B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, Indianola

The B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center at 400 Second Street in Indianola, Mississippi, opened in 2008 in a building complex that includes the restored cotton gin where Riley B. King worked as a young man — the specific building where, as a teenage laborer on a plantation, he earned the money to buy his first guitar. King was born in 1925 in Berclair, a community outside Indianola in Sunflower County, and grew up working the cotton fields of the Delta before his musical talent redirected his life. Indianola is the county seat, and the most significant city in his early geography.

King left Mississippi for Memphis in 1946, initially staying with his cousin Bukka White — himself a significant blues musician — before breaking through on WDIA radio in Memphis with the nickname "Beale Street Blues Boy," which shortened to Blues Boy and then B.B. He built a recording career that lasted more than six decades, made "The Thrill Is Gone" one of the most recognisable blues recordings in history, and became the ambassador for the blues to audiences around the world who would otherwise never have encountered it. He performed more than three hundred concerts a year for much of his career.

He died on May 14, 2015, in Las Vegas, and was buried at the museum grounds in Indianola — returning at the end to the Mississippi county where he had picked cotton as a child. The museum is one of the most comprehensive artist-specific museums in American music: it documents not only his career but the broader context of Delta blues history, the Great Migration, and the social world of the Mississippi Delta that produced him. His guitar Lucille — the name he gave every guitar he played, a name with a specific origin story involving a bar fire in Arkansas — is represented throughout.