Crossroads of 49 & 61

The devil story attached itself to a young man's practice. In the usual telling, Robert Johnson, born in Hazlehurst in 1911, played harmonica with Willie Brown and Charlie Parker and idolized Son House, but his guitar playing drew ridicule and other musicians refused to play with him. He dropped out of sight for months and came back astonishingly good. The speed of the change bred suspicion of a bargain with the devil, and his songs, Crossroads Blues among them, fed the talk. The legend grew after his death in 1938, and scholars still disagree about where it began.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 0.6 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 18 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 19 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Freedom Park — 22 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.

More markers nearby

• Riverside Hotel — 0.5 mi
• Big Jack Johnson — 0.6 mi
• Wade Walton — 0.6 mi
• Ike Turner — 0.7 mi