Day 9
Thursday, April 9, 2026
Across the lot behind the hotel is a place called Woodee's Cafe, another place the front desk had suggested.
The menu... on the wall...
The breakfast, the staff... excellent. $6.75 plus tip.
The original plan was to get in some walking along the Carter Tract Levee. It's a level walk out and then back. Directions to the trailhead seemed easy enough. Then I got to the turnoff. This is the better section of road. Once again, this is based on Google.
A mile from the trailhead, the road ends at a field. Signs reading "Government Property" and "No Trespassing" had me turning around. Much later, I did find a trail map on a state recreation site. Paved road and everything. Perhaps next year.
North on Hwy 49, not something you see every day.
Cars were starting to stack up. One driver left his vehicle, and had a chat with the guy in the red shirt. A brief check of the grass to the left side. After he made it around, the rest of us followed, one after another. Sure beat waiting.
Plan B was a boardwalk trail within the Sky Lake Wildlife Management Area. The road the GPS suggested was posted No Trespassing.
I took a different route out and came across this...
Paved all the way to the gravel parking lot.
As for the boardwalk trail...
It was roped off. Apparently, a tree fell in a storm and took out a section. There was a sign with other trails. This certainly looked like a trailhead.
In the end, I just walked around the large field a few times and moved on to Indianola. That's where you'll fine the BB King Museum. Like so many musicians, he got his start singing in church. One of the ministers added a guitar and it instantly grabbed his attention. After a few lessons, he knew he needed his own. Hearing the blues on the radio changed everything.
He would eventually move to Memphis and become a hit. A disc jockey gave him the nickname Beal Street Blues Boy, eventually shortening it to Blues Boy, thus BB King was reborn. His first hit song was "Three O'Clock Blues." From there, he never looked back. The other question often asked is, why did BB King name his guitars Lucille. In 1949, he was playing a pretty rough place in Arkansas. Two men got into a fight over a woman named Lucille. Somehow, it started a fire and everyone ran. Once outside, BB realized he left his guitar. So, he ran back into the burning building. Realizing it was pretty stupid, he started naming his guitars after the woman in the center of the argument. It was to remind himself not to do anything that dumb again.
One thing I didn't remember were his efforts at prison reform. He did a series of concerts inside maximum security prisons to bring light to the issue. You can see a film and his performance in Sing Sing here:
I was just grateful to have seen him play live once. It was his last tour. His band came out and played. Then they brought out a chair. BB would play a song, tell a story and play another.
A few blocks away from the museum sits Club Ebony. Johnny Jones opened the club in 1948 and it became a big stop on the Chitlin' Circuit. At the time, black artists could only play in black owned clubs. It would change hands a few times until BB himself bought it
No drive through this part of he state would be complete without a stop at the Dockery Plantation. Will Dockery bought the land in 1895 and eventually planted cotton. At it's peak, the plantation had two thousand people on staff. Dockery understood if he wanted to keep good workers, he had to treat them right.
Travelling musicians would often stop at farms and plantations to ply their trade. Many owners rushed them off. Dockery welcomed them. The varied influenced morphed into what we now refer to as the blues.
Some of the musicians who played here included Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and David "Honeyboy" Edwards.
The site is now owned and run by the Dockery Farms Foundation.
There used to be a footbridge over this ravine. While musicians would play for free on the plantation porch, they would also play late into the night in a building on he other side. Admission at night was twenty-five cents.
I've driven through Rosedale twice. Both times Great River Road State Park was closed. Today, the gate was wide open.
There's a trail I've wanted to do for years. It's not very long at all.
It leads to a rather wide sandbar along the Mississippi River.
You can almost see the river from here. Part of me wanted to walk all the way out. But, I did have a commitment up the road.
Normally, I would have driven on to West Helena for the night. But, I did have to stop into Clarksdale.
Hodson's Commissary dates back to when this was all a cotton farm.
These days it's a bar and music venue. I made it for the last half hour of Roger Wilson's set.
I worked with Roger at CNN a long time ago. He was caught up in a corporate merger/staff purge back in '93. Until then, music was a side gig. From then on, it became a career. I still had that half hour drive to West Helena for the night. But first, over by the Red Panther Brewery where 81 year old John Primer was going on at 6P. So yeah, I hung around.
Watermelon Slim sitting in for a song...
Driving to West Helena is really getting old. It's thirty miles from Clarksdale and seems further every year. The room there is a third of what I'd pay in town. Starting to not feel worth the savings. And yeah, I know I'm really not supposed to do this...
