Memphis, the Delta Blues & Elvis Country

Built at the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the National Civil Rights Museum is one of the most important historical institutions in America — a comprehensive narrative of the American civil rights movement from the colonial era through the present, with the Lorraine Motel room preserved exactly as it was on April 4, 1968. A profound and necessary experience.

The birthplace of the Memphis Blues — W.C. Handy wrote 'Memphis Blues' on this block in 1912 and launched the commercial market for blues music. The buildings on Beale Street between Second and Fourth are original; the music clubs operate nightly in several of them. The Handy Home and Museum is at Fourth and Beale.

The most important soul music museum in the world, built on the exact footprint of the original Stax Records studio where Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Booker T. & the MGs, and Isaac Hayes recorded between 1957 and 1975. The original Studio A is reconstructed inside the museum; the Isaac Hayes gold-plated Cadillac is the most-photographed exhibit.

A Memphis institution in the competitive Memphis BBQ market — dry-rub ribs and pulled pork from pits that have been going since 2002, with a sauce program that has won multiple national competitions. The ribs are the correct order.

The birthplace of rock and roll — Sam Phillips recorded Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Howlin' Wolf in this small recording studio between 1950 and 1959. The studio still operates and the guided tour walks through the original recording room where all of those sessions happened.

The Smithsonian-affiliated institution documenting the social and musical history of Memphis music from the Delta sharecropper tradition through the rock era — the scholarship here is more rigorous than the Stax or Sun museums, and the collection of original instruments and field recordings is exceptional.

A Memphis fine dining institution in a 1913 silent movie theater on Main Street — the restored theater interior (original balcony seating, Batchelder tile work) provides the most dramatic dining room in Memphis. The kitchen focuses on Gulf shrimp, Tennessee beef, and seasonal produce.

The plantation where Charley Patton lived and performed in the 1910s and 1920s, widely considered the 'father of the Delta blues' — Dockery is where the earliest recordings of the musical form that would become blues, rock, and soul were made. The original gin house, commissary, and the water tower are all standing, maintained as a National Historic Landmark. Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, and Roebuck 'Pops' Staples all passed through Dockery.

The former G.T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital where Bessie Smith died in 1937 after a car accident — later converted to a hotel that served the Black community during segregation, hosting blues musicians including Ike Turner and Robert Nighthawk. The Riverside Hotel is still operating as a small inn, one of the most historically significant buildings in the Delta.

A Clarksdale gallery in a former hardware store showing Mississippi folk and outsider art alongside Delta blues memorabilia — the collection includes original paintings by several self-taught artists who worked the Delta juke joint circuit. The adjacent Bluesland juke joint hosts weekend shows.

The Clarksdale Greyhound bus station (now a blues museum) is where young Muddy Waters and B.B. King stepped off the bus before heading north to Chicago — the Mississippi Blues Trail marker at the station and the adjacent Delta Blues markers on Highway 61 form the most concentrated single-mile stretch of blues history in the state.

A comprehensive blues history collection in the casino-resort area of Tunica — the former cotton capital of the Mississippi Delta now generates its revenue differently, but the museum maintains a serious collection of blues photographs, instruments, and oral histories from the pre-casino era.

A Tunica institution since 1924 — catfish, tamales (a Delta food tradition with Mexican origins from the turn of the 20th century), and a dining room that has served Delta farmers, casino workers, and musicians for a century. The Delta tamale is genuinely different from the Mexican version and requires an explanation the Blue and White staff is happy to provide.

The two-room shotgun house where Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in a East Tupelo neighborhood built for working-class families. The house, the accompanying museum, and the Assembly of God church where Elvis first heard music are all preserved on the site. The contrast between the modesty of the original house and the magnitude of what grew from it is the point of the entire site.

The site of the July 1864 battle where Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate cavalry was stopped — one of the smaller Civil War battlefields but well-interpreted, with the Corinth Road and the Harrisburg neighborhood context preserved.

A Tupelo institution since 1979 — the Greek-American family restaurant that feeds the Lee County courthouse crowd and the visiting Elvis pilgrims alike. The moussaka and the lemon chicken are legitimately good.

The Natchez Trace Parkway runs 444 miles from Nashville to Natchez along the original Native American and settler trail — the Tupelo visitor center is the most comprehensive introduction to the full Trace, with exhibits on the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations who built the trail and the Kaintuck flatboatmen who walked it home after floating goods to New Orleans.

The Pharr Mounds complex is the largest Mound-builder site in Mississippi — eight ceremonial mounds built by the Woodland peoples between 1 and 200 AD, six miles north of Tupelo on the Trace. The mounds are open to walk through; the interpretive signs explain the burial and ceremonial functions.