Up high in the hills, the lowdown blues.

The first and foremost bluesman of the Mississippi Hills, Chester Arthur Burnett, better known to the world as Howlin’ Wolf, was born outside West Point to teenage parents and to a bitterly hard life of abandonment, back-breaking work and abuse. Driven by his phenomenal talent and a will to survive, he walked barefoot the 80 miles to the Delta to find his father, as later he would find fame and fortune in Chicago.

While Howlin Wolf didn’t return to the Hills, there were other notable bluesmen who did. After sharecropping, fishing and playing at house parties failed to provide a living in Holly Springs, R. L. Burnside migrated to Chicago where many of his relatives had settled, including his cousin by marriage, Muddy Waters. But when within the span of a single month, Burnside’s father, brother and uncle were all murdered in that city, he returned to the Hills, where he led the way in creating a new, raw blues style, influenced by Mississippi Fred McDowell, and driven by the relentless fife and drum beat of music of Hills artist Otha Turner.

A kind of ad hoc blues community eventually formed around bluesman Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint in Chulahoma. The Hill Country bluesmen’s raucous approach to their art—and to their lives—would make them legends. Before it burned in 2000, the Chulahoma club was the pilgrimage of choice for rockers like the Rolling Stones, Sonic Youth and U2.

By then homage from white rockers to African American innovators had become a ritual nearly a half-century old, begun when a poor white boy from the Mississippi Hills incorporated blues into his own particular form of rock and roll.

However, in 1962, it was a young African American scholar and leader, James Meredith, who rocked a belligerent state with a one simple demand: equality.