If Led Zeppelin fans ever wonder about Memphis Minnie, the pioneering blueswoman who recorded "When the Levee Breaks" four decades before the British supergroup made the song famous, none bothered to visit her grave on this hot September day. Fifteen minutes north of Tunica, the mid-South's gaming magnet, Minnie is buried in a dusty churchyard where the dragonflies are as big as your hand and King Cotton has surrendered his crown to corn and soybeans. As any Delta farmer can tell you, cotton prices are down, and it's just as easy to turn a dollar planting something else.
With nine casinos to choose from -- including Harrah's Tunica, self-billed as the "largest casino resort between Las Vegas and Atlantic City" -- Tunica's 10 million yearly visitors ain't got time to get the blues. This once-depressed boomtown's riverboat roll-call features familiar names transported from the Nevada desert to the Delta.
Bally's, Resorts, the Horseshoe, Sam's Town: Each gambling floor celebrates the shotgun marriage of Vegas casino action and the uniquely American Mississippi River culture that Mark Twain made famous. If that culture's on display only in Southern-fried casino buffets, so what? Poker is poker, no matter the theme of the window-less, clock-less, air-conditioned room in which one plunks down his blinds. Sure, this isn't the Bellagio: Harrah's, where the self-parking is free and "nonsmoking" is an exotic linguistic construction, cannot boast of jumping fountains or Cirque du Soleil. Tunica's unwalkable collection of isolated properties doesn't aim to reverse-engineer the full Sin City experience: the Strip, the food, the limousines and whatever else happens in Vegas that's supposed to stay in Vegas.
Instead, riverboat casinos -- that is, immobile pontoons that float in man-made moats beside the Mississippi without a view of the river itself -- offer decent rooms and great golf while enabling citizens of Flyover America to place their bets without expensive trips to the Pacific time zone, and a low-cost escape for any gambler trying not to break the budget for blowing the budget. After all, a casino reality-break is a casino reality-break: As Hurricane Ike overwhelmed the Gulf of Mexico barely six hours to the south, a floor manager changed a television from CNN to ESPN at a gambler's request.
For lovers of turnip greens, William Faulkner and Son House, the whir and buzz of riverboat gambling floors distract from Tunica's real attraction, rural Mississippi itself. Any English teacher can guide a 10th-grader through "Huckleberry Finn," but reading Samuel Clemens's masterpiece before taking a ride on the Mighty Mississip' is like learning to ride a bike by reading Wikipedia.
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