Furry Lewis

Furry Lewis left Greenwood as a small child, but the Delta's bottleneck style stayed in his hands: he fretted with a pocketknife, having learned from a Memphis bluesman called Blind Joe. After a train-hopping accident cost him a leg, he took up music full time, touring with a medicine show first as a comic. W. C. Handy bought him his first store-bought guitar, and his "Kassie Jones" retold the Casey Jones ballad. Rediscovered in 1959, he joined the Memphis Blues Caravan and inspired Joni Mitchell's 1976 song "Furry Sings the Blues."

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bryant's Grocery — 9.5 mi
  The ruin of the Money store where Emmett Till was accused in August 1955, on private land beside the railroad, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 15 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — 26 mi
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 26 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.

More markers nearby

• Elks Lodge — 0.4 mi
• Point Leflore — 0.5 mi
• Greenwood — 0.5 mi
• Hubert Sumlin — 1.6 mi