Local Stories in Mississippi
24 places
History·Coahoma County
Aaron Henry's Drugstore
Aaron Henry qualified as a pharmacist at Xavier University in New Orleans in 1950 and opened the Fourth Street Drug Store in Clarksdale in partnership with a white Mississippian, K. W. Walker. By his own account the shop became the gathering place and the hub for political and civil rights planning for three decades.
History·Leflore County
Baptist Town
Baptist Town is one of Greenwood's oldest Black neighbourhoods, settled in the closing decades of the nineteenth century by people working the plantations, gins and mills as the cotton business pulled labour into the town. Residents hold that it was among the first places in the Delta where freed families could buy and own property, a tradition the neighbourhood has carried for generations, though no deed research has been published to settle it either way.
History·Leflore County
Bryant's Grocery
The collapsed brick shell at Money, swallowed by vines, was Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market. On 24 August 1955 a fourteen year old from Chicago named Emmett Till went in to buy sweets while visiting relatives, and Carolyn Bryant, minding the counter, afterwards said he had behaved improperly toward her, which the cousins with him disputed at the time. Four days later her husband Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W.
Music History·Sunflower County
Charley Patton's Grave
Charley Patton was the first great figure of the Delta blues, a small, loud, theatrical performer who by Son House's account clowned for a crowd by playing the guitar behind his back and between his knees, thirty years before Jimi Hendrix, and whose records shaped Howlin' Wolf, Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson.
Music History·Sunflower County
Club Ebony
Club Ebony was built at Indianola just after the Second World War by a local entrepreneur, Johnny Jones, who bought the Hanna Avenue property with his wife Josephine in November 1945 and had the room open by about 1948. It became one of the most important Black nightclubs in the South, and the bookings were not a local circuit: Count Basie, Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, Little Milton, Albert King and Willie Clayton all played it, along with B. B. King.
History·Leflore County
Cotton Row
Cotton Row is a three block district in downtown Greenwood, bounded by Front Street along the Yazoo River, Main Street, Market Street and Cotton Street, and for most of a century it was where the Delta's crop was graded and sold. Cotton offices lined Front and Market; the earliest use of the name recorded locally is an 1895 newspaper item about buildings on West Market.
Music History·Sunflower County
Dockery Farms
Will Dockery began buying Delta timberland outside Cleveland in the mid 1880s, fresh out of the University of Mississippi at twenty, with a thousand dollars from his grandmother, and by 1895 he had enough to put his name on the place. He came for the timber and found the bottom soil better than the trees.
Music History·Coahoma County
Early Wright
Early Wright went on the air at WROX in Clarksdale in 1947 and became the first Black disc jockey in Mississippi. Born on 10 February 1915, he was an auto mechanic by trade, with a repair shop in the town from 1937, and he came to the station in 1945 as manager of a gospel group called the Four Star Quartet. He was recording an announcement for them when the station manager, Preston Hinman, noticed his voice and offered him a show of his own. He kept it for half a century.
Museums & Art·Bolivar County
Grammy Museum Mississippi
There are two standalone Grammy Museums. The first opened in downtown Los Angeles in 2008; the second opened on 5 March 2016 in Cleveland, Mississippi, a town of about ten and a half thousand people, and it was built and is run not by the Recording Academy but by the Cleveland Music Foundation, a non profit set up locally in 2011 to do it.
Industry & Science·Coahoma County
Hopson Plantation
Between 1935 and 1944 Howell Hopson II worked with the International Harvester Company on his plantation south of Clarksdale to finish a machine that could pick cotton. Engineers had been trying since at least 1850, when the first American patent was issued in Memphis, and more than eighteen hundred patents had failed.
History·Bolivar County
Isaiah Montgomery
Mound Bayou was founded in 1887 by Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, cousins enslaved as boys by Joseph Davis, eldest brother of the president of the Confederacy. The Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad was pushing track through the Delta and needed towns along it to make the line pay, and it commissioned Montgomery as a land agent; what he built with that commission was a town owned and governed entirely by Black people.
Quirky·Washington County
Jim Henson's Deer Creek
Jim Henson was born at Greenville in 1936 and spent most of his boyhood at Leland on the banks of Deer Creek, the family moving to Maryland when he was about a year old and back again in time for his first year at school, then away for good when he was twelve.
Music History·Sharkey County
Muddy Waters's Birthplace
McKinley Morganfield was born in the Jug's Corner community of rural Issaquena County, in 1913 or 1914 or 1915 depending on which record is believed, and he claimed Rolling Fork as his birthplace for the rest of his life, which is why the marker stands on a courthouse lawn in Sharkey County rather than where he was born.
Music History·Coahoma County
Muddy Waters's Cabin
McKinley Morganfield, known as Muddy Waters, spent most of his first thirty years in a cabin on this part of Stovall Farms, sharecropping and driving a tractor, and by the early 1940s running a juke house on the side with a gambling wheel, a jukebox and whiskey he made himself.
History·Sunflower County
Parchman Farm
The Mississippi State Penitentiary opened in 1901, after the state bought some sixteen thousand acres in Sunflower County, over half of it from the Parchman family, whose name stuck. It was built as a working farm rather than a prison, on a penal plan Governor John M. Stone proposed in 1896 and Governor James K. Vardaman drove to completion after 1904, arguing for it in explicitly racial terms.
Music History·Leflore County
Robert Johnson's Grave
Robert Johnson died on 16 August 1938 at the Star of the West plantation north of Greenwood, twenty seven years old, having recorded twenty nine songs in two sessions. His death certificate names the burial place only as Zion Church, and there is more than one, so for sixty years nobody could say which. Three now carry a stone for him. The Atlanta band the Tombstones paid for one at Payne Chapel in Quito in 1990.
History·Bolivar County
T.R.M. Howard
Taborian Hospital opened at Mound Bayou in February 1942, forty two beds, paid for by the Knights and Daughters of Tabor out of an assessment on its twenty five thousand members. Every doctor and nurse was Black, which in Mississippi in 1942 was close to unrepeatable, and the surgeon in chief was Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, then thirty three. Howard was a physician, a planter and an insurance man, and he made the town a base for something larger.
Music History·Yazoo County
The Bentonia School
Bentonia, a town of about three hundred people in Yazoo County, has its own school of blues, recognised by musicologists and named for the town. It is built on an open tuning to a minor rather than a major chord, which Skip James called cross note, and the name is the point: the tuning lets a player cross between major and minor tonalities in a way standard blues tunings make awkward. The result is eerie and unresolved.
Transport·Coahoma County
The Clarksdale Depot
The passenger depot on Blues Alley opened on 7 May 1927, built for the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, a subsidiary of the Illinois Central chartered in 1882, as part of an agreement with the city to raise the tracks through Clarksdale. It replaced an earlier station on a line that mattered more than most. The Illinois Central ran north through Memphis to Chicago, and it made the Mississippi Delta and the South Side of Chicago something close to neighbouring places.
Music History·Coahoma County
The Crossroads
The junction of the old routes of Highways 61 and 49 at Clarksdale was locally the crossroads by the 1930s, and blues audiences later took it for the crossroads, where Robert Johnson is said to have met the devil at midnight and traded his soul for the ability to play. Almost none of that attaches to Johnson in his lifetime.
History·Coahoma County
The G.T. Thomas Hospital
The building on Sunflower Avenue opened on 12 July 1916 as the Clarksdale Colored Hospital, was later the Ancient Order of Watchmen Hospital and then the G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital, and served Black patients of the Delta until 1942. On 26 September 1937 Bessie Smith, the highest paid Black entertainer in the country a decade earlier, was brought here after a road crash about sixteen miles north of Clarksdale on Highway 61, and died of her injuries.
Music History·Coahoma County
The New World District
Clarksdale's Black business and entertainment district took its name around the turn of the twentieth century from Nelson Jones's New World, a saloon and rooming house on the south side of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley tracks. It ran along Issaquena Avenue south of the railroad and round to Fourth Street, now Martin Luther King Boulevard, and it was sometimes called the Beale Street of Clarksdale.
Industry & Science·Washington County
The Rust Cotton Picker
On 31 August 1936 Mack Rust demonstrated the mechanical cotton picker he and his brother John had built, on a private farm designated by the Delta Experiment Station at Stoneville, and several hundred planters, ginners, bankers, scientists and government men came to watch. John was not there; he was in the Soviet Union, delivering two of the ten machines the brothers had made. The insight behind it was his and it came from childhood.
Music History·Tallahatchie County
The Tutwiler Station
W. C. Handy was leading an orchestra at Clarksdale when, by the account in his 1941 autobiography Father of the Blues, he fell asleep at the Tutwiler railway station waiting for a train delayed nine hours and woke to find a man playing a guitar beside him, pressing a knife against the strings the way Hawaiian players used a steel bar. He sang one line three times: going where the Southern cross the Dog. Handy asked what he meant.