Graceland and the Mississippi Delta

Day Four of our American Road Trip and we went to Graceland which, with no hint of irony, I thought was tasteful and restrained.

Since then we've been driving down Highway 61 to New Orleans (a bit further down from Paul Simon in the Graceland song):

The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the civil war

We just got to Clarksdale and the Delta Blues Museum to see it close, but one of the nice curators let me in to buy a Howlin' Wolf CD and then gave us a private tour of the museum. There's Muddy Water's hut in there and a good story about why Robert Johnson got poisoned (answer: you don't mess with a man's money or his honey).

After hours on the Mississippi Delta, rarely seeing anything but soybean fields, we decided to call it a night at The Battlefield Inn in Vicksburg. Tomorrow it might be time to shift gear from Blues tourism to learning about the American Civil War (lucky we brought our Ken Burns' DVDs).

I took this photo when the sun started to fade and we could finally drive with the top down. On to the Big Easy!