The New World District

Clarksdale's Black business and entertainment district took its name around the turn of the twentieth century from Nelson Jones's New World, a saloon and rooming house on the south side of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley tracks. It ran along Issaquena Avenue south of the railroad and round to Fourth Street, now Martin Luther King Boulevard, and it was sometimes called the Beale Street of Clarksdale. Before the Second World War it held shops, saloons, cafes, theatres and bordellos, and the music in it was ragtime and jazz as much as blues. W. C. Handy lived at 317 Issaquena Avenue from 1903 to 1905 and his orchestra played the district on its big nights. Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Son House all performed in the New World, and its rooms over the decades included Wade's Barbershop and Lounge, the Casanova, the Blue Den, the Roxy and New Roxy theatres, and for many years the district's main blues venue, the Red Top Lounge on Yazoo Avenue. The brick buildings that survive are not the originals. A fire swept the district around 1920 and what stands went up afterwards, by which time curfews from 1914 and wartime restrictions had already ended the freewheeling era, though the district stayed busy. What emptied it was mechanised cotton and the Great Migration taking the people. Blues tourism has since rebuilt downtown Clarksdale, which was the white side of town under segregation, while the New World, where the music was actually played, has largely not been rebuilt: the New Roxy's marquee now masks a collapsed roof. There is no National Register district here, only a heritage trail marker, which is part of the same story.