Time is a continuum in the Mississippi Delta. Folks sometimes like to stay up all night. Sometimes they sleep all day. But in the Delta it doesn’t really matter when you dream. The land itself is so vastly flat, you can hardly tell if the sun is rising or setting anyway. Here, dreams are always under construction.

In this place of no real beginnings or endings, hopeful white plastic holiday snowflakes decorate the downtown streetlights all year ‘round. Never mind that the closest thing to snow is drifts of stray cotton blown to the sides of the roads during picking time. Or that Christmas could be half a year away.

Of course, that’s why we like it. To hell with a calendar. And punching a clock. This is one of the last places left in the world where you have to light up a smoke just to have something to do.

Which is why we came up with Avalon. Sheer boredom. And the remarkable lack of a cigar good enough to distract you for a while. We wanted something that smoked as slow and long and deep as the music this place is famous for.

People like to call Clarksdale, Mississippi, the “Birthplace of the Blues.” That’s a lie. The music is born of rhythms so ancient, they aren’t even written about in the Bible. Which probably frustrates some people. But not everything has to be the gospel to be the truth.

We took our name from the real story, which is that many of the men who found a way to give those ancient rhythms a voice were born here. Mississippi John Hurt was one of them. He traveled the world with his music, and he made believers out of all who heard him play. His remarkable life began in a tiny, humble settlement just outside Clarksdale.

It’s called Avalon.