Buddy Guy

Buddy Guy reached Chicago on September 25, 1957, a sharecropper's son from Lettsworth with a guitar and little else. He signed with Chess Records, where he stayed from 1959 to 1968. In 1972 he opened the Checkerboard Lounge with L.C. Thurman and left it in 1985. Honors came late and large: the National Medal of Arts in 2003, Kennedy Center Honors in 2012, a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2015 and a 2016 Grammy for best blues album. The road he took north started on this highway.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 8.4 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 21 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — 21 mi
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.

More markers nearby

• White Hall Plantation House — 3.1 mi
• Old River — 3.6 mi
• Three Rivers Confluence — 5.4 mi
• A Historic Landmark — 5.5 mi