Big Jack Johnson

Big Jack Johnson's first solo album, in 1987, took the name of his day job: The Oil Man. By then he had played bass in the Jelly Roll Kings with Frank Frost and Sam Carr for a quarter century. In 2007 he contributed "Jack's Blues" and a catfish medley with Samuel L. Jackson to the Black Snake Moan soundtrack. He died in Memphis in 2011, and Clarksdale later honored him on its Walk of Fame. The marker stands at Sunflower Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard, at the site of the club he treated as his home base.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — steps away
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 18 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Freedom Park — 22 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.

More markers nearby

• Riverside Hotel — 0.2 mi
• Wade Walton — 0.3 mi
• WROX — 0.3 mi
• Ike Turner — 0.3 mi