B.B. King country to the King's birthplace, with the Civil Rights heart in between
Three Mississippi airports that chain the state's defining 20th-century stories. KGLH Mid-Delta Regional puts you in flat cotton country, twenty-five miles from Indianola and the B.B. King Museum — built inside the brick cotton gin where Riley B. King worked in the 1940s before he became the king of the blues. East-northeast to KTUP Tupelo Regional and the Elvis Presley Birthplace, a $180 two-room shack where Elvis Aaron Presley was born January 8, 1935. Tupelo gospel and Indianola blues are both visible in everything Elvis recorded at Sun Records twenty years later. South to KJAN Jackson, where the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument preserves the modest split-level where Evers was murdered in his driveway June 12, 1963 — the home is now NPS, designated in 2020. American music and American civil rights, on the same flat alluvial plain.