Gulfport Boogie

Roosevelt Sykes, who billed himself the Honeydripper, learned his barrelhouse piano young. He played for all-male crowds in sawmill, turpentine and levee camps, took lessons on the circuit from an older pianist named Lee Green, and made his first records in New York in June 1929. The first, 44 Blues, became a standard. By the 1950s and early 1960s he lived in Gulfport, where he wrote Gulfport Boogie as a tribute to a club called Little Conway's, the Beverly Lounge. The clubs of North Gulfport, Handsboro and Turkey Creek then stood outside the city police's reach.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Biloxi Lighthouse — 12 mi
  A cast-iron tower lit in 1848 on the Biloxi beachfront, kept by women for most of its first century and still in service after Camille and Katrina.
• Biloxi Beach Wade-In Marker — 12 mi
  The beachfront parking lot beside the Biloxi Lighthouse where state markers recall the 1959 and 1960 wade-ins that opened Mississippi's public beaches to Black residents.
• Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art — 13 mi
  Frank Gehry's pavilions on the Biloxi waterfront, built around the pottery of George Ohr, the self-styled Mad Potter, and the rebuilt Pleasant Reed House.
• Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum — 14 mi
  A Point Cadet museum on Biloxi's oyster, shrimp and schooner past, from the packing houses and the shrimpers' unions to the Vietnamese families who rebuilt the industry.

More markers nearby

• Gulfport Army Airfield — 1.5 mi
• Turkey Creek Community — 1.7 mi
• Soria City — 2.2 mi
• Dr. Felix Henry Dunn — 2.2 mi