Water Valley: Tracking legends.

On a late April night of 1900, rail engineer Casey Jones and his fireman Sim Webb left Memphis on a train with six cars, southbound for Canton, Mississippi. Nearly two hours behind schedule at departure, Jones was set to make a record run, traveling light at well past midnight. But up ahead in Vaughn, a jam of train cars made the track he was traveling impassable. Jones, for reasons unknown, did not respond to the signal until he and Webb saw a caboose looming ahead. Webb shouted and jumped, but Jones applied the emergency brake and stayed aboard. The rest is legend—legend that is explored at length and in depth at the Water Valley Casey Jones Railroad Museum at the restored Water Valley Depot.

The museum features documents and railroad artifacts, photographs and original documents, painstakingly collected by Water Valley resident Bruce Gurner, teacher, railroad man and Casey Jones aficionado.

Train wrecks of the human variety are the stuff of the blues, which happen to be the stuff of the local legends preserved over at the headquarters of Fat Possum Records, established in the early 1990s for the express purpose of recording Hills blues artists like R. L. Burnside, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Junior Kimbrough. Hill Country blues, with its raw, raucous driving sound, has brought rock and roll royalty to the Mississippi Hills to pay court, from the Rolling Stones to U2 to Sonic Youth.

Naturally, literary pilgrims also make the trek to this area, and many of them make their mark over in the tiny town of Taylor.