Another of our stops near Lake Village, Arkansas was the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi. As with our visit to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, and its spotlight on Muddy Waters, we loved this tribute to an incredibly talented and influential musician who paved the way for so many. Of course, I had to use “The Thrill is Gone” for the music here, the version with Eric Clapton. The lead photo is the video of B.B. King describing his 1968 appearance at Fillmore West in San Francisco, his first experience with a nearly all-white audience. As he explains, the thunderous applause brought him to tears. One critic writes, “B.B. King played and sang his way out of the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta -- and never stopped.” As for other artists who put the Mississippi Delta on the map, the public library exhibit in Greenville makes a convincing case that this small town was fertile ground for writers. Among the most notable: William A. Percy, Hodding Carter, Walker Percy and Shelby Foote. As we say in our family, “not too shabby.”
