CLARKSDALE, Miss. — The heart of the Mississippi Delta does not have a mega-employer to hand out jobs to thousands of people, so it does what it can with the assets it has.

Here, tourism is the cash cow, and that includes a flow of traffic through the popular sharecropper homes that have been renovated with modern amenities.

The strategy plays off the old images — a poor black man in overalls chewing on a corn cob pipe as he sits on the front porch of a dusty shack, sipping sweet tea and peering out onto a stretch of cotton fields.

But it is a complex strategy, as Mississippi is forced to market the very image it shuns.

"It is somewhat paradoxical," said Ron Hudson, executive director of the Clarksdale-Coahoma County Chamber of Commerce & Industrial Foundation. "But, for the most part, I think it's accepted because it is history."

The blues industry is the flagship of the Delta's tourism sector, as thousands of blues enthusiasts, historians and fans converge on Delta towns every year. Visitors can stand on the sacred ground of blues legends while seeking out the cold beverages and hot tamales the artists reference in their songs.

There are plenty of fried foods and smoky bars to explore, and many visitors opt to stay in a renovated sharecropper home while they're in town.

"How do you market 'poor'? How do you market 'dilapidated'? " asked Bill Talbot, the innkeeper at the Shack Up Inn. "The best way is the way Clarksdale does, and Clarksdale's doing a good job."

Alex Thomas, the Heritage Trails director for the Mississippi Development Authority's Office of Tourism, said the state's cultural heritage is a key economic tool, and attracts visitors from around the world.

"A lot of our international visitors are so impressed with seeing a cotton field, are so impressed with seeing a catfish farm, that's a part of history," he said. "That's ... the experience that they can't get in their country."

It is a balancing act between education and economics. Once visitors are lured in by the re-creations of poverty, they should also be drawn into the history of the blues, he said, to understand what that poverty gave birth to.

Thomas has focused on the Mississippi Blues Trail, a path of markers to designate historic blues sites around the state. Ten of the planned 100-plus markers have been unveiled.

When it's fleshed out, tourists will be able to use a road map to guide them to Robert Johnson's grave, the site where Muddy Waters first recorded, or Greenville's Nelson Street, once the flourishing Beale Street of the Delta.

The Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale gets roughly 75,000 visitors a year, with adults paying a $7 admission. Festivals draw thousands of people to the state each year, including Clarksdale's Juke Joint Festival, which brings in 20,000 to 25,000 people.

It is a stark contrast to how people used to feel about Mississippi.

"People were hanged and killed and burned, and I think a lot of people have been scared to come here for decades because of that. But that's the old school, that's old generations, and now people are beginning to realize, 'Well, hey, Mississippi is a pretty cool place,' " Talbot said.

But Coahoma's tourism revenue pales in comparison to Tunica County, where casinos have taken hold. Tunica raked in $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2006, according to MDA's numbers. Coahoma took in only $92.8 million.

Bobby Tarzi, who owns the Delta Amusement Blues Cafe, says, "The only thing that's going on is the blues, and people from out of town are buying up property. Other than that, it's kind of stale down through here."