Charley Patton's Grave

Charley Patton's last year was short and busy. In January 1934 he made his final recording session in New York City, and he died in Indianola on 28 April 1934, soon after returning. He lies in Holly Ridge. His records earned him wide recognition, but his greater effect came through the musicians he played with, among them Tommy Johnson, Son House, Big Joe Williams, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. Roebuck Pops Staples, who grew up on Dockery Farms, also named Patton as an inspiration to play guitar.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 6.5 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Winterville Mounds — 18 mi
  A Mississippian ceremonial center north of Greenville, built by hand from about AD 1000, with a 55-foot Temple Mound and twelve of its original twenty-three mounds still standing.
• Greenville Levee and the 1927 Flood — 18 mi
  The Mississippi River levee at Greenville, where thousands of mostly Black refugees camped in the flood of April 1927 and where the Department of Archives and History has placed markers.
• Dockery Farms — 21 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.

More markers nearby

• Jimmy Reed — 3.3 mi
• Craig Claiborne — 6.1 mi
• Irene Magruder — 6.1 mi
• Albert King — 6.1 mi