Twelve People and a Space Heater

The room was maybe twenty feet across. Christmas lights on the ceiling in October. A space heater running in the corner even though it wasn’t cold, and nobody turned it off.

Twelve of us in folding chairs. One man on a stool with an electric guitar, no band, no set list. He looked about seventy. He played for two hours and talked between songs like we were all sitting on his porch.

I’ve paid three hundred dollars for arena seats and felt nothing. This cost me the price of two beers.

That was Red’s, in Clarksdale, Mississippi. And it was the reason I’m telling you about a stretch of highway most people fly over.

Highway 61 runs south out of Memphis into the flattest country you will ever drive. Cotton to the horizon in every direction. Grain elevators, water towers, towns of two thousand people with a shuttered movie house on the main street.

Nearly every kind of American music you have ever liked traces back to this ground. Blues came out of these fields, and rock and roll, soul, and most of country came out of the blues. Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner — all of them from inside a hundred-mile circle.

It came out of hard places. Sharecropping, and everything that went with it. The Delta doesn’t hide that and you shouldn’t expect it to. The museums are honest about where the music came from and why, and the trip is better for it.

Go in October or April. Summer in the Delta is brutal and I wouldn’t wish it on you. And go on a weeknight, because that’s when the real players are working and the tour buses aren’t.

In Clarksdale, stay at the Shack Up Inn. It’s a collection of restored sharecropper shacks and rooms built into an old cotton gin, three miles out of town on what was the Hopson Plantation.

Their own slogan is “the Ritz it ain’t,” and they mean it. Front desk keeps short hours. Ask about room service and the website tells you to call the Peabody in Memphis. Rooms run about $80 on weeknights and $100 on weekends, with a two-night minimum Friday and Saturday.

If you need a spotless chain hotel with a breakfast bar, Clarksdale has one and you should book it instead. No shame in that. But if you can handle a porch, a screen door, and a mattress that’s fine rather than great, you’ll remember this place for the rest of your life.

In Memphis, stay downtown near the river so you can walk to dinner and leave the car parked.

This is the cheapest good trip I know of. Here’s roughly how it broke down for the two of us.

▸ Flights. Memphis runs $200 to $400 a person round trip from most of the country. It’s a hub, so fares are reasonable.
▸ Rental car. Four days, $180 to $300. You need one and there’s no way around it.
▸ Lodging. One night in Memphis at $150 to $250. Two nights in Clarksdale at about $80 to $100. Call it $400 total.
▸ Food. Around $100 a day for two, and you’ll eat well. Delta food is not expensive and the barbecue in Memphis is worth going hungry for.
▸ Museums and music. Budget $250 for the pair of you across everything. Most of these museums are modest admission, and cover at a juke joint is usually a few dollars or nothing at all.

All in, we came out a little under $1,900. You could do it for $1,400 if you drove instead of flew and ate simpler. I don’t know another trip that gives you this much for the money.

Graceland. I know. But you’re going for the blues, and Graceland is half a day and real money for something that isn’t what this trip is about. If you’re an Elvis man, add a day and do it right. Don’t squeeze it in.

Beale Street after the first hour. It’s the tourist version, and it’s fine for one walk and one drink. But the thing you flew down here for is a hundred and fifty miles south of it in a room with a bad ceiling.

And skip trying to see all of it. There are dozens of markers and museums scattered across the Delta and you cannot do them all in four days. Pick Clarksdale, Cleveland, and Indianola, and actually be in those places instead of driving past a fourth one.

One practical warning. Juke joints keep their own hours. Red’s in particular is famous for an unreliable schedule, and the entrance is easy to walk right past. Don’t plan your night around one room being open — ask at Cat Head that afternoon and go where the music actually is.

Back to that room with the space heater.

Between songs the man on the stool asked where everybody was from. A couple from Norway. Two guys from Chicago. A young woman driving alone from Austin. Me and my wife from home.

He laughed and said something like, all this way to a town with one traffic light.

Then he played another two hours.

I’ve been to festivals with sixty thousand people and screens the size of buildings. I couldn’t tell you one song I heard at any of them. I can tell you what that man played third, and what he said before he played it, and the way my wife put her hand on my arm halfway through.

Twelve people. A space heater. Two beers.

Book it for October. Go on a Tuesday. Sit close.

— Walter