Gatemouth Moore

Moore's career has a near miss at its center. In 1940 he was singing with Walter Barnes's band but was outside the hall when Barnes and most of the band died in the Natchez Rhythm Club fire. His first records came the next year in Kansas City, and he later steered the shouter Wynonie Harris to King Records. He is reported to have been the first blues singer to play the Apollo Theater. Louis Jordan, Lonnie Johnson, Johnny Otis, Rufus Thomas, Jimmy Witherspoon and B.B. King all recorded his songs.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Triangle Cultural Center — 1.2 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Blue Front Cafe — 15 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Delta National Forest — 24 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• St. Francis Mission School — 1.0 mi
• Redoubt McKee — 1.0 mi
• Yazoo Expedition — 1.1 mi
• B.S. Ricks Memorial Library — 1.3 mi