Pack in some blues.

Before he had the name and the legend of Howlin’ Wolf, Chester Arthur Burnett was a poor boy in West Point, Mississippi, whose chances for success seemed bleak. Born in 1910 to teenaged parents who divorced a year after his birth, Chester found himself homeless when his increasingly unstable mother, who sang spirituals on the street corners of nearby Aberdeen, cast him out of her house with nothing but the love of music that she had passed along. He kept that gift alive, though it was hard. When he went to live with a great uncle, he sang only while he plowed behind a mule; work was unrelenting, the brutality nearly crushing. Finally, Chester left West Point and walked barefoot 85 miles to the Mississippi Delta to find his father.

Today, the spirit of Howlin’ Wolf has been returned to his hometown with the full honors due him. Thanks to the efforts of the Howlin’ Wolf Blues Society, chartered in 1995, a granite statue of The Wolf has been erected in the city park, and since 1996, the Society has also sponsored an annual blues festival in Howlin’ Wolf’s honor that has brought overflowing crowds of blues greats and blues lovers together in exuberant celebration. You can find out more about Howlin’ Wolf at West Point’s Friday House historical museum.

An amalgam of old and new, West Point has also been the birthplace of several Fortune 500 business leaders, and today the ambitious city plans to add several more museums to create a city-wide complex of cultural attractions. West Point is already making a splash as jumping off point to the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway.

So you can pack in some blues, or pack up a picnic to take scenic cruise down the Waterway; it’s another terrific path that’s already been cleared for you here in the Mississippi Hills.