WIRED Staff
Culture

Slideshow: Shack Up a Cotton-Pickin' Minute

From blues greats and cotton pickers to internet workers, travelers who find the legendary crossroads of highways 49 and 61 can stay at the Shack Up Inn and get a taste of life before mechanization. Michelle Delio reports from Clarksdale, Mississippi.
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The field hands who used to gather in jook joints on weekend nights were replaced by cotton picking machines in 1944, and the newly unemployed sharecroppers and blues players headed north to look for work.

See related story: Shack Up a Cotton-Pickin' Minute

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Hopson was the first plantation to convert to using mechanical cotton pickers. Soon afterward they did so, the sharecropper shacks were abandoned.
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The updated shacks have indoor plumbing and air conditioners. No need to use the outhouse out back.
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Hopson plantation has the feel of a ghost town, as if the people who lived here just vanished sometime in the mid '40s.
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Purveyors of fine pulled pork BBQ and outstanding tamales.
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Blues Legend Robert Johnson was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for supernatural musical skills. While he probably wouldn't have picked a major intersection to do the deed, Clarksdale remembers the legend by marking the spot where the Delta's two major highways cross.
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Sharecropper shacks torn down or fallen down after the advent of mechanical cotton picking were rebuilt and moved to the Shack Up Inn, Mississippi's oldest B&B.
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The owners of the Shack Up Inn don't advertise and aren't inclined to post "turn off here" signs on the highway. Here's a photographic hint for would-be guests.
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Each shack has a rusted tin roof, a sagging porch and a squeaky.
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In the seven years that it's been open for business the Shack Up Inn has been wildly successful, even with no advertisement.
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Michelle Delio continues her drive south along the Great River Road toward Clarksdale, Miss., home of the blues.
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The cadillac shack has a bottle tree trimmed with cobalt-blue Skyy vodka bottles in the front yard. Bottle trees are supposed to provide protection from ghosts, who supposedly like to crawl inside the pretty colored bottles.