Bar-B-Q since 1924.
Navigate day 1 in Google Maps ↗ · via Gateway to the Blues
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.
Willie Seaberry's sharecropper-shack juke ran Thursday nights from 1963 until his death in 2016. Closed now, still standing in the fields — road-trippers stop to pay respects. McCarty Pottery in town shapes Delta clay into heirlooms.
'You might say it all started right here' — B.B. King, about the plantation where Charley Patton taught a generation. The Grammy Museum Mississippi in Cleveland is the modern bookend.
Three churchyards claim him; Little Zion's pecan-shaded plot north of town is the best-attested. Whiskey and guitar picks accumulate. The Help was filmed all over Greenwood; Tallahatchie Flats rents shotgun shacks on the river.
The collapsing store where a lie about 14-year-old Emmett Till began (1955). Markers here have been defaced and replaced for decades — the river-site sign is now bulletproof. Unbearable and necessary.
Navigate day 2 in Google Maps ↗
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.
'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.
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.
The trinity in one city: W.C. Handy's Beale, the Sun Studio where Elvis walked in, and Stax's Soulsville. Add Graceland in proportion to your devotion.
A converted gas station serving the chopped-pork sandwich (slaw on, hot sauce yes) by which all others are judged.
Built into the Lorraine Motel, preserving Room 306 and the balcony where Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968. Start the whole trip here; everything south of Memphis echoes it.
Navigate day 3 in Google Maps ↗
Delta 101 is a 3-day trip of about 420 miles.
It starts in Memphis.
It chains The Blues Highway and The Hill Country Ramble.
Day 1: near Clarksdale, MS; Day 2: near Greenwood, MS; Day 3: Greenwood → Memphis via Oxford.