The markers are hard to miss now: sleek roadside signs, scattered across the state, each commemorating a musician, a venue, or a moment in blues history. Together they form a driving trail that has drawn visitors from around the world and helped rebrand Mississippi around its greatest cultural export.

By the measure of tourism, the trail is a clear success. Hotels fill, restaurants benefit, and towns that once had little reason to expect visitors now see them regularly. The economic argument for celebrating the blues has rarely been stronger.

But a quieter reckoning has taken hold among some of the communities the trail commemorates. The musicians honored on the markers were often poor, and many of their descendants still are. The question being asked, more insistently each year, is whether the revenue the music generates ever finds its way back to the places that produced it.

State officials point to grants and reinvestment programs, and there has been some. Skeptics counter that the flow is thin relative to the wealth the music created. The debate is unlikely to resolve soon. It is, in the end, the oldest question the blues ever raised: who profits from the sorrow, and who is left holding it.