On the floor, downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi, seems to be largely the identical because it did a long time in the past: a set of historic brick buildings lining huge avenues pale to postcard sepia. But native Bubba O’Keefe has a retort prepared for guests to his hometown who eye the metropolis’s aesthetic as something however genuine Southern allure.
“People come here and say, ‘Oh my gosh, this place is going down,’” says O’Keefe, the tourism director for this Mississippi Delta metropolis 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 apart, he makes a strong level. It was a Saturday night time in Clarksdale 25 years in the past that impressed blues aficionado-turned-Clarksdale champion Roger Stolle to transfer to city. Somehow, in a metropolis with a deep blues historical past that claimed to be the house of the legendary crossroads — the place in accordance to lore, Robert Johnson offered his soul to the satan underneath cowl of darkness for his dazzling slide-guitar chops — he couldn’t discover a lick of live music wherever.
“What was disturbing about it is that nobody was particularly disturbed,” says Stolle, founding father of Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art, which serves as a de facto welcome middle for guests 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.”
This ‘hidden gem’ of a metropolis is the place the blues style was born
Few musicians working immediately know this higher than singer and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Musselwhite, a blues legend who was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, and moved to Clarksdale a couple of years in the past after spending a long time in locations like Chicago and California. During his youth in the Nineteen Fifties, Clarksdale’s streets on Saturdays had been crowded with folks, pickup vans 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 loads of different believers, music followers can now discover live music seven nights per week in the blues capital not too long ago fictionalized in the hit vampire flick “Sinners,” which leans closely into the area’s musical heritage. According to O’Keefe, tourism tax receipts are steadily rising, bettering 16% since 2016, and blues-related golf equipment, retailers and cafes began 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.”
Nothing says Delta like a great get together, and Clarksdale can throw down with the better of them. In reality, it’s house to greater than a dozen music festivals the place blues legends carry out and revelers dance alongside at one in every of the metropolis’s two-dozen venues (in addition to its avenue corners, outside phases and nearly wherever you’ll be able to plug in an amplifier).
America’s Best Towns to Visit 2025: Clarksdale
One of the first collaborations between O’Keefe and Stolle, Juke Joint Festival, is now one in every of the area’s marquee annual sights. Beginning as a 15-act fest in 2004, the 2025 version in April featured greater than 100 blues performances and attracted 1000’s of holiday makers from 47 states and 26 international international locations. The newest addition to the competition circuit is the current Son House Tribute Festival, a three-day celebration of the pioneering bluesman’s music.
Outside of these occasions, although, the get together performs on at venues like Ground Zero Blues Club, the famed corridor co-owned by Academy Award-winning actor and native Morgan Freeman, the place acts like Super Chikan and Anthony “Big A” Sherrod carry out recurrently on a graffitied stage in a former cotton warehouse. Even local-made-good blues phenom Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, who took guitar classes at the Delta Blues Museum subsequent door, is understood to flip up for a set when he’s in city.
“Everything in this building is on purpose,” says Tameal Edwards, the membership’s reserving supervisor. “Some people are like, ‘Y’all need to upgrade this,’ and we’re like, ‘Nope.’” Rest assured, all the standard facilities are useful and sanitized — however there’s loads of built-in character to draw guests into an genuine juke expertise.
While we’re speaking about juke joints, a couple of blocks away on Sunflower Avenue is Red’s, a traditional juke serving chilly beer, live music and large personalities. Owner Orlando Paden, who inherited the membership from his father, Red Paden, reopened the spot in time for the 2024 Juke Joint Festival and has saved Red’s Old Timers Blues Festival alive on Labor Day weekend.
While the beloved Delta Blues Alley Cafe burned down in March, loads of current restaurant-bar arrivals have absorbed the crowds. With live music on the menu daily, some venues commerce off nights, giving guests a have 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 common performers in any respect of them is Laura “Lala” Craig, a California native who makes her residing taking part in music primarily with Super Chikan and by educating piano to native college students. Like lots of the metropolis’s newer additions, she fell arduous for the blues and moved to Clarksdale completely round 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.”
‘Get out and do stuff’
New lodging choices are giving guests extra causes to keep in city and expertise extra, O’Keefe says. The city’s most well-known in a single day lodging are discovered at the Shack Up Inn, a set of rustic shacks the place sharecroppers as soon as lived, that’s additionally house to a music venue embellished in a roadside-Americana motif. But being three miles south of downtown means it’s largely an expertise of its personal.
Meanwhile, new lodging choices at locations like the Travelers Hotel, situated in the coronary heart of the metropolis inside strolling distance to most of the eating places and leisure, allow a extra immersive Clarksdale go to.
Ann Williams, who owns the property together with her husband, Clarksdale native Chuck Rutledge, fell in love with the metropolis’s “gritty” character and designed the resort to get folks to discover. Without in-room TVs to distract them, visitors can congregate in the resort’s ground-floor widespread space and lowkey bar to pregame earlier than heading out on the city.
“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 households or people, in addition to lower-cost, dormitory-style bunk rooms, whereas The Lofts at the Five and Dime affords a homier remedy with suites that embrace full kitchens.
Clarksdale cooking isn’t all typical Southern soul-food fare. In reality, lots of the dishes you’ll discover on native menus are influenced by New Orleans cooking as a lot as the Deep South.
One of the latest arrivals to the Clarksdale culinary scene, Levon’s — after a Great Dane named for The Band’s Levon Helm, a Deltan from simply over the river in Arkansas — deftly commingles Cajun-Creole classics like gumbo and boudin balls with crossover dishes like blackened catfish, placing a Crescent City spin on a neighborhood delicacy.
Another new arrival, Meraki Roasting Company, is a non-profit espresso roaster that teaches life abilities and entrepreneurship to native teenagers and incubates new companies. One of these startups, Lil Sistas, serves pulled pork, smoked turkey legs, collard greens, cornbread muffins and breakfast staples Thursday via Sunday underneath chef Micheal Williams.
Named for Tutwiler native and “Boom Boom” bluesman John Lee Hooker, the Hooker Grocer & Eatery serves up native beers by Red Panther, a brand new downtown brewery began by the Travelers Hotel people (“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 discover po’ boys, shrimp, and Deltafied takes on fare like the French dip, which is loaded with brisket smoked onsite.
Guests wanting to discover past Clarksdale’s blues scene can tour Cutrer Mansion, which impressed a few of playwright Tennessee Williams’s most outlandish characters and settings, then find out about the area’s historical past on a Jeep tour with Delta Bohemian Tours. For outdoorsy varieties, Quapaw Canoe Company guides single- or multi-night canoe journeys on the Mississippi River, which flows simply 10 miles west of downtown.
New developments on the horizon for Clarksdale guests embrace Wild Bill’s II, a Clarksdale location of the legendary Memphis membership, and a proposed everlasting RV park inside strolling distance of downtown hotspots — one other anchor to get folks to uncover the Clarksdale blues expertise.
“Clarkdale, it’s a serendipitous scavenger hunt,” mentioned O’Keefe. “And you’ll turn up some interesting things.”