Founded in 1848, Clarksdale, Mississippi, soon earned the title “the Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt”, a place where enslaved Africans and their descendants picked cotton by the tonne. But mechanisation in the 1960s changed things. Today, the small city’s median household income is $35,210, with 40% of the populace living below the poverty line. And 80% of Clarksdale’s 14,400 residents are African American. Just another left-behind town in the poorest state in the Union? This is how Clarksdale appears to many outsiders.
Or it did until one of the biggest movies of 2025 opened with the words: “Clarksdale, Mississippi – October 16, 1932”. Why was Ryan Coogler’s Sinners set in Clarksdale? Because this forgotten settlement is also a blues mecca. The crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly “sold his soul to the devil” is here. Bessie Smith, shattered after a car crash on Highway 61, drew her last breath in Clarksdale. WC Handy, Muddy Waters, Robert Nighthawk, Junior Parker, Ike Turner and Sam Cooke are just a handful of the celebrated blues and R&B musicians who were either born or based themselves in Clarksdale at some point across the 20th century. Now, after decades of neglect, Clarksdale is using its musical heritage to re-establish its place on the map – and one of the city’s native sons, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, is bringing the blues back to the centre of American culture.
