Broadcasting the Blues

The American Blues Network began in a Gulfport studio and reached its audience by satellite. Stan Rip Daniels, a radio veteran and blues promoter, had started WJZD in 1994, the first African American-owned FM station on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; WJZD is licensed to Long Beach, with its studios and transmitter on Southpark Drive in Gulfport. In 2000 Daniels used that signal to send blues programming out to other stations, and by 2011 the network was on more than fifty stations nationwide. WJZD is still the only Black-owned FM station on the coast.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Biloxi Lighthouse — 8.5 mi
  A cast-iron tower lit in 1848 on the Biloxi beachfront, kept by women for most of its first century and still in service after Camille and Katrina.
• Biloxi Beach Wade-In Marker — 8.5 mi
  The beachfront parking lot beside the Biloxi Lighthouse where state markers recall the 1959 and 1960 wade-ins that opened Mississippi's public beaches to Black residents.
• Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art — 10 mi
  Frank Gehry's pavilions on the Biloxi waterfront, built around the pottery of George Ohr, the self-styled Mad Potter, and the rebuilt Pleasant Reed House.
• Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum — 11 mi
  A Point Cadet museum on Biloxi's oyster, shrimp and schooner past, from the packing houses and the shrimpers' unions to the Vietnamese families who rebuilt the industry.

More markers nearby

• Turkey Creek Community — 2.6 mi
• Gulfport Army Airfield — 2.6 mi
• Mississippi City Colored School — 3.2 mi
• Mississippi City Cemetery — 3.2 mi