United States
Clarksdale
Robert Johnson's crossroads, the Delta town where the blues still bleeds from every juke joint.
The guitar cuts through the warm air of a juke joint no bigger than a living room, raw and electric, played by fingers that have been doing this longer than you have been alive. Outside, the Delta runs flat to the horizon beneath a sky that presses down like a hand.
Clarksdale sits where Highways 61 and 49 cross, the junction where legend says Robert Johnson traded his soul for the guitar; the story is folklore, marked by a crossroads sculpture, but the living music around it is entirely real. The Delta Blues Museum, Mississippi's oldest music museum, keeps the remains of the Stovall Farms cabin where Muddy Waters lived as a sharecropper, and a converted cotton gin co-founded by Morgan Freeman still stages Delta blues a few blocks away. The juke joints run like amplified living rooms, and each April the Juke Joint Festival spills them into the streets. The town's other inheritance is edible: Delta hot tamales, sold from stands and pushcarts since the cotton-harvest corners of the early 1900s, a tradition African American cooks have kept ever since.
Solo
Sit alone in a juke joint at midnight with a cold beer while someone three feet away plays the blues at you; nobody stays a stranger past the first set.
Friends
Run the Delta as a road trip: crossroads photograph, museum, tamale stands and juke joints until the small hours.
- The crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, where legend says Robert Johnson made his deal, stands a few blocks from the town's working juke joints.
- The Delta Blues Museum, Mississippi's oldest music museum, holds the remains of Muddy Waters' Stovall Farms cabin.
- Live Delta blues still runs in a converted cotton gin co-founded by Morgan Freeman and in juke joints the size of living rooms.
- Delta hot tamales have been sold from stands here since the early 1900s; even Robert Johnson sang about them in 1936.
Delta hot tamales from roadside stands, the cotton-country tradition Robert Johnson set to music in They're Red Hot.
Fried catfish and hush puppies eaten off paper while the juke joint's first set warms up.
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