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The wood-paneled front of the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, with its name on the wall, a glass entrance and a brick wing beside a paved courtyard.carnavalet / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr
🎭Cultural

B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center

Part ofThe Mississippi Delta

A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.

⏱
Duration
Two hours or more.
🎟
Admission
Ticketed; check the museum's site for current prices.
📅
Best Season
Year round; indoor galleries. Hours vary by day, so check first.

The Story

The B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center stands in Indianola, the Sunflower County town where Riley B. King grew up, and it is built around the restored brick cotton gin where he worked in the 1940s. It opened in September 2008. King died in 2015 at the age of eighty-nine and is buried in a memorial garden on the grounds.

The galleries follow him from a childhood in one of the poorest parts of the country to the stage, with guitars and keepsakes along the way, and they widen out to explain the world around him: the cotton economy, the blues that grew from work songs and juke joints, Jim Crow, and the struggle for civil rights in the Delta. That is why the second half of the name matters: it is as much a museum of the Delta as of one musician.

Club Ebony, the town's historic blues club, is nearby, and the museum stages events there. Indianola is the seat of Sunflower County, so Ruleville and Dockery Farms are both a short drive away, and the Indian Bayou winds through the middle of town. Give the museum two hours or more, and check its calendar for current hours before you go.

Visitor Info

⏱
Time Needed
Two hours or more.
🎟
Admission
Ticketed; check the museum's site for current prices.
📅
Best Season
Year round; indoor galleries. Hours vary by day, so check first.
🛣️
Highway
US 82

On the Map

Nearby

The closest stops worth working into your route

cultural19 mi away
Dockery Farms
The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
historical21 mi away
Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden
The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
historical24 mi away
Winterville Mounds
A Mississippian ceremonial center north of Greenville, built by hand from about AD 1000, with a 55-foot Temple Mound and twelve of its original twenty-three mounds still standing.
historical24 mi away
Greenville Levee and the 1927 Flood
The Mississippi River levee at Greenville, where thousands of mostly Black refugees camped in the flood of April 1927 and where the Department of Archives and History has placed markers.
historical29 mi away
Bryant's Grocery
The ruin of the Money store where Emmett Till was accused in August 1955, on private land beside the railroad, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner.
historical30 mi away
Mound Bayou
The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.