Born in Mississippi, Electrified in Chicago

Written by William “Skip” Hidlay in StoryPower: Connecting Passion to PurposeThe Visit Mississippi Crossroads Stage at the 2026 Chicago Blues Festival in Millennium Park. Photo by Skip Hidlay.

The banner running the width of the stage captures the heritage of the blues in six words: Born in Mississippi. Electrified in Chicago.

The banner also testifies to a remarkable collaboration between Chicago and Mississippi at the annual Chicago Blues Festival to promote the tourism brands of a city and a state as shared destinations for blues music lovers from around the world.

In the world of brand strategy and marketing, when something is valuable — a heritage, a category, a story — the reflex is often to plant a flag and try to own it exclusively.

Chicago has every right to claim the blues. It’s where the music was plugged in, amplified, and sent out to the world. Mississippi has every right, too. It’s where the music was born, in the Delta, on the porches and in the juke joints. Two legitimate claims to the same heritage.

But blues music is built on the creativity of collaboration, call and response, musicians sharing the stage and letting each band member take a turn at soloing in the spotlight.

The Chicago Blues Festival tells the story of how two tourism brands came together to model the collaboration of their shared blues heritage.

To understand that story, you have to meet Robert Terrell.

Terrell is deputy director of the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi. He is also, as best I can tell, the only member of the Chicago Blues Festival’s programming committee who lives in Mississippi. Terrell helps book Mississippi artists onto the Visit Mississippi Crossroads Stage for the Chicago Blues Festival every June.

His own life traces the migration of the blues from the steamy Delta of rural Mississippi up north to the energy and opportunity of urban Chicago.

Terrell was born in Hollandale, Mississippi, on Highway 61. His father, born in 1925, was one of 12 children and the only one who stayed in the state.

In 1977, Terrell followed the same path the music had taken a generation earlier. “Same thing as the old blues artists,” he said. “Getting up out of here, trying to find work, running away from these cotton fields.” Aunts and uncles were already in Chicago. He stayed with one of his father’s sisters until he found his footing. He would spend 32 years in the city, running a recording studio at 18th and Michigan, a few dozen blocks from the festival’s current home in Millennium Park.

In the early 2000s, when a Mississippi group went looking to reconnect with the Chicagoans whose families had come north, Terrell was the natural bridge. He helped them land a booth at the festival. The booth became a tent. The tent became a stage.

What Terrell understood — and kept saying to anyone in Chicago who would listen — is that Mississippi and Chicago have a shared heritage in the blues.

“It’s like a tree,” he told me. “The branches stretch way out, all the way to Chicago. But the root of it is right here in Mississippi.” The blues traveled north and were electrified in Chicago, he says, but they grew from the Delta. Home and birthplace.

You could see that truth all over the 2026 festival. Charlie Musselwhite and Elvin Bishop, two pillars of the Chicago blues, played together on Friday night. Musselwhite’s harmonica case featured a worn sticker that read I ♥ Clarksdale, after the Delta hometown of many legendary blues artists and the place he now lives when he’s not on the road performing. On opening night, the bluesman John Primer was honored on a Chicago stage with a replica of his Mississippi Blues Trail marker. Root and branch, on the same stage, all weekend long.

Here is where it becomes a branding story, not just a history lesson. When I asked Katie Coats, the chief marketing officer of Visit Mississippi, why Chicago lets its own stage be used to send tourists 600 miles south, she didn’t describe a negotiation. She described a rising tide.

“It’s not really pulling away,” she said. “It’s just adding to their product.”

The more people Mississippi draws into Millennium Park, the bigger the festival becomes. The more people learn about Mississippi’s role as birthplace of the blues and decide to visit on vacation, the stronger the music’s heritage and appreciation become.

Mississippi’s tagline is “the Birthplace of America’s Music,” and Chicago, Coats told me, is consistently one of the state’s top tourism markets. Her team can now trace the path from someone seeing a Visit Mississippi ad, to landing on the website, to booking a flight.

“It’s a great partnership,” says Kinchen “Bubba” O’Keefe, executive director of Visit Clarksdale, the town where many legendary blues musicians got their start. “Chicago and Clarksdale have a very unique relationship. Muddy Waters left from here and went to Chicago — and the rest is history. Chicago is like the Mississippi Delta of the North.”

One woman who won the Visit Mississippi booth’s blues road-trip giveaway at the 2025 festival took her family through the Delta over Memorial Day and wrote to say what a great time she had and to thank them for the trip, Coats said.

None of this dilutes Chicago’s brand as a blues tourism destination. If anything, sharing makes the city’s own claim louder. This year Mayor Brandon Johnson took the festival stage, honored Bruce Iglauer of the city’s own Alligator Records, and called the festival “the heart and soul of Chicago.”

Two nights later, 84-year-old Taj Mahal closed out the three-day celebration of the blues.

The lesson I take away from the festival: brands that collaborate stand to gain more than those that compete. The strongest brands treat their story as an inheritance to be shared.

Chicago and Mississippi worked out that the blues only gets bigger when two places promote it together. The banner on the Crossroads stage proclaims it. The tourism data proves it.

It also took help from people on both ends of the blues trail, people like Robert Terrell, who has lived both halves of the story and always knew they were one.

“I think it’s important to let the world see the ones who live here and show how the soil keeps cultivating great musicians,” he says.

Born in Mississippi and still growing. Electrified in Chicago and still evolving.

This article was written by William “Skip” Hidlay and originally published by W. Clair Communications on June 12, 2026. View the original at w.claire.com