Start from 27 curated places around Clarksdale, MS, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Levon's Bar and Grill
The most ambitious restaurant in Clarksdale, opened in 2016 by Australian transplant Naomi King and run by Chef Carl Jackson, who trained beyond the Delta before coming home. The menu rotates with the seasons and the produce comes from nearby farms — you might find Angus filet with grit cakes, New Zealand rack of lamb, or blackened catfish with fried green tomatoes. Multiple 'Best of Clarksdale' wins in 2024–2026 for Best Steak, Best Dessert, and Best Full Service Restaurant.
Abe's Bar-B-Q
Founded in 1924 by Lebanese immigrant Abraham Davis, Abe's is the oldest continuously operating BBQ restaurant in Mississippi and sits at the literal Crossroads of Highways 61 and 49. A century of smoke and the same legendary house sauce — a tangy, thin, tomato-based Delta style — have given the sandwiches and tamales mythic status among musicians who have eaten here for generations. Don't skip the hot tamales, a Mississippi Delta tradition with deep Delta roots.
Trails & outdoors
Soldiers Field Sunflower River Trail
Clarksdale's best urban green space, running along the west bank of the Sunflower River on the north side of downtown. The paved trail winds beneath large shade trees past an 18-hole disc golf course, covered pavilions, picnic tables, and a playground. Canoe and kayak launches at Soldiers Field let you drop onto the river and paddle the same waterway that flows through the Delta farmland. Flat, accessible, and free.
Hugh Jack Stubbs Recreational Trail
A 2.5-mile ADA-accessible paved pathway that follows the historic Yazoo Pass waterway as it winds from Moon Lake in rural Coahoma County. Four fitness stations are spaced along the flat route, and the trail ends at Moon Lake Landing — where you can fish, birdwatch, or simply sit at the water's edge on the 2,300-acre oxbow lake. Completely flat and utterly quiet, a genuine antidote to the Delta's lack of trails.
Things to do
Red's Lounge
The last true juke joint in Clarksdale: a small room with Christmas lights, a pool table, cold beer from a cooler, and blues memorabilia pinned to every surface. Red Paden ran the door here for more than 30 years until his death in December 2023; his family has kept the juke joint going since. The New York Times called it one of the last places in America offering Delta blues in its authentic natural setting. Cash only, no frills, and the music is as real as it gets — whoever is playing tonight probably learned the blues in the Delta.
Ground Zero Blues Club (Live Music)
While Ground Zero is listed as a restaurant above, the live music experience here is an institution in its own right — 200+ shows annually in a room that has hosted legends and unknowns with equal reverence. The capacity is 400 seated and 800 standing, with pool tables up front for those not ready to commit to the music. The signed walls and ceilings represent decades of musicians passing through, and every show feels like a dispatch from the living tradition of the blues.
Landmarks & sights
Delta Blues Museum
Mississippi's oldest music museum, housed in the 1926 Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad depot — a building that once carried share-croppers and would-be musicians out of the Delta. Inside, Muddy Waters' actual boyhood shack from Stovall Plantation anchors a collection of handwritten set lists, vintage instruments, and artifacts that trace the roots of virtually every popular genre born after 1920.
The Crossroads
The intersection of old Highways 61 and 49, marked by a 1999 sculpture of three giant blue guitars crafted by local metalsmith Vic Barbieri. Blues folklore holds this is where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to master the guitar — the state of Mississippi has officially declared this the crossroads of that legend. Whether you believe the myth or not, standing here in the Mississippi Delta flatness while cars whiz past on the old blues highway is genuinely eerie.