One thing about the Mississippi Delta: it has a very strong sense of place. It's specific. When you're there, you know you're there. It's not like some other places where you just feel that you could be almost anywhere in America. Maybe part of it has to do with the blues, how all of us who have listened to the blues have absorbed a sort of subconscious knowledge about the birthplace of this music, so that when we go to that place we recognize it on that mythic or archetypal level. Does that make sense?

On a much more mundane level, when we were in Greenville I felt that this sense of place was reinforced by the brown tap water. Kind of demoralizing if you're used to clear, colorless water, but it also lets you know where you are. I couldn't google up much about it, other than this article, which is a couple years old. I'm not ashamed to say, I'm glad I mostly drank bottled water while we were there.