I was born in a hospital on Highway 49. If one follows 49 north into the Delta, it crosses Highway 61, and at that intersection you’re standing where the blues were born. And if you believe Muddy Waters – and I do – he said, “The blues had a baby and they named the baby rock and roll,” you can drive east a couple of hours to Tupelo and walk through the shotgun house where Elvis was born.
Continue south on Highway 45 from Tupelo and you’ll land in Meridian, hometown of Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. Get on Interstate 59 south out of Meridian and you’ll wind up back in Hattiesburg, where the circle closes.

Halfway down 45, it hit me.

Mississippi really is the birthplace of America’s music.

People say Texans take their state pride to the limit. I have that, times 10, for Mississippi. I am seventh-generation, Pine Beltian to the bone, and the older I get the louder I get about it. This is the most under-visited state in the union, and most of the people who don’t visit couldn’t find Merigold on a map.

The Europeans see Mississippi as an exotic locale. It took me seeing my home state through their eyes to really understand what we have here.

The blues were born here. So was rock ’n’ roll, recorded in my hometown before Cleveland was running the numbers. Country music’s father was born and raised an hour and a half north of where I am typing this. Faulkner sat under an oak in Oxford and rewrote what the American sentence could do. Down in Jackson, Eudora Welty was making stories out of porch conversations. Out on the Gulf, Walter Anderson rowed a skiff to Horn Island to paint what nobody else had bothered to see. B.B. King’s first note out of Indianola is still ringing true.

For all of that, we get apologized to. I have lost count of the number of times someone at a dinner party in some other city said, “Oh, Mississippi. I’m sorry.” I used to bristle. I don’t anymore. Those people are wrong, and being wrong is its own punishment. And why would I try to convince someone like that about what we have? They might move down here.

I have co-hosted two Mississippi tours in my life, and on both I had guests from all over the country. People who came down expecting one thing and went home with another. People who hugged my neck on Day Five and said they had to come back. I love turning people on to Mississippi.

Six years of saying “soon” finally caught up with me. I sat down with the Yonderlust leadership team last winter and put it on the calendar: June 15-19. We’re covering a majority of the state.

Each of these places is a piece of my life. Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville doesn’t look like much from the street and somehow turns into church when you sit down at a table. The shotgun house in Tupelo is small enough to walk through in two minutes, and most of the people I’ve taken there end up standing on the front porch for half an hour trying to imagine the boy who walked out of it and changed the world. The potters at McCarty’s in Merigold pull a piece of clay out of nothing the way other people pour coffee. Vasti Jackson has played Crescent City Grill so many times I could sing his set list backward, and he plays every song like it’s the first time. The MAX in Meridian is the most underrated museum in the South, and you can quote me on that. The Walter Anderson Museum is a small building in a small town that holds work strong enough to put any gallery in Paris to shame, and Walter’s son John still walks through it answering questions like he’s got all the time in the world. Mary Mahoney’s has been pouring gumbo into bowls in Biloxi since 1964.

I have lived a small chapter of my life at every one of these places. In June I’ll be taking a small group of Mississippians, and a few outsiders who get it, and letting them live a chapter of their own.

A long drive across a beautiful place is its own argument for being alive. So I’m putting a bus on the road for five days. There will be a bar on it, because life is short and the Delta is long. Bill Ellison and Temperance Babcock and Jeff Bullard play live on one leg of the trip. Muddy Waters’ nephew takes another. None of that is the point. The bus is just the room we’re in while Mississippi rolls by the window.

I’m not trying to sell you a trip. The June bus is full. I’m trying to sell you on Mississippi. Get in your car this weekend and drive to Indianola or Ocean Springs or Tupelo on your own. You don’t need a bus or a guide to do any of it.

Onward.

BBQ RIBS

Yield: 6-8 servings

Ingredients:
3 full racks pork spare ribs, 3-4 pounds each (3-inch/down)
2 cups white vinegar
1/2 cup paprika
1/4 cup garlic powder
2 tablespoons onion powder
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon Creole seasoning

Directions:
■ Place the ribs in a large roasting pan or baking dish and pour the vinegar over the ribs. Using your hand, rub all of the ribs with the vinegar and allow them to marinate for 1 hour. Drain the vinegar and dry each rack completely with paper towels.
■ Combine the spice mixture and coat the ribs completely. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
■ Prepare the grill. Cook the ribs over indirect low heat for 2½-3 hours or until they begin to pull away from the tips of the bones and the entire rack bends easily when held in the middle with a pair of tongs.

Robert St. John is a restaurateur, author, enthusiastic traveler, and world-class eater from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He has spent four decades in the restaurant industry, written 13 books, and written a syndicated newspaper column for more than 24 years. Read more about Robert at robertstjohn.com.

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