Henry Townsend

Henry Townsend picked up the nickname Mule in his teens because he was sturdy in body and in character. By the late 1920s he was touring and recording with pianist Walter Davis, and over a long life in St. Louis he outlasted nearly everyone from that era. By the mid-1990s he and Yank Rachell were the only active blues artists whose careers had begun in the 1920s. Late in life he talked thirty hours of memory onto tape, and Bill Greensmith edited it into the autobiography A Blues Life.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mound Bayou — 5.4 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.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 12 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.
• Dockery Farms — 18 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.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 20 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

• AKA Mobile Health Project — 5.2 mi
• Po' Monkey's — 8.3 mi
• Fred Coe 1914-1979 — 9.9 mi
• Alligator Blues — 10.0 mi