B.B. King Birthplace

B.B. King's first try at music in Memphis failed. In 1946, just over two years after moving to Indianola, he went north and lived about ten months with his second cousin Bukka White, learning from White and others. He found it hard to compete with Beale Street's many bluesmen and went back to Indianola and the Barrett farm in 1947. A year later luck turned: he sang an advertising jingle for WDIA and soon hosted the station's Sepia Swing Club. He was born outside Itta Bena and Berclair, and this marker stands at that county road crossing.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 16 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Bryant's Grocery — 18 mi
  The ruin of the Money store where Emmett Till was accused in August 1955, on private land beside the railroad, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 23 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Dockery Farms — 24 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.

More markers nearby

• March Against Fear — 4.5 mi
• Itta Bena ("Home in the Woods") — 5.0 mi
• Johnny Russell — 7.7 mi
• Where the Southern Cross the Dog — 7.7 mi