To get there, drive west from Atlanta or south from Memphis through the flat, rich alluvial plain in Mississippi. Start your immersion at Tunica’s Gateway to the Blues Visitor Center, built in a circa-1895 train depot.

My introduction to chitlins was at the The Big Dinner sponsored by Washington County Sheriff Harvey Tackett. A friend later drove me miles up river to the ’Coon Hunters Ball, featuring turtle soup, squirrel stew, venison and oh-so-tender broiled rattlesnake.

“Twenty years ago, there were only five cars on this street — and they belonged to store owners,” said Bubba O’Keefe, on the somewhat busier streets of Clarksdale, Mississippi, he helped animate.

I hopped off the Southern Crescent from UVA, hurried to my Great Aunt Bolling Spalding’s funeral and fell in with other embarrassed latecomers walking behind her casket at the cathedral door. A distinguished, somehow familiar gentleman nodded. At the cemetery, my father introduced: “Meet your cousin, Walker Percy.”

My seventh grade English teacher’s homework assignment was one sentence by William Faulkner. Simple, right? It carried on for five pages – and the rest of my life. I lose myself in its tumescent portrayal of the taming of the Mississippi Delta. Start here, with “Big Woods,” an assemblage of Faulkner’s hunting stories.

Thanks to B.B. King’s relentless touring schedule – appearing in 342 shows in 1956 – he was known worldwide as “The King of the Blues.” He reworked a 1951 blues song, “The Thrill is Gone,” lifting it to a Grammy award in 1970.

The first blues song I heard growing up on Atlanta college radio was “Cross Road Blues,” 1936, by genre progenitor Robert Johnson.

Opened in 1945 when there were not many other African-American-owned businesses in Indianola, Club Ebony has succeeded through three owners and decades of legendary music.

Before 1895, Dockery Plantation was, like much of the Delta at the time, a swampy tangle of gum and cypress trees, panthers, wolves and mosquitoes.

When the Grammy board searched for the most appropriate location to build its first museum outside L.A., they could have chosen many places. Their verdict: Mississippi Delta.

Listen carefully in the juke joints, restaurants or the impressive interactive museums in Tunica, Cleveland, Clarksdale and Indianola, and you’re bound to hear fans talking about their love of the blues – many with international accents.

The U.S. Civil Rights Trail stops in 15 states, few as chilling as Mississippi.