The crossroads of the world — where Robert Johnson sold his soul and the blues was born
Clarksdale is a small Mississippi Delta city with a claim that no music lover can ignore: it is the spiritual birthplace of the blues. Robert Johnson reportedly sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 at midnight. Muddy Waters grew up nearby in Stovall; John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, Sam Cooke, and James Cotton all came from the Delta around Clarksdale. The Delta Blues Museum tells the full story with Muddy Waters' cabin and personal artifacts. The Ground Zero Blues Club, co-owned by Morgan Freeman who lives nearby, books live blues every weekend. Highway 61 — Bob Dyl…
The Mississippi Delta — flat, humid, impoverished, and dominated by cotton plantations — created the conditions for the blues in the decades after the Civil War. Freed Black sharecroppers, working land that had once been slave country, developed a music that merged West African musical traditions with field hollers, spirituals, and the specific anguish of Jim Crow poverty. W.C. Handy collected blues songs near Clarksdale in 1903 and published what became the first written-down blues compositions. Robert Johnson recorded his sessions in 1936–37, creating the template for all blues to follow. T…