The Delta Blues & Ducks

If you say, “Dockery, Mississippi” to a blues fan, it’s likely that they will recognize the town as where the blues began. Dockery, the site of an old plantation, sits 3 miles west of Ruleville. Indianola, MS, the hometown of B. B. King is twenty miles to the south. A $10 million museum is going to be built on the gin site where B. B. King worked until as he said, “I got into trouble and had to leave town.”

There is a major effort underway to publicize sites like Dockery and Indianola with nine such sites located in Sunflower County. Fred Carl of Viking Grill fame in nearby Greenwood, MS has started efforts to develop a Blues Trail in the Delta to hopefully encourage more tourism.

Drew bills itself as the “Waterfowl Capital of Mississippi” with several million dollar hunting lodges in the nearby delta. Hunting enthusiasts fly in from all over the country every year.

It is those tourists and hunters that Ruleville and Drew have an opportunity to sell for new businesses, plants and residents. They’ve got some wonderful assets that I hope they can turn into more and better jobs.