Gospel and the Blues

C. L. Franklin's Mississippi began in a sharecropper's household. Born Clarence LaVaughn Walker in Bolivar County in 1915, he took his stepfather's surname after his father left, and was preaching at sixteen on the itinerant Black Baptist circuit. From Memphis he went to Buffalo, and in 1946 to New Bethel Baptist in Detroit, where his recorded sermons, among them The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest, and his whooping delivery earned him the name Million-Dollar Voice. The Library of Congress added that sermon to its National Recording Registry in 2011.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dockery Farms — 6.0 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.
• Mound Bayou — 9.7 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 10 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.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Chrisman Street — 0.2 mi
• Adath Israel Temple — 0.3 mi
• The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy — 0.4 mi
• Cleveland — 0.5 mi