Clarksdale

The blues was invented in the Delta and recorded in Memphis. This trip drives the river-flat road between them — the cotton fields where Charley Patton taught Howlin' Wolf to play, the train platform at Tutwiler where W.C. Handy first heard a man play slide guitar with a knife, the three contested graves of Robert Johnson, the prison farm Alan Lomax recorded at, the last rural juke joint, and then up to Memphis — Beale Street, Sun, Stax — where the studios took what the Delta had started and put it on tape that the rest of the country could hear. Eleven stops, two states, about three days if you take it seriously.