By Craig Havighurst

Indianola, Miss.

Driving Highway 61 south from Memphis into the Mississippi Delta compels a person to imagine life stooped over a cotton sack from dawn to dusk, deprived of comfort and opportunity. And as the vast fields glide by, a traveler might also reflect on some improbable truths: that music could be a balm for such an existence, that the music of slaves and sharecroppers could evolve into something as mutable and powerful as the blues, and that a man could carry the blues out of that miserable place to enrich the world and be hailed as a king.

That's the story told with color and context at the new B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, an artfully rusted town of 12,000 people in the heart of blues country. The $14 million facility is likely the most elaborate museum in the U.S. about a single living musician, but Mr. King's stature justifies the investment. The 83-year-old is to the blues what Luciano Pavarotti was to opera or Wynton Marsalis is to jazz: a household name and a global ambassador.

But while he's logged thousands of shows and visited most countries on Earth, Mr. King has reportedly been a proud son of Indianola, returning regularly to host shows and stay in touch with the area. About 400 members of his extended family were there when Mr. King attended the museum's grand opening in early September. What he saw was a modern corrugated steel and timber building tastefully conjoined to a 1920s cotton gin where he'd worked as a teenager before lighting out for Memphis. The modest but beautiful brick structure will serve as a gallery and performance space.

Inside the museum proper, a 10-minute film sets a reflective mood. Very recent performance footage reminds us that Mr. King is neither gone nor retired but still active and musically potent. And we ride with him on his tour bus, following directions from an old audio recording of his father's voice, to a humble patch of farmland that Mr. King believes was his birthplace.

The homecoming gesture works because Mr. King's journey has been so extraordinary, and the exhibits begin in an anteroom that uses ambient sound, images and light to evoke that journey's origins in the Depression-era Delta. Here, young Riley B. King lost his mother at age 9, then lived with various family members before eventually working the land for a white tenant farmer. Musically, Mr. King was taken with gospel and the region's acoustic blues, as well as with the big bands that he saw on an early video jukebox at the local tavern called a Panoram (an example in the museum and several interactive displays weren't functioning a week after opening but have now been fixed.). He assimilated the suave presentation and big sound of those bands as a guitarist and bandleader.

Mr. King's first attempt to establish himself in Memphis fell short, but in late 1948 he returned for good and, with the help of a cousin, the bluesman Bukka White, he found his footing in the capital city of the blues and black culture. Mr. King sang himself onto a radio slot pitching Peptikon patent medicine over the revolutionary WDIA. In one of the museum's most fascinating stretches, we see through WDIA artifacts and Memphis street photography how the radio station's embrace of black music, aided by the vibrant live music scene on Beale Street, fueled the rise of rhythm and blues.

The young Mr. King took the nickname "The Beale Street Blues Boy" before shortening it to B.B. and making his first hit record. The sultry and melancholy "Three O'Clock Blues" heralded his arrival in 1951, and a run of success on the rhythm-and-blues chart allowed him to take his talent on the road.

Stages, tour buses and hotels would be Mr. King's world from that point on, and the museum makes one of its several shifts in color and tone to illustrate the excitement and struggle of shepherding a big band around the network of black clubs and halls known as the chitlin' circuit during the segregated 1950s and '60s. A leather-bound notebook in which Mr. King kept his song charts, cross-referenced by songwriter, is among the more arresting items in the sequence.

The home stretch covers the artist's embrace by white audiences in the late 1960s. There is remarkable film from a night at San Francisco's Fillmore West when Mr. King, seeing the complexion of his audience, thought his booking agent had made a mistake. But the crowd of young white rock fans roars with passion and acceptance, bolstered in no small part by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and other blues-rooted rock stars who were by then citing Mr. King as a key influence.

The B.B. King Museum took shape over the past five years as a biracial coalition raised private and state money with the aim of creating a critical tourist destination in a struggling region. The museum's executive director, Connie Gibbons, says that once the facility is complete (a blues study center and outdoor performance venue are still under construction), it will also be an education hub with after-school music activities for at-risk kids.

"The thing that makes [King] so different from all the rest is his character and his commitment to his community, whether that's his band or the small town of Indianola or wherever he is," Ms. Gibbons says. "He has this work ethic and this commitment to improving himself each and every day. That's the message that you want your visitors and young people to walk away with."

Until recently, blues pilgrims traveling to the Mississippi Delta had to be resourceful, looking for blues performances in hard-to-find clubs with irregular hours. There were few choices for upscale lodging, and few destinations beyond grave sites. Now, with the Alluvian Hotel and Viking cooking school in nearby Greenwood, a blues museum and actor Morgan Freeman's nightclub and restaurant in historic Clarksdale, and the B.B. King Museum in Indianola, the Delta is a bit less forbidding but no less wondrous.

Mr. Havighurst is a writer and media producer in Nashville, Tenn.