Highway 61 Blues

Highway 61 enters Mississippi at Memphis and runs to the Louisiana line, passing Tunica, Clarksdale, Cleveland, Vicksburg and Natchez. Its Blues Highway nickname comes mostly from the Delta stretch, but the road also carried people. As agriculture shifted and Jim Crow tightened its hold, countless African American migrants rode this route out of the Delta and the Deep South. It is arguably the most famous and infamous link in a road that runs on to New Orleans. Kirby Road meets it at this spot.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — 17 mi
  A National Historic Landmark Mississippian mound town on a bluff over the Mississippi, with a university museum, a replica house and a nature trail inside T. O. Fuller State Park.
• Graceland — 20 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 23 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 24 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Son House — 1.3 mi
• Hollywood Cafe — 2.9 mi
• Abbay & Leatherman — 5.6 mi
• Memphis Minnie — 10 mi