A series of three film reports by Trevor Philpott on The Mighty Mississippi

The Mississippi shapes America. It runs down the centre of the country from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico and drains the body of the nation from the Rocky Mountains to the Eastern seaboard. It has its own great cities - Minneapolis, St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans - and its own varieties of wilderness from the pine forests of Minnesota to the mangrove swamps of Louisiana.

But for all its size, power and history, the Mississippi is still largely undiscovered and misunderstood, even by Americans. It is still thought of in terms of river boats and cotton bales and sweating, singing Negroes.
This 2,500-mile journey shows the river and its people as they are in the 1970s, a true voyage of discovery through the heartland of the United States.