A Short Week
4 days · ~500 miles · from Memphis
The full Highway 61 run, river to river: the Delta's jukes and shrines, Vicksburg's bluffs, Natchez's mansions and the Felicianas, then the levee road into the Crescent City.
This trip chains: The Blues Highway · River Road & the Felicianas
Starting in Memphis, this 4-day itinerary connects The Blues Highway and River Road & the Felicianas. It suits travellers interested in barbecue, boudin, oysters & tamales; blues, country, jukes & jamborees; battlefields, the movement & the past. The day-by-day bases let you split roughly 500 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 125 miles per day across the whole trip, or roughly 2.8–4.2 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 before the heat, then 61 south: Gateway to the Blues in the old Tunica depot, the Crossroads sign at 61 and 49 (it is a sign; manage expectations), the Delta Blues Museum until it closes. Juke night at Red's or Ground Zero — whichever has a band, and ask, because the schedule is a rumor. Overnight Clarksdale.
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 at opening, the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, B.B. King's museum in Indianola, then east to Greenwood for the Robert Johnson grave most people settle on, at Little Zion. Back west for tamales at Doe's in Greenville, and the levee miles down to Vicksburg's bluffs by dusk. Overnight Vicksburg.
'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.
The restored 1955 courthouse where the murderers were acquitted in 67 minutes, and where the county issued its formal apology in 2007. The center's guided story is the strongest hour in the Delta.
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.
World-class museum wrapped around the brick gin where B.B. worked; he's buried on the grounds. Club Ebony, the chitlin'-circuit landmark he later bought, stands nearby.
Tamales and gigantic porterhouses out of a 1941 grocery storefront — enter through the kitchen. Greenville is the hub of the Delta's Hot Tamale Trail (ask about the festival each October).
Navigate day 2 in Google Maps ↗ · via Emmett Till Interpretive Center, Po' Monkey's, Dockery Farms, B.B. King Museum, Doe's Eat Place, Muddy Waters's Rolling Fork, The Onward Store, Margaret's Grocery
The military park first, while the markers are readable, then what is left of Margaret's Grocery on old 61. Port Gibson, the Windsor Ruins down their gravel road, and Natchez: the mansions held against the Forks of the Road memorial a mile away, which is the whole point. South into the Felicianas on 61 — from here you are driving River Road & the Felicianas north to south, the reverse of how the atlas draws it. A night at the Myrtles if you want the ghost story with your breakfast, or in town if you don't.
Rev. H.D. Dennis promised Margaret a castle and built one from cinderblock, paint and scripture — 'ALL IS WELCOME, JEWS AND GENTILES.' Viewable from the road while preservationists work.
'Too beautiful to burn,' Grant supposedly said while marching through. The golden hand atop First Presbyterian has pointed heavenward since 1859.
Twenty-three Corinthian columns alone in the woods — all that's left of Mississippi's grandest mansion, which survived the war only to burn from a party guest's cigarette in 1890.
More antebellum mansions than anywhere (the millionaires sat out the war); Longwood's unfinished octagon — workers dropped tools in 1861 and never came back. Hold both: the Forks of the Road slave-market memorial, and a beer at Under-the-Hill where the river men drank.
Promoted as 'one of America's most haunted homes' — the Chloe legend, a mirror that allegedly holds spirits, and a B&B if you're brave. The town around it is the prettiest in Louisiana, ghosts or no.
Navigate day 3 in Google Maps ↗ · via Port Gibson, Windsor Ruins, Natchez, Mammy's Cupboard, Rosemont, Angola Museum
The River Road the slow way, levee on one side and chemical plants on the other, no apology from either. Whitney Plantation, told from the perspective of the enslaved — give it the morning. Oak Alley's oaks from the top of the levee, free and better framed than the ticketed view. Then into the city by the old river road, which delivers you to the Riverbend streetcar line instead of an interstate ramp.
English Louisiana: Grace Church's mossy churchyard, Rosedown's gardens, and Oakley House, where the young Audubon painted dozens of his birds as a live-in tutor.
The quarter-mile allée of 28 live oaks, planted a century before the 1839 house. The postcard of the Old South — read its slavery exhibit so you see the whole picture.
The one museum on the river told entirely from the enslaved person's perspective (opened 2014) — memorials, first-person narratives, the Wall of Honor. The essential stop on this road; book the timed tour.
The longest true siege in American history (48 days, 1863) — and among the first major assaults by Black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, whose valor here helped change the Union army.
The crenellated Old Capitol — Mark Twain called it a 'little sham castle' and blamed Sir Walter Scott for the South's worst ideas — and Huey Long's 34-story tower, where the Kingfish was shot in 1935 and lies buried out front under his own statue. Free observation deck.
Navigate day 4 in Google Maps ↗ · via Port Hudson, Louisiana's Two Capitols, Donaldsonville, Houmas House, Oak Alley, Evergreen Plantation, Whitney Plantation, Destrehan Plantation
Memphis to New Orleans on US 61 is a 4-day trip of about 500 miles.
It starts in Memphis.
It chains The Blues Highway and River Road & the Felicianas.
Day 1: Clarksdale; Day 2: Vicksburg; Day 3: near St. Francisville, LA; Day 4: St. Francisville → New Orleans.