Hickory Street

Pianist Little Brother Montgomery was born in the sawmill town of Kentwood, Louisiana, and began playing piano at four. As a young man he played lumber and turpentine camps in Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, and his family later moved to Canton to work for a lumber company. From 1931 to 1938 he led the Southland Troubadours in Jackson. His instrumental "Crescent City Blues" became the basis of Gordon Jenkins's song that Johnny Cash adapted as "Folsom Prison Blues." He settled in Chicago in 1941 and entered the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 14 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Tougaloo College — 16 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Blue Front Cafe — 19 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.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 21 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Madison County Courthouse — steps away
• Grace Church — 0.3 mi
• Achilles "Killis" Walton House — 0.4 mi
• March Against Fear — 0.4 mi