By SHELIA BYRD


INDIANOLA, Miss. (AP) -- Translucent images of long ago, of black men and women, backs bent, picking cotton under an unforgiving sun, are artistically displayed on standing glass panels in a museum carved out of an old brick gin mill in the Mississippi Delta.

They're a reminder of those who labored by day in a segregated society. But at night they escaped to Indianola's Church Street to be entertained by a young man later known as B.B. King, who would throw his hat on the ground to catch coins as he conjured devil's music from his guitar.

More than a half-century after King left Indianola in search of fame, the $15 million B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretative Center has opened in his hometown and is as much a tribute to him and his blues music as the culture that inspired it.

King's museum is the latest attraction for the state's blues tourism industry, which ironically thrives because so little has changed in the predominantly black Delta since King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson got their start there. Enthusiasts from across the nation and overseas vacation in the flatland region, known for fertile soil, its past racial strife and its lingering, unfathomable poverty.

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