Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey through the Soul of the South

3. Clarksdale: Cradle of the Blues, Crossroads of Cultures

77 6 3 Clarksdale Cradle of the Blues, Crossroads of Cultures when I asked the gentleman who answered the phone at the Riverside Hotel if he had any nonsmoking rooms available that evening, he told me what I needed to know. “If you don’t smoke, then it’s a nonsmoking room. If you do smoke, then it’s a smoking room.” He was as polite as could be, but I detected a chuckle in his voice. Forced to decide on the spot if local color was worth the possible trade-off of tobacco-imbued sheets, I consulted Ralph, my husband, who would be along for the ride on this leg of my adventure: Of course it was. Otherwise, we’d be missing the whole point of this gritty little city’s appeal. Clarksdale, by all accounts, is the true cradle of the blues and the place where people from all over the world come to immerse themselves in everything associated with it, from the music, to the food, to the art, to the quirky river-town vibe. Hard-core roots music fans have always been drawn to the junction of highways 61 and 49, the famous crossroads where archetypal bluesman Robert Johnson supposedly traded his soul to the devil in exchange for musical mojo. In more recent years, actor Morgan Freeman’s the famous native son who’s gotten credit for enticing the world to visit. 78 Clarksdale Freeman grew up in a shotgun house near Charleston, the tiny town about thirty miles from Clarksdale where the Delta meets the hills. He spent Saturday afternoons in the balcony of a local movie theater—the only section blacks were allowed to occupy back then—watching cowboy flicks and dreaming of the day he could flee the Jim Crow South. Decades later, the kid who had turned his dreams into movie stardom returned to the Delta and built a home on the property where he grew up. In the foreword to a weighty coffee table book called Proud to Call Mississippi Home, a collection of profiles of the state’s most accomplished sons and daughters, he explained that he missed the relaxed pace, lush landscape, and people who “accept me as a friend instead of a celebrity.” Freeman decided to return the favor in a serious way by helping launch what became two of the region’s best-known establishments—the audaciously upscale restaurant Madidi (randomly named after a national park in Bolivia) and Ground Zero Blues Club, both in Clarksdale. Madidi opened in an old brick building in the middle of the sleepy business district in 2000, with classically trained chefs dishing out uptown dishes like rack of lamb and edamame and sweet corn succotash. Suddenly this obscure hard-luck town was appearing in newspapers and glossy food and travel magazines everywhere. But Madidi never turned a profit, and after nearly twelve years, Freeman and business partner Bill Luckett, a local attorney, finally decided to call it quits. But their blues club is still going strong, as are other attractions fueled by the renaissance. In 2002, Roger Stolle quit a corporate marketing job in St. Louis to move here and focus on promoting the music and the region that had become his passion. He opened Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art, a store specializing in homegrown cds, dvds, artwork, books, and gifts that has become for many blues aficionados a destination in itself. Restaurants, folk art galleries, entertainment venues, and other Deltaflavored businesses have popped up around Blues Alley, which is anchored by the restored depot that has been the Delta Blues Museum since 1979. The list of local festivals grew. So did the choice of funky places to stay. Ralph and I had, in fact, tried to book one of the much-ballyhooed refurbished shotgun houses that make up the Shack-Up Inn on the old Hopson Plantation, just off the highway on the fringes of town. Alas, every shack, we were told, was occupied by the Delta Blues Harmonica Jam Camp. Clarksdale 79 So we followed the map to Plan B, the Riverside Hotel. It led us to a rundown , two-level brick structure along the Sunflower River behind a broken Schlitz sign. On its tiny concrete porch was a rusty barbecue grill and a couple of ratty plastic chairs, but the Blues Trail marker nearby was the amenity we were hoping for. It was...