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 ortheast Mississippi has been home to some of the America’s most influential musicians, including rock and pop superstar Elvis Presley and blues legend Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett. This tradition of music making continues today in the region, with numerous live musical events featuring local artists held every weekend within northeastern Mississippi. However, in comparison to the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the state, the region’s music and musicians have received only scant attention from scholars.
 As a first step in gaining more information about the region’s living musical traditions, the Mississippi Arts Commission and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi partnered to sponsor the Northeast Mississippi Music Documentation Project. The project, conducted from fall 2002 through spring of 2003, gathered information about the music of the region through an in-depth field survey.
 The project was headed up by veteran Mississippi fieldworker Wiley Prewitt and focused on a fourteen county area in the northeastern corner of the state (bordered by Lafayette County on the west, Monroe and Chickasaw Counties in the south, and the state line on the north and east). Prewitt found and documented (with photography and audio cassette) a wide range of musicians and musical venues active in the area, including young steel guitarists playing for services at the Church of the Living God in Toccopola, lively jam sessions at the Sparks Family homeplace in Belmont, and gospel musicians taking over the shopping mall in Tupelo.
 In addition to this website, the project also resulted in a series of performances at the Oxford Public Library by musicians and groups documented by Prewitt. Several of these musicians featured at the library were subsequently invited to perform on Thacker Mountain Radio; the live radio show produced in Oxford and heard on a local station as well as on the Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s radio stations. A database of the musicians and performance sites documented by the project is available from the Arts Commission.
The project (including this web component) was made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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