On the backroads that stretch between Indianola and Jackson, the weight of what Mississippi once was — the long rows of cotton, the silence of fields that once demanded everything from the people who worked them — still hangs in the languid air.
Out of those fields came the blues, and out of that music came one of the state’s greatest sons, Riley “Blues Boy” King, known to the world as B.B. And the same Mississippi soil that gave him a voice also gave rise to an equally revered man of courage and conscience, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, both of whom would have turned 100 this year.
