Bobby Rush

Bobby Rush was born Emmit Ellis Jr. near Homer, Louisiana, in 1940, a preacher's son who sang in his father's church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. In 1953 he moved to Chicago and blended Louis Jordan's comic touch with driving rhythms in what he called folk funk. In the early 1980s he came south to Jackson and signed with James Bennett's LaJam label, which issued five albums between 1981 and 1985, each funkier and bawdier. Rolling Stone crowned him King of the Chitlin' Circuit after he appeared in Martin Scorsese's 2003 blues series.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Farish Street Historic District — 1.6 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Old Capitol Museum — 2.1 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 2.2 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 3.0 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Ishmon Bracey — 0.6 mi
• M.W. Stringer Grand Lodge — 0.7 mi
• Noel House — 0.8 mi
• Subway Lounge — 1.1 mi