2 days ago
The blues live in this Mississippi Delta town
See More Videos On the surface, downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi, looks largely the same as it did decades ago: a collection of historic brick buildings lining wide avenues faded to postcard sepia. But local Bubba O'Keefe has a retort ready for visitors to his hometown who eye the city's aesthetic as anything but authentic Southern charm.
'People come here and say, 'Oh my gosh, this place is going down,'' says O'Keefe, the tourism director for this Mississippi Delta city of 14,000, with an implied wink. 'I say, 'Well, you should have seen it 25 years ago. We're on the way up.''
Jokes aside, he makes a solid point. It was a Saturday night in Clarksdale 25 years ago that inspired blues aficionado-turned-Clarksdale champion Roger Stolle to move to town. Somehow, in a city with a deep blues history that claimed to be the home of the legendary crossroads — where according to lore, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil under cover of darkness for his dazzling slide-guitar chops — he couldn't find a lick of live music anywhere.
'What was disturbing about it is that nobody was particularly disturbed,' says Stolle, founder of Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art, which serves as a de facto welcome center for visitors to Clarksdale. 'It didn't seem amazing to them like it seemed to me, that Clarksdale would be quiet on a Saturday night. You could either luck into the greatest thing ever, or it was crickets.'
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Share your picks for our top towns in 2026 Few musicians working today know this better than singer and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Musselwhite, a blues legend who was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, and moved to Clarksdale a few years ago after spending decades in places like Chicago and California. During his youth in the 1950s, Clarksdale's streets on Saturdays were crowded with people, pickup trucks and mules pulling wagons.
'My earliest memories are of Clarksdale, and it was just a booming town,' Musselwhite says. 'Then I slowly saw it almost become a ghost town. And now it's coming back.'
Thanks to years of efforts by Stolle, O'Keefe and plenty of other believers, music fans can now find live music seven nights a week in the blues capital recently fictionalized in the hit vampire flick 'Sinners,' which leans heavily into the region's musical heritage. According to O'Keefe, tourism tax receipts are steadily rising, improving 16% since 2016, and blues-related clubs, shops and cafes started by locals and transplants are fueling the success.
'The thing about Clarkdale is, you have to experience it,' O'Keefe says. 'It's blues in an authentic setting. And when you walk around downtown, it's like being on a movie set. You're walking back in time.'
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Nothing says Delta like a good party, and Clarksdale can throw down with the best of them. In fact, it's home to more than a dozen music festivals where blues legends perform and revelers dance along at one of the city's two-dozen venues (as well as its street corners, outdoor stages and just about anywhere you can plug in an amplifier).
One of the first collaborations between O'Keefe and Stolle, Juke Joint Festival, is now one of the region's marquee annual attractions. Beginning as a 15-act fest in 2004, the 2025 edition in April featured more than 100 blues performances and attracted thousands of visitors from 47 states and 26 foreign countries. The latest addition to the festival circuit is the recent Son House Tribute Festival, a three-day celebration of the pioneering bluesman's music.
Outside of those events, though, the party plays on at venues like Ground Zero Blues Club, the famed hall co-owned by Academy Award-winning actor and local Morgan Freeman, where acts like Super Chikan and Anthony 'Big A' Sherrod perform regularly on a graffitied stage in a former cotton warehouse. Even local-made-good blues phenom Christone 'Kingfish' Ingram, who took guitar lessons at the Delta Blues Museum next door, is known to turn up for a set when he's in town.
'Everything in this building is on purpose,' says Tameal Edwards, the club's booking manager. 'Some people are like, 'Y'all need to upgrade this,' and we're like, 'Nope.'' Rest assured, all the usual amenities are functional and sanitized — but there's plenty of built-in character to draw visitors into an authentic juke experience.
While we're talking about juke joints, a few blocks away on Sunflower Avenue is Red's, a classic juke serving cold beer, live music and big personalities. Owner Orlando Paden, who inherited the club from his father, Red Paden, reopened the spot in time for the 2024 Juke Joint Festival and has kept Red's Old Timers Blues Festival alive on Labor Day weekend.
While the beloved Delta Blues Alley Cafe burned down in March, plenty of recent restaurant-bar arrivals have absorbed the crowds. With live music on the menu every day, some venues trade off nights, giving visitors a look at the up-and-coming venues popping up in downtown storefronts, like The MatchBox, Buster's Down Home Blues Club and Bad Apple Blues Club.
One of the regular performers at all of them is Laura 'Lala' Craig, a California native who makes her living playing music primarily with Super Chikan and by teaching piano to local students. Like many of the city's more recent additions, she fell hard for the blues and moved to Clarksdale permanently around the time Stolle arrived to make it her life's work.
'If you know the old-school tuning forks, they sort of buzz, they resonate,' says Craig. 'It's like I get these tuning-fork things at my back, like my Root Chakra that tells me, 'Oh my goodness, this is gonna be some epiphany, it's gonna change my life.' And I just felt that way the entire time I was here.'
New lodging options are giving visitors more reasons to stay in town and experience more, O'Keefe says. The town's most famous overnight accommodations are found at the Shack Up Inn, a collection of rustic shacks where sharecroppers once lived, that's also home to a music venue decorated in a roadside-Americana motif. But being three miles south of downtown means it's largely an experience of its own.
Meanwhile, new lodging options at places like the Travelers Hotel, located in the heart of the city within walking distance to most of the restaurants and entertainment, enable a more immersive Clarksdale visit.
ESSENTIAL CLARKSDALE
EAT: Local barbecue at Abe's or Deltafied fare at Hooker Grocer
DRINK: A pint at Red Panther Brewing Co. and or brews at Red's
STAY: At Travelers Hotel or the luxurious Clark House Inn
SEE: Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art and the Delta Blues Museum Ann Williams, who owns the property with her husband, Clarksdale native Chuck Rutledge, fell in love with the city's 'gritty' character and designed the hotel to get people to explore. Without in-room TVs to distract them, guests can congregate in the hotel's ground-floor common area and lowkey bar to pregame before heading out on the town.
'We want people to either be in the lobby meeting folks from somewhere else or meeting locals, or be out supporting local music venues and bars and restaurants,' Williams says. 'Who wants to go sit in your hotel room all night and stare at a box, you know? Get out and do stuff.'
Nearby, the Auberge Hostel rents rooms designed for families or individuals, as well as lower-cost, dormitory-style bunk rooms, while The Lofts at the Five and Dime offers a homier treatment with suites that include full kitchens.
Clarksdale cooking isn't all typical Southern soul-food fare. In fact, many of the dishes you'll find on local menus are influenced by New Orleans cooking as much as the Deep South.
One of the newest arrivals to the Clarksdale culinary scene, Levon's — after a Great Dane named for The Band's Levon Helm, a Deltan from just over the river in Arkansas — deftly commingles Cajun-Creole classics like gumbo and boudin balls with crossover dishes like blackened catfish, putting a Crescent City spin on a local delicacy.
Another new arrival, Meraki Roasting Company, is a non-profit coffee roaster that teaches life skills and entrepreneurship to local teens and incubates new businesses. One of those startups, Lil Sistas, serves pulled pork, smoked turkey legs, collard greens, cornbread muffins and breakfast staples Thursday through Sunday under chef Micheal Williams.
Named for Tutwiler native and 'Boom Boom' bluesman John Lee Hooker, the Hooker Grocer & Eatery serves up local beers by Red Panther, a new downtown brewery started by the Travelers Hotel folks ('the best place to go on a Sunday afternoon,' says Naomi King, an Australian transplant who owns Levon's). On Hooker's menu, diners will find po' boys, shrimp, and Deltafied takes on fare like the French dip, which is loaded with brisket smoked onsite.
Guests looking to explore beyond Clarksdale's blues scene can tour Cutrer Mansion, which inspired some of playwright Tennessee Williams's most outlandish characters and settings, then learn about the region's history on a Jeep tour with Delta Bohemian Tours. For outdoorsy types, Quapaw Canoe Company guides single- or multi-night canoe trips on the Mississippi River, which flows just 10 miles west of downtown.
New developments on the horizon for Clarksdale visitors include Wild Bill's II, a Clarksdale location of the legendary Memphis club, and a proposed permanent RV park within walking distance of downtown hotspots — another anchor to get people to discover the Clarksdale blues experience.
'Clarkdale, it's a serendipitous scavenger hunt,' said O'Keefe. 'And you'll turn up some interesting things.'
Jim Beaugez writes about music and culture from his native Mississippi and has been published by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Oxford American, Outside and Garden & Gun.
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