A Spaceship in the Delta

All my food and coffee plans fell apart this morning. I had a Jackson Starbucks mapped, but traffic and confusion put me on the road with only the lousy motel room coffee, and nothing except for ice-cold leftover tamales. Nei, takk!

(that is "no, thanks" in Norwegian...)

I had some other possibilities, but you know how the lull of the road just pulls you sometimes? I didn't get anything until it felt like my stomach was eating itself....there was only one option when I finally pulled into a wide spot in the road...can you guess it? Can you?

McDonalds.

No pictures - just let me say that it was disgusting.

But it got me up the road to Indianola, MS, where I was stupefied to find that the BB King Blues Museum and Delta Interpretive Center was a state-of-the-art facility. I later learned (from the awesome young man who worked at the Highway 61 Blues Museum) that it cost 15 million dollars - as he said, it seemed like a spaceship landed in the Delta and BB King stepped out.
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Let me say at the outset that this was one of the very best museums I have ever visited. Yes, I include places I have have visited in SF, NYC, Houston, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Oslo, etc. It was incredible. Incredible.

 First, you watch a very nicely produced little documentary on BB King's life.

Then, you walk into a wonderfully evocative exhibit on the Delta culture of the early twentieth century...with a poem by Natasha Trethewey and a quote by Eudora Welty on the wall-sized photo panels.

Video  jukebox - 4 different video files, with music...you choose....

So many different themes, eras, places, and ideas showcased, including life on the road for black musicians in the south. They had a video theater built into a replica 1940s bus to discuss the dangers of touring in the deep South. So cool.

My conversation with the woman who sold me the entry ticket was equally edifying. She has an Ed.D., and worked with folklore and music for her dissertation. She mentioned the name of Bill Ferris to me, and told me that the archives at UNC were great. I'm there - Dr. Ferris's name continues to pop up as I continue on through Mississippi.

Stopped near Holly Springs to pay my respects to the father of country blues, Charley Patton.

Next up was the Highway 61 Blues Museum, in Leland, MS. This was quite the polar opposite of the house that BB King built! Housed in a storefront in the typically depleted main square of an abandoned  township, there were two twenty-something bearded white guys hanging out with an old black man with a guitar. I bought my ticket, and Pat Thomas told me he was going to just play his music while I looked around the exhibits. Talk about a great aural accompaniment to a museum experience.

Pat was amazing, and he had this stack of dominos next to him - he had sharpie'd a cat head onto each one. He gave me one, with his autograph. This is the best souvenir! This whole cathead thing is a mystery though - I have asked, googled...the guy at the museum said Pat invented the cathead, but I keep seeing cathead biscuits, cathead art stores, etc. Help - what is the origins of the cathead?

There was some really cool stuff here - excellent photos, and a lot of mixed-media art that I loved.

It also seems that Johnny Winters' family has a long residential and commercial history in Leland - I thought this was a really great object tying the slave and sharecropping past to the blues past...

 On the way up to Clarksdale, I decided to roll the dice on one more stop on the tamale trail. The hang here was great, and apparently Andrew Zimmern has been here too...

They were OK - better than Natchez, not as good as Vicksburg, nothing to write home about. Again, the meat was not identifiable. That is perplexing. And I'm getting tired of having to buy 6 tamales and only eating one or two. Singles, hello tamale sellers, please?

A quick stop at the site of a long-standing plantation where, during the sharecropping/Jim Crow years, many blues musicians lived and worked, including Charley Patton and Howlin' Wolf.

 The best part was, next to the marker, they had a button that played Charley Patton, through speakers hidden in the many shacks, loud enough to hear throughout the grounds.

And then, it was off to Clarksdale....more plantations, more shacks, and yes,  I booked it myself, but am starting to feel strangely about it....my hotel:

 Yep, the Shack Up Inn....

 Tinth Shack ....

More on this later...I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it....