I’m a Fiddle Player Who Felt Disconnected from the Blues. A Trip On the Mississippi Blues Trail Changed That

His name’s Edward Antoine, the man who’s singing, but he calls himself King Edward, just like the historic hotel a mile away. He just turned 87, and though he must sit down to perform, his voice still sparks and crackles like autumn leaves. The house band behind him, most members young enough to be his grandchildren, keep the beat. The crowd at Hal & Mal’s in Jackson, Mississippi, whoops with pleasure at the end of every stanza.

“What you have to learn about the blues,” says Bobby Rush, the man sitting next to me, “is it ain’t just something to make you sad. Because the same thing that will make you laugh is the same thing that will make you cry.” Rush, 91, has just won his third Grammy award, so I listen to what he says. “You love your mama, don’t you?” he asks gnomically. “You don’t love the blues, you don’t love your mama.”

With apologies to my mother, I have never loved the blues. But then I’ve barely listened to the blues before now. Sure, I can recognize the genre—its form is one of the most instantly identifiable of all musical genres. The shuffling rhythm of the guitar, the steady walking of the bass, the melismatic voice pouring out emotions: Blues is the sound of history, created by Black American musicians in the 1890s, with roots in work songs and spirituals, and later gospel.

But it has remained a distant musical form for me. I’m hoping this trip will change that. As a fiddle player, I’m a regular visitor to the U.S. South, chasing the sounds that shape it. When I learned Mississippi had a Blues Trail honoring the people and places that secured the music’s legacy, I booked a flight from my home in London.

The state’s Blues Trail began in 2006 with just three historical markers; today, there are more than 200. Hal & Mal’s, which has hosted live blues performances for more than 40 years, is one of the trail’s newest honorees.

Photos by Miranda Barnes

This is how I end up next to Rush, whose seven-decade career as a singer and songwriter is celebrated with its own marker a couple of miles from here. He just returned from touring three hours ago, he says, so he’s a little tired, but he wanted to make the effort to go out because his friend Paul is visiting. Paul, it turns out, runs a blues festival in Maine and is fanatical about the music genre’s history. Paul has visited every marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

My goal is more modest—a weeklong road trip to some of the trail’s key sites. While the blues has no single origin story, the Deep South is certainly one of the places it was born. Many of its pioneers learned from each other while sharecropping on plantations in the Mississippi Delta. If I ever hope to feel this music, I want to better understand where it comes from.

Onstage, a harmonica player digs so deep into a solo he ends up on his knees. “You don’t just play the blues,” the musician tells the crowd, “you live it.”

The next morning, I head for the town of Bentonia. Bobby Rush’s music travels with me. “My love for you is so doggone strong,” he sings in his 1971 song “Chicken Heads,” flowing through my car speakers. “Like the Mississippi River it rolls on and on.”

Thirty miles north of Jackson I pull off Highway 49 and find the cinder block building I’m looking for. A dark blue plaque stands a few feet from its concrete porch, confirming its credentials: The Blue Front Cafe is the oldest surviving juke joint in Mississippi. There’s no agreed-on etymology of “juke,” but by the early 20th century it came to represent a live music venue that was more house party than formal club.

Photos by Miranda Barnes

There are no customers inside, just an elderly gentleman in a cap, sitting on a stool and looking up at a shelf lined with tubs of dill pickles and pigs’ feet. He heads behind the counter to serve me a Coke and gets himself a soda. This is Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, and his parents founded this place in 1948.

Holmes, 77, inherited the live music café when his father died in 1970. Bentonia’s distinctive blues style—haunting, minor-key melodies rendered in a high falsetto—was evidently inspired by a World War I veteran named Henry Stuckey and passed along to musicians including Skip James and Holmes himself. Today, Holmes is the last of the Bentonia bluesmen.

Each June, the Bentonia Blues Festival he founded in 1972 gathers hundreds of attendees in front of the porch for three days, with open-mic jamming all afternoon and a long lineup of regional musicians performing in the evenings. Other times of the year, music here tends to be a spontaneous affair, and it can be chance whether you happen to come by on a day when Holmes will be playing with his buddies. But he’s happy to arrange sessions in advance for the tour groups he shows around most weeks.

“I’m just proud to have contributed something,” he says. “Even when I’m gone, this place’ll be here.” He walks me around the photographs and posters that cover the walls, and I ask him which of the many guitars in the corner are his. “All of them,” he says, laughing. A TV blares out news headlines—war, poverty, inequality. Hard times are always with us, I think: Maybe this is why the blues endures.

Photos by Miranda Barnes

A few miles out of Bentonia I cross into the Mississippi Delta, and the terrain changes from thick and green to wide and flat. The view changes with it—fields of cotton and trees rising out of swampland. From this isolated landscape emerged the Delta blues, whose distinctively raw sound I hear in the tiny town of Leland, home to the Highway 61 Blues Museum.

Outside the museum stands a marker to the bluesman James “Son” Thomas, who worked as a porter here in the early 1960s, when the building was the Montgomery Hotel. I step inside, and a guitar rasps out minor chords: Thomas’s son, Pat, often plays for visitors in the entrance hall. He sits and sings words his father wrote, his Mississippi accent eliding the vowels so that many of the words remain a mystery.

But you don’t need to understand the lyrics to feel the yearning within them, and I’m amazed how much meaning can be packed into a simple, repeated phrase. “Beefsteak when I’m hungry,” Pat sings, “and whiskey when I’m dry.” The best blues songs are perfectly honed short stories of hardship— “I asked for water, she brought me gasoline”—but some of them still celebrate the little wins in life.

Highway 61 is known as the Blues Highway because it took so many musicians from small towns to Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago. The Great Migration, between 1910 and 1970, saw 6 million Black Americans move from the rural South to the industrial cities farther north in search of a better life outside the Jim Crow laws that dominated daily life in the region. The blues traveled with them, evolving and electrifying in new urban environments. It’s a history wonderfully told in Indianola, the hometown of blues legend B.B. King, just 20 minutes east of Leland. Born Riley B. King, early in his career he was given the nickname “Beale Street Blues Boy,” which was shortened to “Blues Boy,” and finally B.B.

In 1935, at 10 years old, King was singing at church and working the cotton fields with his family of sharecroppers. In the late 1940s he hitchhiked to Memphis, before building his career on the “Chitlin’ Circuit.” The informal network of venues developed in response to segregation, which not only divided audiences by race but frequently excluded Black audiences and artists from “white” venues altogether. Club Ebony in Indianola, an important waypoint on the Chitlin’ Circuit, has been continuously open since the late 1940s, except for a brief period of renovation; the B.B. King Museum—which opened in Indianola in 2008—oversaw the renovation.

King was passionate about his Delta home, and even arranged to be buried on the museum grounds. He was laid to rest there in 2015 and lingers in other ways, too. After visiting the eponymous museum, I stop at the nearby restaurant Betty’s Place, where my fried chicken is brought to the table by Betty herself. It turns out she was King’s cook for two decades.

Photo by Miranda Barnes

By early evening, I arrive in downtown Cleveland, Mississippi, home to art galleries, boutiques, and the Delta State University campus, whose music institute has serious credibility, including a recording facility to rival Abbey Road. Since 2016, the campus grounds have housed the Grammy Museum Mississippi, a vast structure full of interactive exhibits. (It also has a Blues Trail marker.)

In the rooftop bar of the Cotton House Hotel, I meet music professor Barry Bays, who has played bass for numerous famous blues musicians, from Willie King to Charlie Musselwhite. I tell him about my trip and he asks if I’ve been to Dockery Farms. “That’s where the blues was born, after all,” Bays says.

Back in the 1920s, the plantation at Dockery, seven miles outside Cleveland, had a bigger population than the town itself. It had its own currency, train station, and entertainment. Musician Charley Patton recorded some of the first-ever blues records while living there, and under his influence Dockery became a hothouse of talent, nurturing the careers of future stars like Son House and Howlin’ Wolf.

The next morning, I follow Bays’s directions to Dockery, which today is an open-air, self-guided museum visited annually by thousands of music lovers from around the world. I walk through the collection of timber buildings by the side of the highway. The commissary where the workers came to spend their earnings burned down decades ago, but you can still find the stone slabs of its porch, where the musicians used to play. I stand on it and hear riffs emanating from unseen speakers. Either that, or I’m having a very high-definition hallucination.

Photos by Miranda Barnes

Thirty-eight miles north of Cleveland is Clarksdale, which once claimed to be home to a greater proportion of millionaires than any other U.S. city. In the 1920s, Clarksdale was booming. And while its cotton-based wealth largely lined the pockets of white landowners, it also fostered a vibrant Black district called “The New World,” whose clubs, cafés, and juke joints throbbed with patrons every Saturday.

Driving into its compact downtown of low-rise storefronts is like arriving on a movie set. The historic facades remain, in various states of repair. For decades, many sat vacant, their commerce drained by economic tides: the Great Migration, suburban flight.

Any number of blues icons can be traced back to Clarksdale. Legend has it that Robert Johnson met the devil here at the start of his career, at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, selling his soul in return for his musical genius. He became one of the genre’s biggest influences but died in 1938, at only 27. Muddy Waters was accidentally discovered in 1941 by the musicologist Alan Lomax on the Stovall Plantation just outside town, and subsequently rocketed to fame. John Lee Hooker, W.C. Handy, and Sam Cooke all lived in the city, and Bessie Smith died here, after a car crash on her way between gigs. The Riverside Hotel, where she spent her final hours, provided lodging to many of the area’s famous musicians, including Robert Nighthawk and his young roadie, Ike Turner. The hotel’s owners recently received a grant to help preserve it.

Blues fanatic Roger Stolle moved from St. Louis to Clarksdale in 2002 with a vision of a community revived by its musical heritage. Back then, the town was so deserted that his was often the only car in the street. “If I’d said then that by 2024 we were going to have two good coffee shops in Clarksdale, people would have laughed,” he says. “But my belief was that if you had something genuine here that people could see, or hear, or experience, you could market that.”

Stolle launched the Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art store and used his persuasion skills as a former adman to convince entrepreneurs and artists to move into Clarksdale’s vacant properties. At Hambone Gallery, owner Stan Street sells his artwork by day and plays the blues by night; harmonica restorer Deak Harp repairs and sells instruments at his downtown workshop. Today, Clarksdale hosts live blues shows 365 days a year and is well situated for tourists en route between Memphis (an hour-and-a-half drive north) and New Orleans (five hours south).

Photo by Miranda Barnes

At the Bad Apple Blues Club, the afternoon show has already begun. Entering its windowless interior from the sunny street temporarily blinds me, so when a voice asks me where I’m from, it takes a moment to pin it to the man in a pink trilby hat at the far end of the room. It turns out Sean “Bad” Apple pauses his set to welcome every new arrival, helping us find spots on a mismatched chair or beaten-up sofa, or selling us a beer from his icebox.

Apple walks the dozen of us in the audience through the musical evolution of the blues, illustrating it with guitar tunes, bee jokes, and Burt Reynolds impressions. His solo performance, in this setting that doubles as his home, reveals something in the music I haven’t heard yet: the sound of a human looking for connection.

Over the next two days, I pinball between venues. There are a dozen in downtown Clarksdale, and the more gigs I attend, the more I find myself appreciating the blues’ different moods, from uptempo grooves to slow melancholic delights. At Ground Zero Blues Club, co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman, I listen as Anthony “Big A” Sherrod bends the strings on his guitar with such emotion I feel sure I’m hearing them sing by themselves.

In Red’s Lounge, Clarksdale’s longest-operating juke joint, I encounter an energy so raw it seems to make the walls vibrate. Deak Harp is getting hectic on harmonica, backed by an achingly cool guitarist who never removes her shades. There are only a handful of us in the tiny room, and it’s like the best house party I’ve ever been to.

Photo by Miranda Barnes

A big part of the town’s charm is the way it seems to have already made space for you. When I’m not at gigs I’m running into the people I’ve met at them: Big A fist bumps me one afternoon when I spot him outside the Delta Blues Museum, taking a break from the school-age students he teaches there. At Abe’s Bar-B-Q, I’m treated like a regular by Phylis, who delivers my order—“have it with the slaw or there’s no point having it at all”—then brings over a photo of her grandfather, who established the place 100 years ago.

Stolle told me that people come to Clarksdale for the music and stay for the community. I’m regretting that I must move on. But I do so with a new affection and appreciation for the music. On the way to Tupelo, when the blues radio I’m listening to loses signal and Howlin’ Wolf cuts out mid-verse, I improvise the rest for him.

Tupelo is a comfortable city, with ample playgrounds and on-street parking. What Tupelo doesn’t feel is rock and roll, which is ironic, given its claim to fame as Elvis Presley’s birthplace, its own stop on the Blues Trail.

Elvis’s father Vernon, his grandfather Jessie, and his uncle Vester built the two-room Tupelo cabin in which Elvis was born in 1935 for $180. The “shotgun shack” has been preserved, and an accompanying museum, city park, and ornamental lake all honor the hometown hero.

I sit alone in the museum’s 126-seat theater and watch a film about Elvis’s childhood. He learned to sing at church but found rhythm in the streets of east Tupelo. His family home was close to the Black quarter of “Shake Rag,” and juke joint music seeped into the streets, where Elvis was known to hang out. The first recordings he ever made were of the blues. The “revolutionary” sound of rock and roll is based on its scales and structure.

The next day, I head farther south, following the blues legacy to Meridian, my final stop. The streets are so quiet that a plastic cup scudding across the pavement sounds like thunder. The art deco brilliance of the downtown buildings reflects the wealth it once accrued as a railroad town. There was no more famous employee of that railroad than Jimmie Rodgers, aka the Father of Country Music, who became popular in the late 1920s before dying of tuberculosis at age 35.

At the extravagant Temple Theatre, a crowd has gathered. They listen as guitarists in various sizes of cowboy hats sing songs about moonpies and Jesus. The Sucarnochee Revue is the opening gig of the weeklong Jimmie Rodgers Festival, an annual tradition since 1953. Elvis himself performed in one of its early talent contests. (He came in second.)

In the lobby I chat with Alana Sparrow Broughton, one of the organizers. “I grew up listening to hard rock,” she says. “I hated country music.” But the more she learned about Rodgers, the more fascinated she became. A white worker on the railroad, he absorbed the work songs of the Black laborers, and their bluesy inflection became a key character of his songwriting. He has his own marker at the train station.

As I head out of Mississippi the following day, I think about how blues tones, style, and structure are woven through the music I love, from the balladry of bluegrass to the righteous funk of Motown. I realize the blues has been there all along. I think back to Bentonia and the Blue Front Cafe. “I don’t care how big your house is, if it’s got one bedroom or 21 bedrooms,” Holmes had told me. “They all have one thing in common—a foundation. And blues is the foundation.”

Photo by Miranda Barnes

How to take a Blues Trail trip

In 2006, the Mississippi Blues Commission created the Mississippi Blues Trail to mark historic musical sites—clubs, churches, cotton fields, record labels, streets, and museums. Today, the trail has more than 200 sites and counting. Here’s where to start.

Begin your trip in Jackson, the soulful state capital; the Westin Hotel is centrally located. Head to the funky Fondren District for a night out at the live music venue Duling Hall, housed in a 1927 school; for a quieter evening, try the neighborhood of Belhaven Heights for a late performance at Urban Foxes coffee shop. The next day, drive into the Delta, where Indianola, 100 miles north, pays tribute to B.B. King in its museum and interpretive center.

Just 20 minutes to the west, the small town of Leland is worth a visit to hear Pat Thomas, son of famed bluesman James “Son” Thomas, play his father’s music at the Highway 61 Blues Museum. It’s also known for the Muppet collection at the Birthplace of Kermit the Frog Museum; Jim Henson, Kermit’s creator, grew up here.

The unmissable blues town of Clarksdale has live music every day and festivals every month (not to mention kayaking on the Mississippi River). Make your first stop the Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art store, where you can find out which clubs are putting on gigs that day. Abe’s Bar-B-Q—which has been serving its smoked-meat sandwiches for 100 years—and Meraki, a coffee roaster and arts charity, are both excellent spots to meet locals. Come evening, check into the 52-unit Shack Up Inn, which comprises a collection of former sharecroppers’ cabins surrounded by farm equipment and literal tumbleweeds.

Tupelo, two hours east of Clarksdale, is the birthplace of Elvis. For a true diner experience, visit Johnnie’s Drive-In, where, as a child, Elvis used to order hamburgers. For fine dining, head to Forklift, where your rabbit will be cooked three ways and paired with cauliflower cream. There’s live blues at the Blue Canoe, which hosts excellent bands on a weekly basis. In 2021, the city got its first boutique hotel, Hotel Tupelo, in a downtown location once part of the Shake Rag district, home to many juke joints. The hotel’s 79 rooms keep the Elvis references on the sophisticated side, and its restaurant, Jobos, has a cocktail bar.

South of Tupelo and east of Jackson is Meridian, another city with a famous musical son. Today, its attractions include the Jimmie Rodgers Museum, and you’ll find live music at Brickhaus Brewtique and the Meridian Underground Music store. Seafood Express—inside a gas station on Highway 45—is the place for shrimp po’boys, plus catfish, crawfish, and crab. Just as beloved is Weidmann’s, which has been serving fried green tomatoes since 1870. Book a stay at the Threefoot Hotel: This 16-story skyscraper, built in 1929, is an art deco marvel inside and out. Renovated in 2020, it’s now a Marriott with 131 modern rooms.

Where to detour

Oxford

Mississippi’s best-known university town is a natural stopover halfway between Clarksdale and Tupelo. Here, fine dining (Saint Leo, City Grocery), fancy hotels (the Oliver), and a gallery scene (Southside, Oxford Treehouse) are accompanied by plenty of live music, and the Blues Archive at Ole Miss has regular exhibits. Stop by Kingswood Restaurant, whose weekend brunches are popular with residents.

Friars Point

Author William Faulkner and playwright Tennessee Williams each wrote about this tiny community outside Clarksdale. Guide Billy Howell can take you there as he drives along the levee on his Delta Bohemian Tours; he’ll also introduce you to the places that inspired Williams’s plays.

Crystal Springs

A quaint railway town 30 minutes south of Jackson, Crystal Springs contains a small museum dedicated to blues legend Robert Johnson, owned by his grandsons.