The Clarksdale Depot

The passenger depot on Blues Alley opened on 7 May 1927, built for the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, a subsidiary of the Illinois Central chartered in 1882, as part of an agreement with the city to raise the tracks through Clarksdale. It replaced an earlier station on a line that mattered more than most. The Illinois Central ran north through Memphis to Chicago, and it made the Mississippi Delta and the South Side of Chicago something close to neighbouring places. People left along it in enormous numbers, following relatives who had gone before and become contacts for the next ones, and Pullman porters carried bundles of the Chicago Defender south, a paper that organised migrant clubs and arranged group discounts on the northbound fare. Roughly six million Black Americans left the South between 1916 and 1970. The Delta's own emptying came late and came from machinery. The boll weevil had reached Mississippi in 1907 and cotton prices collapsed after 1920, but Delta planters were recruiting labour in those years rather than losing it, and Coahoma County held a virtually unchanged population from 1930 to 1960. It was mechanised picking that ended the need for hands, and the exodus that followed the Second World War was the larger one. The music went north on the same trains and became something else when it arrived: Muddy Waters left Clarksdale for Chicago in 1943, was given an electric guitar the year after, and turned the acoustic Delta blues into the amplified Chicago sound that rock and roll was built from. The depot has held the Delta Blues Museum since 1999.