This soulful southern state has a rich cultural history, and in fact markets itself as 'the birthplace of America’s music’.
It's certainly true that Mississippi has produced many seminal musicians, among them B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson, who famously claimed to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for his guitar skills.
Then, of course, there’s the Mississippi Delta Blues, a genre thought to originate in the singing of the plantation labourers working along the river banks, and which helped to shape the course of popular music in the 20th century.
The state is also the home of William Faulkner, one of the most important writers in Southern literature, and Mississippi provides the model for the fictional Yukattawa Country in which Faulkner’s most famous works are set.
And – covering all the cultural bases – Mississippi is also the birthplace of Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, whose Pulitzer prize-winning works A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are still enjoyed by audiences around the world.
Today, many of those who visit Mississippi do so in order to explore the land that produced all these great musicians and writers, who have played such major roles in the development and representation of American identity and culture.
The state, like much of the US, also offers a host of outdoor activities, including hiking, cycling, horse riding, boating, waterskiing, fishing, and (a more modern innovation) ‘geocaching’ – basically an international game of hide and seek, in which players use GPS to track down hidden containers, whose location is posted on the internet.
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