Billy Lee Riley

Billy Lee Riley's comeback began with two covers. In 1978 Robert Gordon and Link Wray recorded Red Hot and Flyin' Saucers Rock and Roll, which led to a 1979 Memphis show and a return to recording. He released 706 Reunion and Blue Collar Blues in 1992, and his 1997 album Hot Damn was nominated for a Grammy. In 2005 a fall required two surgeries. His last public performance was in June 2009 at the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street, and he died of bone cancer in Jonesboro on August 2, 2009, at 75.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Davidsonville Historic State Park — 8.4 mi
  The ghost-town site of Arkansas's first post office, courthouse and federal land office, on the Black River, with open-frame outlines of the courthouse and a dogtrot house.
• Powhatan Historic State Park — 9.1 mi
  A river port and county seat on the Black River whose 1888 courthouse, 1873 jail, log house and academy still stand where they were built, with a state archives branch in the same park.
• Crowley's Ridge State Park — 16 mi
  A 1933 state park on the loess hills of Crowley's Ridge, built around Benjamin Crowley's homestead spring and the stone-and-log pavilion, dam and cabins of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Arkansas State University Museum — 22 mi
  A free university museum in the Dean B. Ellis Library, with a mastodon cast, an Old Town Arkansas street, Native American and Rockabilly galleries and a tinkering studio, and the hub of the university heritage sites.

More markers nearby

• Oldest Town Site in Arkansas — 8.2 mi
• Randolph County Civil War Timeline — 13 mi
• General Sterling Price's Invasion of Missouri — 13 mi
• The Missouri Swamp Fox Is Captured in Pocahontas — 13 mi