The Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale

The Delta Blues Museum at 1 Blues Alley in Clarksdale, Mississippi, occupies the Clarksdale freight depot of the Illinois Central Railroad — the line along which tens of thousands of Black Mississippians fled the Delta during the Great Migration, carrying the music north to Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, and beyond. The building's railway history is part of the point: the music the museum documents was inseparable from the movement of people, the geography of migration, the particular relationship between the Delta and the rest of America that the Illinois Central tracks physically embodied.

Clarksdale has the strongest claim of any Mississippi town to the title of capital of the Delta blues. Muddy Waters was born nearby in Rolling Fork but grew up in the Clarksdale area, at Stovall Plantation, and was discovered by folklorist Alan Lomax recording for the Library of Congress there in 1941. John Lee Hooker was born in Coahoma County, of which Clarksdale is the seat. The Crossroads — the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil — is in Clarksdale, though the precise location of the historical crossroads is disputed. The Ground Zero Blues Club, co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman, operates a few blocks from the museum.

The museum holds instruments, photographs, recordings, and documents spanning the full history of Delta blues, with particular emphasis on Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Robert Johnson. It is the most comprehensive blues-specific museum in the state that produced the form. Clarksdale itself is small, economically struggling, and genuinely atmospheric — a Delta town that has not been smoothed into a tourist experience, which makes the museum and the surrounding streets a more honest encounter with the blues world than a well-funded renovation could provide.