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Bethel A.M.E. Church

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Yazoo City
Organized in 1868, Bethel is the oldest African American congregation in Yazoo City. After affiliating with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the congregation moved to this site in 1890. Designed by J.S. King, Bethel A.M.E. is one of the earliest brick churches built by African Americans in Mississippi.

(African Americans • Churches, Etc.) Includes location, directions, 3 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Redoubt McKee

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Yazoo City
On March 5, 1864, Union Maj. George McKee and the 11th Illinois Infantry Regiment, occupying this defensive position, were attacked by Confederate cavalry forces commanded by Gen. Lawrence "Sul" Ross and Gen. Robert V. Richardson. During the battle, which spilled into the streets of Yazoo City and included action by Union gunboats, Ross made three separate demands for the fort's surrender. Each was rejected by McKee. Towards the end of the day, the Confederates withdrew towards Benton.

(Forts, Castles • War, US Civil) Includes location, directions, 2 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Town Creek

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Yazoo City
Town Creek, one of Yazoo City's earliest residential areas, is located within the Town Center National Register Historic District, noted for the uniformly constructed buildings in the business district.

(Notable Places) Includes location, directions, 3 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

St. Francis Mission School

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Yazoo City
Established by the School Sisters of St. Francis of Milwaukee and Father Peter DeBoer, SVD, to minister to the African American children of Yazoo City, the school opened in September 1940 with 80 children enrolled. The high school held its first and last graduation in 1947 and 1969 respectively and closed in 1970.

(African Americans • Churches, Etc. • Education) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Tommy McClennan

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Yazoo City

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Tommy McClennan (c. 1905-1961) was one of America's most successful down-home blues recording artists during the period when he recorded 20 singles for the Bluebird label (1939-1942). Among McClennan's most notable numbers were "Bottle It Up and Go," "Cross Cut Saw," "Travelin' Highway Man," and "New Highway No. 51 Blues." McClennan, famed for his raucous, uninhibited singing and guitar playing, frequented this section of Yazoo City when he lived on the nearby J. F. Sligh plantation.

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Tommy McClennan was born in Yazoo City in April of 1908, according to Big Bill Broonzy in his book "Big Bill Blues." However, McClennan's death certificate cites his birthplace as Durant (Holmes County) and the date as January 4, 1905. He is shown with his mother Cassie and his siblings in the 1910 census in Carroll County, and in 1920 the family was living on a plantation near Sidon in Leflore County. McClennan and his wife Ophelia were also enumerated in the 1930 Leflore County census, with his occupation listed as teamster. His name was variously spelled McClinton, McLindon, McCleland, and McClenan on these documents, although the McClennan spelling was used on all of his recordings. Other bluesmen remembered him from elsewhere in the Delta, including Bolivar County and Vance, but he was best known around Greenwood, where Booker Miller, a protege of Charley Patton, knew him as "Sugar," and Yazoo City, where local resident Herman Bennett, Jr., and others called him "Bottle Up," after his most popular song, “Bottle It Up and Go.” When Miller quit playing in 1937, he sold his guitar to McClennan. In the Greenwood area, McClennan's performing partners included Robert Petway and Honeyboy Edwards. When Samuel Charters traveled to Yazoo City doing research for his book "The Country Blues" in the 1950s, he learned that McClennan had lived on the Sligh plantation and liked to hang out on Water Street at the Ren Theater, an adjacent barroom, and a pool hall. Bennett also recalled him from the Cotton Club, a popular blues spot on Champlin Avenue.

McClennan began his recording career in 1939 after white Chicago record producer Lester Melrose came looking for him. Broonzy recounted that Melrose had to make a hurried exit when his presence angered locals who thought he was recruiting laborers to leave Mississippi. In Chicago McClennan, “one of the most ferocious blues singers to get near a microphone,” in the words of Charters, unleashed his gruff, unbridled blues in the studio, sometimes further energizing the recordings with lively comments urging himself on. According to Broonzy, McClennan was chased from a Chicago party when revelers objected to the controversial lyrics McClennan sang in “Bottle It Up and Go.” McClennan's friend Robert Petway also recorded sixteen songs for Bluebird. Petway (aka Petaway or Pettiway) shared a similar, if less rough-hewn and exuberant, performing style with McClennan. They were of similar diminutive height and were sometimes taken to be brothers. Their recording careers both ended in 1942, although Bluebird and RCA Victor continued to release McClennan singles for several years. McClennan moved to Chicago but there are few reports of him performing there. The last time Honeyboy Edwards saw him, McClennan was drinking heavily and living in a hobo jungle. McClennan died of bronchopneumonia in Chicago on May 9, 1961.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 5 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Gatemouth Moore

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Yazoo City

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Arnold Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore was one of America’s most popular blues singers in the 1940s before becoming a renowned religious leader, radio announcer, and gospel singer. He served as pastor of several churches in Mississippi and Louisiana, including the Bethel A.M.E. Church and Lintonia A.M.E. Church in Yazoo City. Moore, who was born in Topeka, Kansas, on November 8, 1913, spent much of his career in Memphis, Kansas City, and Chicago. He died in Yazoo City on May 19, 2004.

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Gatemouth Moore was the tuxedoed toast of the blues world when he strode from the gambling table to the stage of Chicago’s Club DeLisa one December night in 1948. But when he tried to sing, nothing came out, until, finally, he broke into the old spiritual, “Shine On Me.” According to a columnist for Chicago’s African American newspaper the Defender, Moore “ran off the stage and about seven blocks in the snow screaming and yelling ‘I’m saved.’” This was but one of many dramatic and colorful moments in the career of Moore, who entered the ministry and remained a newsworthy national personality in all his varied fields of endeavor.

A descendant of emancipated slaves who emigrated to Kansas from Tennessee during the historic “Exoduster” resettlement movement of the late 1870s, Moore sang ballads and spirituals as a youngster in Topeka. In his teens he left with a traveling show, joined the Port Gibson-based Rabbit Foot Minstrels, and ended up in Clarksdale around 1934. A year or so later he caught a ride to Memphis and launched a new career as a blues shouter. At a show in Atlanta an intoxicated woman gave him his nickname, he recalled: “I opened my mouth and she looked up and hollered, ‘Ah, sing it, you gatemouth S.O.B.!” Moving between Memphis, Kansas City, and Chicago, he toured with some of the country’s top bands and wrote and recorded hits such as “I Ain’t Mad at You Pretty Baby,” “Did You Ever Love a Woman,” and “Somebody’s Got to Go.” Both B.B. King and Rufus Thomas considered Moore a major influence; they not only recorded his songs but remained close friends with him through the years.

Moore was ranked in the top rung of vocalists in national polls by the Defender when he felt the calling to preach. He carried his flair for showmanship with him into the ministry, as a gospel singer and recording artist, as the host of radio and television programs, and as a raconteur whose tales could stretch the limits of belief. His elegance and exuberance enabled him to easily cross social, racial, and religious lines, and though he devoted himself to the church, community work, charities, and education, he still enjoyed singing the blues on occasion. A pastor of both Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches, a leader of the “black Elks” (IBPOEW), president of the Birmingham Black Barons baseball team, and an emcee at both blues festivals and religious conventions, Moore once delivered a eulogy for the closing of the Club DeLisa and preached one famous sermon from a casket and another from a cross. In 1974 the A.M.E. Church assigned him to Yazoo City, where he married high school counselor Walterine Coleman. Moore, who attained the rank of bishop, received a brass note on the Beale Street Walk of Fame in 1996, and his widow was presented with a resolution in his honor by the Mississippi Senate in 2004.

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Noted singers who have called Yazoo City home, in addition to Gatemouth Moore, include from left: Jo Armstead, Kenzie Moore, and Robert Covington. Jo Armstead (b. 1944) left Yazoo City in 1961 to become an Ikette with the Ike and Tina Turner revue. She later co-wrote several R&B hits, including "Let’s Go Get Stoned," "Jealous Kind of Fella," and "Sock It To Me." Kenzie Moore (1929-1987) was a football star and WAZF deejay who sang with the Joe Dyson band in Jackson and recorded “Let It Lay” and other songs for the Specialty label in 1953-54. Covington (1941-1996) played drums with a number of Chicago blues artists, most notably Sunnyland Slim, and was featured as a singer on the 1988 album The Golden Voice of Robert Covington.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Grierson's Raid

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Mississippi, Newton County, Newton

Here at Newton Station, on April. 24, 1863, Federals under General Benjamin H. Grierson struck the Vicksburg-Meridian rail route, tore up tracks, & burned depot.

(Railroads & Streetcars • War, US Civil) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Pocahontas Mounds

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Mississippi, Hinds County, near Jackson
Built and used between A.D 1000 and 1300, this platform mound and a nearby burial mound mark the ceremonial and political seat of a regional chiefdom of the Plaquemine culture. A thatched, clay-plastered ritual temple or chief's lodging stood atop this mound. Dwellings of villagers occupied surrounding fields.

(Anthropology • Cemeteries & Burial Sites • Native Americans • Settlements & Settlers) Includes location, directions, 3 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Pinetop Perkins

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Mississippi, Humphreys County, near Belzoni

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Blues piano master Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins was born on July 7, 1913, on the Honey Island Plantation, seven miles southeast of Belzoni. Perkins spent much of his career accompanying blues icons such as Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 and Muddy Waters. After he began to tour and record as a featured singer and soloist in the 1980s, Perkins earned a devoted following among enthusiasts who hailed him as the venerated elder statesman of blues piano.

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Pinetop Perkins did not have an album under his own name in the United States until he was seventy-five years old (in 1988), but during the next two decades he recorded more than fifteen LPs and CDs as the reigning patriarch of blues piano. Perkins started out on guitar, but he also learned piano as a youngster, influenced by local pianists and by the records of Clarence “Pine Top” Smith and others. Smith’s “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” of 1929 was so popular that many pianists, including Perkins, took up boogie woogie and sometimes even adopted the name “Pine Top,” or “Pinetop.”

Perkins spent much of his childhood moving around the Delta, living with his mother or other relatives, or with his friend, guitarist Boyd Gilmore, on a plantation with Gilmore’s grandparents. Perkins picked cotton, worked as handyman, mechanic, and truck driver, and began playing at juke joints, house parties, and cockfights. His first professional job in music was as a guitarist with blues legend Robert Nighthawk. In the 1940s Perkins played piano on radio broadcasts with Nighthawk and with Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 (Rice Miller) on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas. When a woman stabbed him in Helena, the injury forced him to give up the guitar, although he was already becoming better known as a pianist. Perkins also drove a tractor on the Hopson plantation near Clarksdale. In Clarksdale he later mentored a young Ike Turner on piano and began working with another prodigy, guitarist Earl Hooker.

Perkins first recorded as pianist on a Nighthawk session in Chicago in 1950. In 1953 Perkins recorded two versions of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” when he, Boyd Gilmore, and Earl Hooker did a session together for Sam Phillips’s Sun label in Memphis. Pinetop continued to play with Nighthawk, Hooker, and others at different times and also worked at a laundry and a garage. In 1969, when Otis Spann–another noted pianist with Belzoni roots–left the Muddy Waters band, Waters called on Perkins to take his place. International touring and recording with Muddy brought him widespread recognition, and he made his first album in 1976 for a French label. In 1980 Perkins and other band members left Muddy and formed the Legendary Blues Band. After recording two albums with the unit, Perkins embarked on his belated solo career.

In addition to Perkins and Spann, other blues artists who were born in on near Belzoni or who lived here include Denise LaSalle, Boyd Gilmore, Eddie Burns, Paul “Wine” Jones, Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, and Elmore James.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 5 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Denise LaSalle

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Mississippi, Humphreys County, Belzoni

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Soul and blues star Denise LaSalle was born Denise Allen near Sidon in rural Leflore County on July 16, 1939, but spent much of her childhood here in Belzoni. After moving to Chicago in her teens, she began writing songs and scored the first of many self-penned hits in 1971 with the No. 1 R&B single “Trapped By a Thing Called Love.” LaSalle’s direct and often provocative style on stage also led to great success as a live performer.

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Denise LaSalle achieved success not only as a recording artist and performer but also as a songwriter, producer, record label owner, and nightclub operator. Ora Denise Allen spent her early years on a plantation and around age seven or eight moved with her family moved to Belzoni, where they lived in homes on Cain and Hayden streets. In the late 1940s she saw bluesmen Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 performing on radio programs broadcast from the Easy Pay furniture store downtown. She sang in church as a child and after moving to Chicago in her mid-teens worked with the gospel group The Sacred Five.

At fifteen Allen sold stories to the magazines Tan and True Confessions. Soon thereafter she began writing songs and changed her professional name to “LaSalle” because it “sounded French.” In 1967 LaSalle made her first recordings for bluesman Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s Tarpon label, scoring a minor hit with “A Love Reputation.” In 1969 LaSalle and her then-husband Bill Jones formed Crajon Enterprises. The LaSalle-penned "Get Your Lie Straight" was a major hit for Bill Coday on the Crajon label. In 1971-72 LaSalle gained national recognition with three Top Ten R&B singles on Westbound Records: “Trapped By a Thing Called Love,” “Now Run and Tell That,” and “Man Sized Job.” As further records on Westbound, ABC, and MCA continued to hit the charts, LaSalle was becoming infamous for her racy onstage persona and extended, off-color “raps” on how women should please their men and vice versa. LaSalle attributed her strong abilities as a storyteller to her lifelong love of country music; her song “Married, But Not to Each Other” was covered by country star Barbara Mandrell.

In 1984 LaSalle recorded the first in a long series of albums for Jackson-based Malaco Records. Nine of her Malaco albums in the 1980s and '90s sold well enough to make the national charts, as did the Malaco single "My Tu-Tu." During this period LaSalle began to be marketed as a “blues” rather than “R&B” artist and in 1986 she founded the National Association for the Preservation of the Blues to bring more attention to the “soul/blues” style. LaSalle also wrote songs for Z. Z. Hill, who had a hit with her “Someone Else Is Steppin’ In,” as well as for Ann Peebles and Little Milton, whose recording of the LaSalle-Mack Rice composition “Packed Up and Took My Man” was sampled by rapper Ghostface Killah. In 1997 LaSalle left Malaco after her husband, businessman and disc jockey James “Super” Wolfe, Jr., joined the ministry. She recorded a gospel album on her own Angel In the Midst label, but soon returned to the blues field with popular albums on her Ordena label and on Ecko Records. In 2008 she rejoined the Malaco Records roster.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Turner's Drug Store

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Mississippi, Humphreys County, Belzoni

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The names of Turner’s Drug Store (located on this corner) and the Easy Pay Store across the street are etched into blues history as sponsors of some of the first radio programs in Mississippi to feature Delta blues. In 1947-48 stations in Yazoo City and Greenville began broadcasting live performances by Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 and Elmore James from Belzoni via remote transmission. Williamson, James, and other musicians often performed outside the stores, and inside the Easy Pay as well.

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Sonny Boy Williamson, also known as “Rice” Miller, was already an established blues radio icon famed for his “King Biscuit Time” program in Helena, Arkansas, when he began broadcasting over Yazoo City station WAZF on programs sponsored by the Easy Pay Store and Tallyho, an alcohol-laced vitamin and mineral tonic produced at Turner’s Drug Store. The Easy Pay was wired for Williamson to set up inside the store for the weekday 3:30 p.m. broadcasts while crowds of onlookers watched through the front window. Elmore James often played guitar with Williamson and also sang numbers of his own, including his signature tune, “Dust My Broom.” WAZF laid a direct telephone line to Belzoni and built a local studio to commence an enhanced schedule of remote broadcasts beginning on June 1, 1948, although the station had already been featuring Williamson for several months. WJPR in Greenville also carried the Easy Pay/Tallyho shows at one point, further boosting the profiles of Williamson and James a few years before they launched their legendary recording careers at Trumpet Records in Jackson.

Williamson’s Tallyho theme song began: “Tallyho, it sure is good, you can buy it anywhere in the neighborhood.” Drug store co-owner O. J. Turner, Jr., and Easy Pay proprietor George Gordon were partners in Tallyho, which was produced under a formula licensed from Louisiana senator Dudley LeBlanc, creator of a popular potion called Hadacol, after Gordon happened to meet LeBlanc at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. Turner’s son, O. J.“Bubba” III, mixed batches of Tallyho with a paddle in a No. 2 washtub at the drug store, and as the demand spread, Turner, Jr., began delivering Tallyho to drug stores around the Delta from the trunk of his car. The Easy Pay also advertised easy-credit purchase plans for furniture, appliances, and household goods. When Williamson and James weren’t on the radio, they were liable to be found playing on the streets, in front of Turner’s, and at various juke joints and cafes, including Jake Thomas’ and Jack Anderson’s. James once lived on the Turner Brothers’ plantation with his family and his adopted “play brother,” Robert Earl Holston, who often joined him on guitar. Both James and Williamson lived in the Belzoni area at various times in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, and both married Belzoni women, but neither man ever settled in one place for long. Williamson began broadcasting for Hadacol in West Memphis in late 1948, sometimes joined by guests including a young B. B. King, who went on to host a blues show sponsored by yet another tonic, Pep-Ti-Kon, in Memphis. B. B.’s jingle: “Pep-Ti-Kon sure is good, you can get it anywhere in the neighborhood.”

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment • Industry & Commerce) Includes location, directions, 5 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Nehemiah “Skip” James

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Bentonia

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The haunting quality of Nehemiah “Skip” James’s music earned him a reputation as one of the great early Mississippi bluesmen. James (1902-1969) grew up at the Woodbine Plantation and as a youth learned to play both guitar and piano. At his 1931 session for Paramount he recorded eighteen songs, including the dark-themed “Devil Got My Woman” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” He later became a minister, but returned to performing blues during the 1960s “blues revival.”

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Skip James The music of Skip James and fellow Bentonia guitarists such as Henry Stuckey (1897-1966) and Jack Owens (1904-1997) is often characterized as a genre unto itself. The distinctive approach is notable for its ethereal sounds, open minor guitar tunings, gloomy themes, falsetto vocals, and songs that bemoan the work of the devil. Stuckey learned one of the tunings from Caribbean soldiers while serving in France during World War I, and said that he taught it to James, who went on to become the most famous of Bentonia's musicians.

James was born on June 9, 1902, on the Woodbine Plantation where his mother Phyllis worked as a cook; his father, Edward, a guitarist, left the family when James was around five. Inspired by Stuckey, James began playing guitar as a child, and later learned to play organ. In his teens James began working on construction and logging projects across the mid-South, and sharpened his piano skills playing at work camp “barrelhouses.” In 1924 James returned to Bentonia, where he earned his living as a sharecropper, gambler and bootlegger, in addition to performing locally with Stuckey.

James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, for his historic 1931 session for Paramount Records, which included thirteen songs on guitar and five on piano. “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” alluded to the Great Depression, while the gun-themed “22-20 Blues” provided the model for Robert Johnson's “32-20 Blues,” and the haunting “Devil Got My Woman” was the likely inspiration for Johnson's “Hell Hound on My Trail.” James’s records sold poorly, and later in 1931 he moved to Dallas, where he served as a minister and led a gospel group. He later stayed in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Hattiesburg and Meridian, Mississippi, occasionally returning to Bentonia. When he applied for a Social Security card in 1937, he was employed locally by the Cage Brothers (probably the Cage family who had a farm north of town). He returned in 1948 and sometimes played for locals at the newly opened Blue Front Cafe, although he did not earn his living as a musician. He later lived in Memphis and Tunica County, where he was located in 1964 by blues enthusiasts who persuaded him to begin performing again.

James relocated to Washington, D. C., and then to Philadelphia to play folk and blues festivals and clubs. He recorded several albums and gained new renown from the rock group Cream’s 1966 cover of his song “I'm So Glad,” but the somber quality of much of his music and his insistence on artistic integrity over entertainment value limited his popular appeal. James died in Philadelphia on October 3, 1969. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1992.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Stage House · Dyckesville

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Wisconsin, Kewaunee County, Dyckesville
The first European inhabitant of this area was Louis Van Dycke, from whom the community received its name. Dyckesville, an early Belgian settlement, was a typical crossroads community including a store, church and saloon. It became part of one of the largest Belgian settlements in America.

On this site in 1878 Joseph Stage built the "Stage House." It was one of the earliest businesses in the area and housed a hotel, dance hall, saloon and the Dyckesville post office. It served also as a stop for stage coaches. Nearby stood a barn for the horses. In 1901 the building was gutted by fire and rebuilt. It operated under several different owners and continued to be a focal point in the community. Its demise occurred in 1969 when another fire struck. In April 1971 the building was razed.

(Industry & Commerce • Settlements & Settlers) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Little Milton Campbell

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Mississippi, Sunflower County, Inverness

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Little Milton Campbell, one of the world’s leading performers of blues and soul music for several decades, was born on the George Bowles plantation about two miles southwest of this site on September 7, 1933. Acclaimed as both a singer and guitarist, Campbell was a longtime crowd favorite at Mississippi festivals and nightclubs. His hits included “We’re Gonna Make It,” “The Blues Is Alright,” and “That’s What Love Will Make You Do.” He died in Memphis on August 4, 2005.

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Little Milton There was nothing “little” in stature or physique about Milton Campbell, whose nickname served only to distinguish him from his father, “Big” Milton Campbell. As a vocalist Campbell was equally effective with powerful anthems and soft ballads, and as a guitarist he had few peers. He was also a savvy businessman who demanded professionalism from his bands and insisted on maintaining a consistent musical identity throughout his long career. Campbell produced many of his own records and booked other artists through Camil Productions, a company he ran with his wife, Pat.

Campbell was born near Inverness but spent most of his early childhood with his mother in Magenta in Washington County. He built a one-stringed guitar on the side of his home and around age twelve he bought his first real guitar via mail order with money he had made by working in the cotton fields. He returned sometimes to stay with his father in Inverness and later performed at the town’s top blues venue, the Harlem Club, owned by Wallace Bowles (brother of plantation owner George Bowles, Jr.). Milton, however, always cited Leland blues bandleader Eddie Cusic as the first to give him experience playing for audiences. By his late teens Milton had moved to Greenville, where he performed with local luminaries including Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, Joe Willie Wilkins, and Willie Love. He also hosted a radio program there on WGVM.

Campbell first recorded in Jackson as a sideman with Love in 1951. In 1953 talent scout Ike Turner helped Campbell land a recording contract with Sun Records in Memphis. Milton started to develop his own distinctive style after relocating in the mid-’50s to East St. Louis and later to Chicago. In St. Louis he recorded for Bobbin Records and also recruited talent for the label, including then little-known Albert King. Campbell moved on to Chicago’s Checker label, where he began to blend his blues with soul music and rose to national prominence with a long string of hits. In 1971 Campbell signed with the Memphis soul label Stax, where he scored further hits, and in 1984 he joined the Jackson-based Malaco label for a long and productive association that resulted in fourteen albums. He moved to Las Vegas, though he kept an apartment in Memphis in order to be closer to the Southern soul and blues performing circuit where he remained a major attraction. During his career Little Milton had a total of twenty-nine singles and seventeen albums on the Billboard magazine charts. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1988. Campbell suffered a stroke on July 27, 2005, and died a week later.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 6 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

The Blue Front Café

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, Bentonia

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The Blue Front Café opened in 1948 under the ownership of Carey and Mary Holmes, an African American couple from Bentonia. In its heyday the Blue Front was famed for its buffalo fish, blues, and moonshine whiskey. One of the couple’s sons, Jimmy Holmes, took over the café in 1970 and continued to operate it as an informal, down-home blues venue that gained international fame among blues enthusiasts.

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The Blue Front Café During the 1980s and ’90s the Blue Front Café began to attract tourists in search of authentic blues in a rustic setting. In its early years, the café was a local gathering spot for crowds of workers from the Yazoo County cotton fields. Carey and Mary Holmes raised their ten children and three nephews and sent most of them to college on the income generated by the café and their cotton crops. The café offered hot meals, groceries, drinks, recreation, entertainment, and even haircuts.

The Holmes family operated under a tangled set of local rules during the segregation era. The Blue Front was subject to a 10 p.m. town curfew, but at the height of cotton gathering and ginning season, the café might stay open 24 hours a day to serve shifts of workers around the clock. The Blue Front could not serve Coca-Cola, however, nor could black customers purchase it or other items reserved for whites anywhere in Bentonia; African Americans were allowed only brands such as Nehi and Double Cola. Still, white customers regularly bought bootleg corn liquor at the back door of the café. After integration, the Blue Front boasted its own Coca-Cola sign.

Music at the Blue Front was often impromptu and unannounced. The café seldom advertised or formally booked acts. Many itinerant harmonica players and guitarists drifted through to play a few tunes, but at times the musical cast included such notables as Skip James, Jack Owens, Henry Stuckey, Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 (Rice Miller), and James “Son” Thomas.

Local musicians who have played at the Blue Front also include harmonica players Bud Spires, Son Johnson, Bobby Batton, Alonzo (Lonzy) Wilkerson, and Cleo Pullman; guitarists Cornelius Bright, Jacob Stuckey, Dodd Stuckey, Tommy Lee West, owner Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, his brother John, their uncle Percy Smith, and cousin Otha Holmes; and, on special occasions, bands from Jackson led by Eddie Rasberry or Roosevelt Roberts. Musicians also performed at Carey Holmes’s outdoor gatherings on the family farm, which later evolved into the Bentonia Blues Festival, sponsored by Jimmy Holmes. In 2000, Mary Alice Holmes Towner, Jimmy’s sister, also organized a blues and gospel festival in Marks, Mississippi.

Jimmy Holmes’s first two CDs, released in 2006 and 2007, were recorded at the Blue Front, perpetuating the music he learned in Bentonia from Jack Owens and others.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 6 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

The Haskell Cemetery

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Kansas, Douglas County, Lawrence


The Haskell Cemetery has approximately 100 students buried here. The child’s name, tribal affiliation, date of birth and death are engraved on their headstone. Some of causes of death were listed as consumption (Tuberculosis), pneumonia, accidental death, typhoid-malaria, heart and kidney problems. The earliest burial was 1885 and the last burial was in 1943. Please, be respectful of the offerings left on the headstones.

(Cemeteries & Burial Sites • Education • Native Americans) Includes location, directions, 5 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Jack Owens

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Mississippi, Yazoo County, near Bentonia

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Jack Owens became one of Mississippi's most venerated blues artists in the 1980s and ‘90s after spending most of his life as a farmer in Yazoo County. Born November 17, 1904, or 1906 according to some sources, Owens did not perform outside the state of Mississippi until 1988. During his final years he and his harmonica player, Bud Spires, traveled together to many festivals and performed on Owens’s front porch for hundreds of visitors. Owens died on February 9, 1997.

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Jack Owens belonged to the pioneering generation of Bentonia bluesmen, which included Nehemiah “Skip” James (1902-1969) and Henry Stuckey (1897-1966). Stuckey is often regarded as the seminal local blues figure, but researchers have yet to discover any recordings or photographs of him. James ranks as Bentonia’s most internationally renowned musician, known for the striking quality of the music on his 1931 recordings for the Paramount label and for a briefly rejuvenated career during the blues revival of the 1960s. Just as James’s recording career was nearing its end, Owens was beginning his, in 1966; his first album, produced by musicologist Dr. David Evans, was not released until 1971. But during the following decades Owens became Bentonia’s resident celebrity. Local citizens grew accustomed to the sight of tour buses, vans, and cars with out-of-state license plates, sometimes loaded with cameras and recording equipment, heading for Owens’s house just north of this site off Rose Hill Road.

The music of Owens and James, as Evans wrote, was distinguished by “haunting, brooding lyrics dealing with such themes as loneliness, death and the supernatural...Altogether it is one of the eeriest, loneliest and deepest blues sounds ever recorded.” Neither Owens’s music nor his lifestyle in Bentonia changed much over the years. He clung to old ways and superstitions, including burying money in the ground and hanging bottles from his trees, and was reputed to be the last farmer in the area to plow with a mule. He once made moonshine and ran juke joints in or near his house. Even in his nineties he kept a pistol or shotgun at hand but claimed he had not shot anyone in several years. Documentary filmmakers were duly fascinated, and Owens appeared in Alan Lomax’s Land Where the Blues Began and Robert Mugge’s Deep Blues, as well as a commercial for Levi’s 501 Blues. After making a few festival appearances in Mississippi, he accepted offers to perform in Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Europe, and elsewhere, and took his first plane flight in 1992. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a National Heritage Fellowship in 1993.

Owens is buried in the Day Cemetery east of Bentonia. Only at his funeral was his real name, L. F. Nelson, revealed. He left protégés Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, proprietor of the Blue Front café, and harmonica player Benjamin “Bud” Spires to carry on the Bentonia blues tradition. Spires, who was born in Anding on May 20, 1931, was Owens’s steadfast musical companion for some thirty years. He was the son of guitarist Arthur “Big Boy” Spires (1912-1990), a Yazoo County native who moved to Chicago and recorded several songs that are considered classics of down-home postwar blues.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music • Entertainment) Includes location, directions, 5 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Florida East Coast Railway - General Office Buildings

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Florida, Saint Johns County, St. Augustine
Henry M. Flagler built the Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) to link his resort empire and establish the east coast of Florida as “The American Riviera.” Flagler, partner with John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil, developed the Atlantic shoreline with a chain of luxury hotels from Jacksonville to Key West. Perhaps Flagler's greatest achievement was the construction of the Key West Extension finished shortly before his death in 1913. By 1916, the FEC Railway included 23 railroads, terminals, and bridge companies along 739 miles of track. Steamships linked the railroad at Miami to Nassau, Bahamas, and at Key West to Havana, Cuba. The Florida East Coast Hotel Company owned 14 resorts joined by the rail lines. In St. Augustine, Flagler's 1888 railway station west of downtown was replaced by three office towers built starting from south to north in 1922, 1923 and 1926. They served as the Railway's headquarters until 2006, when the FEC provided a $7.2 million gift-in-equity, making possible the transfer of the property to Flagler College. The College is committed to preservation of the buildings and adapting them for College uses.

(Notable Buildings) Includes location, directions, 3 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Zora Neale Hurston

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Florida, Saint Johns County, St. Augustine
Noted author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) rented a room in this house in 1942. One of the few surviving buildings closely linked with Hurston’s life, it is an example of frame Vernacular construction, with cool, north-facing porches on both floors. The owners frequently rented to female students at nearby Florida Normal and Industrial Institute (now Florida Memorial College in Miami). While living here Hurston taught part time at the Institute and completed her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Also, she met novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a St. Augustine resident and author of The Yearling. Earlier in 1927 Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a Chicago medical student, at the St. Johns County Courthouse. Hurston was one of the first to appreciate the significance of Fort Mose north of St. Augustine, the first town settled by free black people in the United States. Her article on Fort Mose appeared in the October, 1927 issue of the Journal of Negro History. During her lifetime Hurston traveled the back roads of Florida collecting folk stories and songs that she used to write musical plays, short stories, and novels.

(African Americans • Arts, Letters, Music) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.

Coffin Sports Complex, Tahoma, and Teacher's Quarters

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Kansas, Douglas County, Lawrence


Coffin Sports Complex was built in 1981. It has an Olympic-size swimming pool, racket ball courts and basketball court. It currently is the home for the American Indian Athletics Hall of Fame. Coffin Complex is named after Tony Coffin, Prairie Band Potawatomi. In 1945, he was Haskell’s head football coach and later became the Athletic Director. His son, Doug Coffin, designed the “Medicine Wheel Totem Pole” displayed in front of the Coffin Complex.

The Tinker building under the south section of the Football stadium was built in 1950 as a 136-unit dormitory. Tinker was named after Major General Clarence Tinker, Osage. He was the only Indian ever to achieve this rank in the armed forces. He attended Haskell from 1900 (age 13) to 1906 (age 19).

Tahoma
The new 42-bed hospital was built in 1906. Tahoma is the original form of the word Tacoma. Tahoma building was razed in 1980.

Teacher’s Quarters
Teacher’s Quarters
building was located south of Coffin Sports Complex. It was built in 1886 by Haskell Institute vocational trades students for use as a hospital and later converted to employee housing. It was razed in 1961.

Medicine Wheel
Designed by Doug Coffin
Haskell Indian Junior College
May 13, 1993
In memory of Tony Coffin
Constructed by
Haskell Faculty, Staff & Students

(Education • Man-Made Features • Native Americans • Sports) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.
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