Beale Town Bound

Hernando's Jim Jackson recorded "Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues" in October 1927, and it became a best-seller. Its melody and lyrics can be traced in later songs including "Rock Around the Clock" and "Kansas City," and Jackson cut a string of follow-ups. He ran the Red Rose Minstrels, a traveling medicine show that worked Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama, and he came home to Hernando to play until he died in 1933. Fellow Hernando native Robert Wilkins later performed "Prodigal Son" at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Graceland — 16 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — 18 mi
  A National Historic Landmark Mississippian mound town on a bluff over the Mississippi, with a university museum, a replica house and a nature trail inside T. O. Fuller State Park.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 20 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Elmwood Cemetery — 21 mi
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.

More markers nearby

• The Dickinson Family — 0.2 mi
• Joe Callicott — 5.8 mi
• Jerry Lee Lewis — 6.2 mi
• Coldwater — 8.9 mi