Visit Clarksdale, American South

Clarksdale Mississippi is the birthplace of Blues music. During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s Clarksdale was home to Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Ike Turner, to name just a handful of great Bluesmen who started their careers in Clarksdale.

By the 1950s the town also hosted the legendary radio station, WROX, which hosted a number of popular Blues artists. Consequently, Clarksdale became the first urban centre of the Blues and today is home to the Delta Blues Museum, and one of its first yearly Blues festivals, the Sunflower River Blues Festival. There is also a grand juke joint in Morgan Freeman's & Bill Luckett’s Ground Zero nightclub. It features Blues and other forms of music many nights a week and plays host to some of the South’s great entertainers.

Visitors to the town should not miss the Shack-up Inn and the Hopson Plantation which is virtually unchanged from when it was a working plantation. You will find authentic sharecropper shacks, the original cotton gin and seed houses and other outbuildings. The Rock and Blues Museum is packed full of music memorabilia from the 1920s through to the 1970s.