page_title: Clarksdale, Mississippi
section_title: Delta Blues Museum
hierarchical_section_title: Clarksdale, Mississippi / Arts and culture / Delta Blues Museum
caption_attribution_description: Juke Joint Festival at Delta Cinema in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
context_page_description: Clarksdale is a city in and the county seat of Coahoma County, Mississippi, United States. It is located along the Sunflower River.
  The western boundary of the county is formed by the Mississippi River. Located in the Mississippi Delta region, Clarksdale is an agricultural and trading center. Many African-American musicians played here, developing the blues, and taking this original American music with them to Chicago and other cities during the Great Migration. Clarksdale is named after John Clark, a settler who founded the city in the mid-19th century when he established a timber mill and business.
context_section_description: In late 1979 Carnegie Public Library Director Sid Graves began a nascent display series which later became the nucleus of the Delta Blues Museum. Graves single-handedly nurtured the beginnings of the museum in the face of an indifferent community and an often recalcitrant Library Board, at times resorting to storing displays in the trunk of his car when denied space in the library. When the fledgling museum was accidentally discovered by Billy Gibbons of the rock band ZZ Top through contact with Howard Stovall Jr., the Delta Blues Museum became the subject of national attention as a pet project of the band, and the Museum began to enjoy national recognition.
  In 1995 the museum, at that time Clarksdale's only attraction, grew to include a large section of the newly renovated library building, but remained under the tight control of the Carnegie Library Board, who subsequently fired Sid Graves, at the time seriously ill. Graves died in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in January 2005. In an interim move from the renovated Library building, the Museum spent most of 1996 in a converted retail storefront on Delta Avenue under the direction of a politically connected former Wisconsin native, the late Ron Gorsegner. In 1997–1998 Coahoma County would finally provide funds to form a separate Museum Board of Directors composed mainly of socially prominent, local white blues fans, and to renovate the adjoining Illinois Central Railroad freight depot, providing a permanent home for the Delta Blues Museum.
caption: Juke Joint Festival at Delta Cinema in Clarksdale
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