Museum is a tribute to a King — B.B. King

Organizers are betting on King’s appeal to draw $8 from at least 40,000 visitors each year to keep the museum afloat. Connie S. Gibbons, the museum’s executive director, says fundraisers also will be held and grants sought to generate money.

“Our mission is education,” Gibbons says. “What we’ve done is use B.B. King’s life and his experiences to talk about life in the Delta. It’s his values, it’s his work ethic, it’s his commitment to work excellence that provide the inspiration for the message and the story we want to tell.”

The museum is to be the centerpiece of the state’s blues tourism effort that also includes a developing blues marker trail stretching from Memphis Minnie’s grave in Walls, near the Tennessee border, to Farish Street in downtown Jackson, a historic black business district and home of the Alamo Theatre, where artists performed live. The blues trail is a project of a state commission created to market the Mississippi’s blues heritage in a region that flourished because of cotton before mechanization eliminated the need for most plantation jobs.

“What state can boast they have two kings — Elvis and B.B.,” says Steve Martin, a spokesman for the Mississippi Development Authority, the state’s economic development arm. “Just in the last two years, we’ve really capitalized on our blues heritage. In terms of economic, we see a lot of businesses sprouting up.”

Tourism generated $1.3 billion in a 14-county region of the Delta in 2007, according to MDA. The bulk of the money, $1.1 billion, was spent in Tunica County, which has become a major market for casino gaming.

Carver Randle, an Indianola attorney who is also on the museum’s board of directors, says the museum can be an instrument to improve the Delta on several levels. It has already been a “blessing in that it brought people together who ordinarily would not have come together,” referring to the six years blacks and whites in the region worked together on the project.

King says much has changed since he left Indianola years ago, specifically fewer people working the land. But the area surrounding his museum suggests otherwise. Ramshackle homes line narrow streets and small groups of people stand on street corners drinking beer not far from where King once played.

“No better thing could have happened to our town,” Joyce Poore, manager of the Double Quik convenience store, says of the museum, adding that it stands as a symbol for the youth. “By him being a black man and to build the museum in his honor, that’s progress.”

Indianola Mayor Arthur Marble hopes the museum will “have a profound impact on the local economy,” in his town of 12,000, a town that is 70 percent black. He says he’s trying to establish a partnership with the city of Clarksdale, the location of the Delta Blues Museum and actor Morgan Freeman’s nightclub, Ground Zero.

Marble is convinced that the blues tradition is what will help the Delta survive.

“I think we don’t have a choice,” Marble says. “It’s the common thread we’ve got to exploit.

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