The Blues and Mississippi are synonymous to music lovers. The repertoire of any blues or rock band is full of songs, guitar licks, and vocal inflections borrowed from Mississippi bluesmen such as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, and Son House to Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Joe Williams, Bukka White, and Furry Lewis…  just to mention some of the early ones.

Ambassadors
A couple of generations later Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, James Cotton and many others are still ambassadors of the Mississippi blues. With the creation of the
Mississippi Blues Trail the blues commission of Mississippi wants to bring all this historic places into a map and makes this accessible to all blues lovers.

Important places
Historians, blues lovers and students have made up a list of all places that are so important for the development of the blues. On those places they placed what they call blues markers, that gives a brief definition of the significance of those places. Examples of such places are: Muddy Waters home site in Clarcksdale, Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo, Willy Dixon in Vicksburg, Howlin’ Wolf in West Point en Highway 61 in Tunica.

Blues markers
Meanwhile there are all ready a lot of blues markers to find, circulated all over the Mississippi. The most recent asset has been revealed in September: the birthplace of B.B King in Berclair, east of Indianola.

GPS-blues
The next step of this project is to set op all these blues markers on GPS this in combination with audio material. The intention is that it will be finished at the end of 2010.

We invite you to experience the land and the people who gave birth to modern American music — Mississippi, the birthplace of the Blues.

Website: http://www.msbluestrail.org
Source: http://www.tourpress.nl