Atlas Obscura Itineraries

The Explorer’s Guide to Road Tripping Down Highway 61

Highway 61 is known as “The Blues Highway” as it makes its way from New Orleans to Memphis, following the Mississippi River through lands forged over eons, from the coastal swamps of Louisiana to the alluvial plains of the Delta, the highway connecting these landscapes to the human tales etched into the soil, telling the story of the Deep South through a journey of migration, transformation, and enduring spirit. In New Orleans, where I was born and raised, Highway 61 was the end of my known world. It was a road of short-stay motels, pawn shops, Bingo parlors, and a pervading sense of danger. It was the boundary of my childhood, of all that was safe and familiar. Years later, as an adult, I would come to know the highway as a conduit to the past, an artery of profound historical and cultural significance, invention and reinvention, of human dreams pinned to its asphalt, ever following the river like an acolyte to the great hand that carved both into the mythos of the South.