In May of 1999, the New Orleans Blues Project submitted an application to the White House Millennium Council for a Millennium Trail designation for the famed BLUES HIGHWAY.

The designation was assigned in June 2000, naming the New Orleans Blues Project as the managing organization of the BLUES HIGHWAY Millennium Trail.

The BLUES HIGHWAY Community Millennium Trail was named, "In recognition of efforts to bring the community together to Honor the Past - Imagine the Future’ by developing a trail that connects people to their land, their history and their culture."

The "BLUES HIGHWAY" is a physical and conceptual heritage trail that links America's communities sharing a common blues heritage. The BLUES HIGHWAY traverses The Mississippi River and the old Highways 61 & 49 from New Orleans to the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, St. Louis and Kansas City to Chicago....and points east to Detroit, Philadelphia and the Piedmont region of the Carolinas; points west to Houston and the Deep Ellum section of Dallas/Fort Worth - the routes traveled by blues men and women from the turn-of-the-century, to modern day touring blues acts, linking the communities and cities where blues was born, nurtured and still thrives today.

The New Orleans Blues Project is developing the BLUES HIGHWAY Millennium Trail as a music and cultural economic development initiative, as well as a tourism development initiative.

As a music and cultural economic development project, The New Orleans Blues Project seeks to employ the BLUES HIGHWAY Millennium Trail designation to generate attention, recognition and investment into America's blues and roots music scene and related culture and heritage - with a specific emphasis in terms of investment into community and economic development activities throughout the Lower Mississippi Delta states of AR, MO, TN, MS & LA - in keeping with the Lower Mississippi Delta Development initiative and the New Markets initiative - and more specifically, toward the building of a regional music business infrastructure that will provide more employment, business development and entrepreneurial opportunity. The timing is especially right, as the region moves increasingly toward a more culturally-based economy.

As a tourism initiative, the BLUES HIGHWAY will highlight the music, arts, culture and heritage of the communities along the BLUES HIGHWAY, complimenting existing regional tourism efforts and stimulating additional awareness and interest in the region, increasing cultural tourism throughout the lower MS Delta.

Click on the Trail Tours link above to see photos from King Lloyd's Sugar Hill House of Blues in Woodville, Mississippi.