Mississippi Blues

Looking for an interim stop between Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Biloxi, Mississippi, I found Cleveland, Mississippi in approximately the right location and googled it.  Happily, it was the Smithsonian's 2017 #2 best small town to visit and boasted a Grammy Museum, so it seemed a fine choice.  RV parks in that area were hard to find, though.  The nearest - Willy's Last Resort - was in the town of Indianola, a half hour from Cleveland.  Nancy called Willy, who said that there were only four RV sites there, with nobody around, but to hook up our motorhome, and he would drop by.  It turned out to be a plain small town parking lot with four marked spaces, but each site had the necessary hookups.  And only a block away was the B.B. King Museum!

We drove to Cleveland and looked around, and the downtown district was nice enough, but in general Cleveland was just an average Mississippi town.  Then we toured the Grammy Museum, which was wonderful.  A large theater with fabulous sound played a loop of snippets of hundreds of performances over the years at the Grammy awards show.  And a smaller theater showed Michael Jackson videos.  Of course his vocals were magical, in my opinion, and some of the visuals, especially the ones directed by John Landis, were absolutely brilliant.  Dresses and costumes worn by iconic singers at the Grammys and a number of instruments of famous musicians were displayed.  Among the interactive features were various instruments a museum-goer could play.

I wondered why in the world Cleveland, Mississippi had been selected to house this large, state-of-the-art Grammy museum.  I suspect that it was largely because this part of Mississippi is considered to be the birthplace of delta blues.  Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker (whose music was featured in a display there), and others were born here and were pioneers of this raw, emotional musical style.  Another factor is that Mississippi has been the birthplace of an impressive number of other famous singers and musicians.  Elvis Pressley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Faith Hill, Bo Diddley, and many others started life here.

We spent a couple of hours in the Grammy Museum, and it was a great experience.  Unfortunately, we didn't see a single other person during our visit.  I hope that was an aberration.

Back in Indianola, we walked from our RV site to the B.B. King Museum, another beautifully designed and executed display of memorabilia.  B.B. was born nearby into a dirt-poor sharecropper family back in 1925, when segregation was at its ugliest.  He became an international star who lived most of his life doing gigs on the road until his death in 2015.  He's buried in a little park beside the museum.

Nancy and I saw B.B. twenty years ago at the Great American Music Theater in San Francisco.  Even more than his singing, that guitar vibrato was immediately identifiable as being uniquely his.  Nobody else has ever sounded like that.

It's weird to think about the fact that I grew up in Tallulah, Lousiana, just 100 miles from Indianola and Cleveland.  I was an ignorant white kid who had no idea that an important musical form was invented and was being developed practically next door, just across the Mississippi River.

Two amazing museums dedicated to music twenty-five miles apart in hardscrabble Mississippi.  Surprising, and we loved them both.  By the way, Willy, the RV park owner, never came by, and we left without ever paying.  Heck of a way to run a business.  (We'll send him a check if he ever answers our calls or text.)