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Tunica Now Home to Two New Museums
Reflecting Blues Trail, Life in the Delta
By Bob Lindsey
Not far from the top hotel-resort in Tunica, Mississippi are two new attractions that make a visit to the land of the Delta Blues special. Located on Highway 61 (the northern stretch of the Blues Highway in Mississippi) is the new Gateway to the Blues Museum and a few miles farther to the west on the banks of the Mississippi River sits the new Tunica RiverPark & Museum.
The interactive Gateway to the Blues
Museum is a 5-minute ride from the Gold Strike Casino, and is now open daily for blues and American music lovers. When you spot the rustic building on the Blues Highway (61) next to the Tunica Visitors Center, you’ll think it’s been there since the early years of B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf or Robert Johnson, but you’d be wrong. The building, an old train depot, is authentic, but it was moved from the Delta back roads to where it now appropriately sits on the Blues Highway. The facade of the old depot and the interior of the visitor’s area dates back more than 100 years.
The back of the building has a large new addition to display the artifacts, paintings, displays and the 20 guitars of various bluesmen and others such as Les Paul and Eric Clapton, who were instrumental in the preservation of the Delta Blues. There’s also a recording studio where you can learn the basic 12-bar sequence of the black folk music. Local bluesman, Memphis Jones, will teach you the AAB writing style and allow you to record your very own blues song through this interactive exhibit. Once you are finished recording your song, you will have the opportunity to take it with you via e-mail.
There’s a section commemorating many of
the great blues singers, as well as W.C. Handy’s first cornet, and interactive exhibits on how to play a lap steel guitar and a diddley bow. There are George Hunt paintings located in the Mississippi Blues Trail Gallery. (The Blues trail features almost 200 historical markers throughout the state and across the world. Tunica is home to six of these markers.)
The Gateway to the Blues Museum has a $10 admission. It’s located just two miles south of Interstate 69/Hwy 304 and 61 interchange, a mere 15 miles from Memphis.
Tunica RiverPark & Museum
A new culture icon for this area also opened this year on the banks of the Mississippi, just a few miles from Highway 61. The Tunica RiverPark & Museum includes a three-mile EcoTrail through Delta “forest” and native flora, exhibits that showcase the rich history, nature and culture of the Delta with many hand-on experiences, and the Tunica Queen, a modern 300-seat riverboat offering daytime and nighttime dinner excursions.
We had an hour to visit the exhibits and it wasn’t enough time, but we were able to browse all of the rooms including an impressive freshwater aquarium with catfish, buffalo, and other fish native to the river. The Eads Diving Bell simulator gives you a glimpse of what these devices offered in the early years of under river exploration. The 1927 flood exhibit reveals the dramatic and expansive flooding that occurred all along the Mississippi River from St. Louis south to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Indian Mounds exhibit traces the Mysterious structures all along the Mississippi, including the Cahokia, IL mounds, home of the vanished Mississippian tribe. Mound Builders Interactive takes visitors “underground” through a life-sized model of an ancient Native American burial mound. A child and a small adult can crawl through a re-created trench and see various aspects of Native American life including pottery, weapons, bone tools and other artifacts.
RiverPark’s photography exhibit illustrates the people and iconic places on the drive along the Mississippi Blues Trail with 30 photos that show varying journeys along that trail. There’s Robert Johnson’s grave site, other performing blues musicians and the clubs they played, plus folks going about living their daily lives in the Delta.
The nearly 300 artifacts that are displayed in the museum tell the stories of the Native Americans, soldiers, settlers, slaves, tenant farmers and riverboat workers in the Delta and along the river. For more information on Tunica River Park and Museum: 866-517-4837 or visit: www.tunicariverpark.com. Cost is $10 for adults, $5 for children under 12. The museum is open every day except Mondays.
The original old train depot now forms the façade of the Gateway to the Blues Museum. A larger addition was built on the back after it was moved to Highway 61.
