Riverside Hotel

For decades a myth said Bessie Smith bled to death in Mississippi because a whites-only hospital turned her away. Historians say no. After her 1937 car crash on Highway 61 sixteen miles north of Clarksdale, a physician stopped to help, and she was carried by ambulance to the G.T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital, where she died at 11:30 that morning. The story of refusal came from a DownBeat article by John Hammond, who admitted thirty-four years later that he had relied on hearsay. The building later became the Riverside Hotel.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 0.4 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 18 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 19 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Freedom Park — 22 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.

More markers nearby

• Big Jack Johnson — 0.2 mi
• Wade Walton — 0.4 mi
• Ike Turner — 0.5 mi
• Crossroads of 49 & 61 — 0.5 mi