Black Prairie Blues

Carey Bell and Eddy Clearwater, cousins from the Macon area, both ended up in Chicago. Bell wanted a saxophone like his hero Louis Jordan, but his family could not afford one, so he settled for a harmonica, known as a Mississippi saxophone. Clearwater taught himself guitar left-handed and upside down at thirteen, and in 1950 moved to Chicago, playing mostly gospel before he turned to blues. Bell later accompanied Earl Hooker and Robert Nighthawk, and his son Lurrie Bell became a guitarist too.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty Site — 13 mi
  A National Historic Landmark in rural Noxubee County where the Choctaw Nation signed away its last Mississippi land on September 27, 1830.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 18 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.
• Nanih Waiya — 26 mi
  The Mother Mound of the Choctaw in Winston County, a sacred origin place returned to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in 2008.
• Mount Zion Methodist Church — 34 mi
  The Black church in Longdale burned by the Klan on June 16, 1964, rebuilt by its congregation, and the place Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had gone to visit when they were murdered.

More markers nearby

• Big Joe Williams — 14 mi
• Samuel Harding "Sam" Hairston — 16 mi
• B.L. Moor High School — 18 mi
• DeKalb — 23 mi