Highway 61 — The Blues Highway, Mississippi

US Highway 61 — the 'Blues Highway' — runs from New Orleans through the length of the Mississippi Delta to Memphis and on to Bob Dylan's Minnesota, and its name alone evokes the Great Migration of Black Southerners northward and the music they carried with them. The road passes through or near virtually every significant site in Mississippi blues history: Natchez, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Yazoo City, Greenville, Leland, Greenwood, Cleveland, Clarksdale, and on to Memphis. Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and hundreds of others followed this road north to Chicago, carrying the Delta blues into the electric era.

Bob Dylan named his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited in explicit homage to the road's mythological status — the highway ran through Duluth and the Iron Range of Minnesota where he grew up, connecting his childhood landscape to the Deep South blues that had formed his musical consciousness. In 'Highway 61 Revisited,' the title track, the highway becomes a mythological space where God, Abraham, the Georgia Sam, and the fifth daughter of the tenth son all converge in surrealist comedy. The album marked Dylan's electric turn and remains one of the greatest rock and roll records ever made.

The Mississippi Blues Trail maintains numerous markers along Highway 61's route through the state. Driving the highway from Memphis to Vicksburg — a journey of about 250 miles through the flat, alluvial Delta — is one of the great American road trips. The landscape of cotton fields, water towers, shotgun houses, and occasional juke joints looks surprisingly unchanged from the photographs taken by FSA photographers in the 1930s and 1940s.