The friends pressure-washed the things, inside and out, and tried to seal up the cracks. “Soon enough,” says Guy Malvezzi, one of the inn’s owners, “here come the European travelers wondering if they could ‘let’ them. We didn’t know what they were talking about.” And so the inn was born almost by accident, and a shack or two has been added every few years since.

Clarksdale is the home of the blues: It survives on tourists who arrive looking for those sounds, those roots. Today the inn is beloved by folks like Elvis Costello and Robert Plant, and hundreds of others who come year after year. When a blues festival is announced on the calendar, a few thousand people request reservations.

Malvezzi and his business partner, Bill Talbot, call their enterprise a B&B, a bed and beer. Their office is in the cotton gin next door, where they put out coffee and a box of doughnuts in the morning and trade stories. Over the years they’ve found lighthearted ways to advertise, like posters that say, “Bring your wife, bring your girlfriend, heck, bring both.”

But there is something solemn as they reflect. They see themselves as having stumbled into roles as caretakers of history, though not the kind of history you cull from textbooks and museum placards and recycle at dinner parties. For to enter and sleep between the walls where a farmer named Robert Clay raised seven sons is a history lesson that hushes you.

Demand from blues tourists led the owners to build out ten hotel suites in the cotton gin, now the Cotton Gin Inn. The rooms have painted concrete floors, corrugated tin entrances, and stained cypress walls.
Conversely, the shacks have unmatching linens and bubble wrap stuffed between the heating unit and the window. “We’ve done six-pack carpentry and twelve-pack architecture,” says Talbot.

When night comes, so does the chill. You might think it would be unsettling to sleep in an abandoned house, and yet, returning from a night in Clarksdale to turn the key of your shack is strangely comforting. Maybe you realize these homes have known a lot more nights than you have. Maybe you even wish the night were a little longer, because in the morning you have to leave. You wander out on the porch where the Delta stars make bearable the Delta wind—the stars along with several nips of whiskey—while down by the banks of the Sunflower River a coyote begins to cry.