Mississippi Blues Trail
Cache Challenge
The Mississippi Blues Trail was established by the Mississippi Bureau of Tourism to recognize the unique connection our state has with a style of music known as the "Mississippi Blues" or simply "the Blues." Many musicians acquired fame, and for some fortune, playing this style of music. The MBT decided to recognize these artists and their beginnings here in Mississippi.
The MBT divided the state into five basic regions where Blues Trail markers are placed.
These markers are in places of historical significance to the blues music heritage. Each marker tells about a specific piece of that history. The vast majority of these markers are in the Delta region in the northwest part of the state.
This challenge involves visiting those historical MS Blues Trail markers scattered out around the state of Mississippi...and even beyond.
Participating cities include : Tupelo,Columbus,Jackson,Holly Springs,Cleveland,Clarksdale,University of Mississippi,Aberdeen,Meridian,Vickburg...
At or near many of these markers there is a geocache hidden. Your quest is to visit these markers and find the geocaches associated with them.
Each Blues Trail Geocache consists of one find towards the final goal of 50 Blues Trail Geocaches in order for challenge completion for final.
Here is a bookmark link to the current blues trail caches -Mississ ippi Blues Caches
We hope your ventures along the way
to completion of this challenge are both
memorable and rewarding!
Transformed in the 1950s from a sharecropper shack that was built probably in the 1920s, Poor Monkey's Lounge is the one of the last rural jook joints in the Mississippi Delta. There are several remaining urban jooks, and some modern reincarnations designed to reflect old time places, but virtually no rural jooks remain. These places were once common. Before the Great Migration to the North and the exodus to towns and cities, hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and small farmers peopled the countryside in the days when one person and one mule worked ten acres. Today, on this depopulated countryside, one tractor works a thousand acres.
The building is made of unpainted cypress planks, roofed with corrugated galvanized steel that is often referred to as a "tin." It is windowless, but has three doors. The front sports several faded, hand-painted signs.
Poor (Po') Monkey's sits in a cotton field in Bolivar County, west of the town of Merigold on the Hiter farm, land worked by members of the same family for generations. Monkey's is the only surviving sharecropper shanty on this land, although there are remains of a few others nearby. In the early 1950s, Willie Seaberry, known as Poor (Po') Monkey, began to operate the unused sharecropper house as a lounge.