Muddy Waters' reconstructed cabin, including a life-size figure of the musician, is the centerpiece of the Delta Blues Museum, which is housed in a former railroad depot.

It's well past noon, and Rick Thomas is living on Delta time, lounging on the front porch, sipping coffee, shooting the breeze with his friend Loren Rullman.

So far, it's been a fine trip for the blues fans, both of them Midwestern college administrators in their 30s. They've seen not one, but two reputed burial plots of Robert Johnson, and now they're heading out to find Mississippi John Hurt's marker. Best of all, they're staying in a unique guesthouse that looks so rustic you wouldn't be surprised to see an old man in bib overalls playing harmonica.

"The blues is all about feeling," Rullman says, "and you really feel it in a place like this."

There's a rusted tin roof overhead, a leaning outhouse out back, a bottle tree trimmed with cobalt-blue Skyy vodka bottles in the front.

A place like this? These guys are paying to sleep in a shotgun shack.

Every summer, backpacking pilgrims from around the world journey to Mississippi to see the land where the blues was born. Never mind that John Lee Hooker and most of the other bluesmen who started out on Delta cotton plantations couldn't wait to get out. For true blues travelers like Thomas and Rullman, it isn't enough to hear Robert Nighthawk coax plaintive notes out of a slide guitar; they want to feel what gave him the blues.

No place gives them more to soak up than Clarksdale, an old cotton-trading town of 20,000 an hour south of Memphis. In the space of a few blocks, visitors can hit half a dozen blues clubs, see Bessie Smith's death chamber, stand inside the cabin where Muddy Waters got his mojo working, or drive to the crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have given his soul to the devil in exchange for supernatural musical prowess. (No one knows where the mythical intersection of "Cross Road Blues" really is, but Clarksdale stakes its claim stylishly with a signpost sculpture crafted from electric guitars.)

And now, on top of all the live music and dead legends, Clarksdale has what may be the world's first tourist court made up of shotgun houses. They call it the Shack Up Inn and pitch it to the blues crowd as Mississippi's oldest B&B - "bed and beer."

The interior of the Cadillac shack feels authentic, with fly swatters, funeral home calendar, Mardi Gras beads and portraits of John and Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

When I visited Clarksdale recently, I wasn't sure I wanted to stay there. Gimmick motels are fun to look at, but it's seldom very satisfying to spend the night in the Wigwam Village or Alamo Plaza. And this particular gimmick comes with some heavy baggage.

As housing types go, shotguns rank not much above straw huts and dirt-floored hovels. The classic specimen has two or three rooms stacked one behind the other, the doorways aligned so you could shoot through the front entry and out the back without hitting anything. Shotgun houses don't have to be shabby - look at some of the rehabs in Atlanta's Cabbagetown neighborhood - but the style is indelibly associated with mill villages, sharecropping and all stripes of Southern poverty. Alan Lomax, the folklorist who first recorded many of the Delta bluesmen in the 1930s and '40s, understood in his memoirs when he discussed shotgun houses in a chapter titled "There Is a Hell."

To be honest, there was another reason for my reticence. An authentic shotgun shack would probably not have indoor plumbing. I haven't used a real outhouse since my country cousins in Georgia moved from a fieldworker's house into a split-level during the '60s, and it is not a happy memory. I was little, the hole was large - enough said.

So I was relieved to find out that the Shack Up Inn's shacks had been upgraded. The houses were relocated from nearby plantations and retrofitted with plumbing, electricity, air conditioning and other amenities that the original tenants probably never had. Otherwise, the houses look pretty much the same, rough wooden siding and all.

"We could have Sheetrocked the walls, but that would've been so Comfort Inn," says Guy Malvezzi, one of the partners in the enterprise.

The shacks are four miles outside Clarksdale on one of the oldest cotton fiefdoms in Mississippi, the Hopson Plantation. According to the historical marker out front, Hopson was the first plantation to convert completely to mechanical cotton pickers, in the early 1940s. As machinery took over the cotton belt, thousands of field hands migrated north and left their shacks behind. The structures were bulldozed, burned down, left to the elements. Once commonplace, they are slowly vanishing from the landscape.

James Butler, a Clarksdale man who married into the Hopson family, wanted to save some of them. Problem was, all the worker housing on the Hopson farm had been torn down. So he and his partners started buying shacks from other plantations, moving them in next to the old Hopson commissary, which they turned into a blues club. They spent thousands of dollars repairing five shacks, putting in new systems and furnishing the interiors with vintage pieces and a veritable flea market of Dixie kitsch - everything from Mardi Gras beads to funeral home fans.

The result is an edgy mix of homage and irony. The people who stay at the Shack Up Inn - blues groupies and musicians, mostly - aren't that different from the literary tourists who want to commune with Hemingway's spirit by lifting a glass at Sloppy Joe's in Key West. One of the guests, a guitarist from Detroit, wasn't happy until someone took him out to play over Sonny Boy Williamson's grave at midnight. A couple I met from Arizona were on cloud nine because a local musician, James "Super Chikan" Johnson, had invited the young man to sit in on drums at a juke joint the night before.

"This place is so fertile, so much life," said the newly minted percussionist, C.T. Holman, as he snapped a photo of his wife in front of their shack.

The notion that you could appreciate what it was like to toil on a cotton plantation during Jim Crow days by sleeping in an air-conditioned shack is, of course, dubious at best. Considering our history, I wasn't surprised to hear that the Shack Up Inn had been in operation three years before it had its first black guests. A man from Memphis who had grown up in a shack brought his family for a stay last month. Everyone at the inn was a bit leary - and relieved when he said he enjoyed himself.

Malvezzi checked me into the Robert Clay shack, a three-room, 450-square-foot model that's bigger than most hotel rooms I've stayed in - only they didn't have a refrigerator on the porch. It's named for the field hand who lived in the house for decades, raising seven sons without power or running water. Clay is dead, but his memory inhabits the place like a friendly ghost. His portrait hangs in an honored spot in the kitchen, over his ironing board. The coils from his whiskey still decorate the bathroom like primitive folk art. His outhouse squats in the back yard, along with the post-hole diggers he used to clean out the pit.

I sank down in the sofa and looked around. It felt authentic, all right: fly swatter, funeral home calendar, a pastel portrait of the Kennedys and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a massive black iron stove, the vent pipe twittering with birds. The dim lamps and threadbare furniture made it all feel like the inside of a tourist cabin where Bonnie and Clyde might have hidden out.

There was a rap on the front door - Malvezzi again. "I've got something for you." He walked to the bedroom and laid a Moon Pie on the pillow. "This is your good-night mint. Eat it before the mice do."

That evening, as rain pinged the tin roof pleasingly, I flipped through the guestbook to see who had stayed in the Clay shack. There was a couple from Atlanta. A band with a hilariously provocative name, the 5 Who Framed O.J. And there were blues fans from all over - Norway, Italy, Germany, South Africa.

"If you listen very closely around midnight," a lodger from Indiana had written, "you can still hear the old Negro spirituals in the wind."

And I thought it was thunder.