More than a half-century after B.B. King left Indianola, Miss., in search of fame, the $15 million B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretative Center has opened in his hometown.
King's museum is the latest attraction for the state's blues tourism industry, which ironically thrives because so little has changed in the predominantly black Mississippi Delta since King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson got their start there. Enthusiasts from across the nation and overseas vacation in the flatland region, known for fertile soil, past racial strife and lingering, unfathomable poverty.
King, an 83-year-old multiple Grammy-winner who still plays about 120 gigs a year, says he's honored the story of the blues is being told through the prism of his life.
"It's going to be educational to people, young and old, because it's going to talk about the origins of the blues. I'm just one who carried the baton, because it was started long before me," he says.
The details may be different, but the narrative of his life is similar to blues musicians who came before him.
He was born poor and black as Riley B. King in 1925. His parents split, leaving his grandmother to raise him before she died while he was still a young boy. He grew up, and as most blacks did in the Delta, he got a string of plantation jobs. His last was at the cotton gin in Indianola. Somewhere in between, he began developing his playing style, described by some as a mix of Delta, Memphis and Texas sounds.
He became known as the Beale Street Blues Boy and then had the nickname Blues Boy, which he shortened to B.B. His career took off in 1948 after performing on a radio program in West Memphis.
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.
"No better thing could have happened to our town," Joyce Poore, manager of the Double Quik convenience store, says of the museum.
Indianola Mayor Arthur Marble hopes the museum will "have a profound impact on the local economy," in his town of 12,000, which is 70 percent black.
