Highway 61

The Blues Highway
U.S. Route 61 is also known as the Blues Highway, because it runs through the Mississippi Delta country which was an important source of blues music. Son Thomas ("Highway 61"), Mississippi Fred McDowell ("61 Highway") and Jay Farrar of Son Volt ("Afterglow 61") all wrote songs about it, and many Mississippians, such as Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley took the blues to Chicago along the route.
The junction of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi is designated as the famous crossroads where — according to legend — Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the blues. However, there is no proof that it is the site. Several miles north is another junction where the two highways diverge again; between the junctions the two Highways share the route. It has never been confirmed as the place Johnson meant. If the crossroads in the song was ever anything other than a metaphor, it could have been any intersection in that part of Mississippi, or the world.
Like Route 66 in the Western U.S., the iconic Highway 61 sign is so strongly identified with the Clarksdale area that it is used to market different products and services, including the locally based Covenant Bank.
Blues singer Bessie Smith died in an automobile accident on Highway 61. Ike Turner's "Delta Cats" drove up Highway 61 to Memphis to record "Rocket 88", one of the first rock and roll records. Elvis Presley grew up in housing projects along it and Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in a motel on Highway 61. Bob Dylan was born along a stretch of Highway 61, in Duluth, Minnesota. Some of these connections led Bob Dylan to commemorate the highway in the title song of his album Highway 61 Revisited. More recently, in March of 2006 Hilary and Holly Williams - daughters of Hank Williams Jr. - were seriously injured in a one car accident on Highway 61 near Dundee, Mississippi.