Ike Turner

Clarksdale's best-known bandleader lost the credit for his first big record. In 1951 Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm cut "Rocket 88" at Sam Phillips's Sun label in Memphis. Turner wrote it, but the release named only vocalist Jackie Brenston, who soon left to cash in. Turner kept arranging, scouting talent and working the Chitlin' Circuit, then built a revue around Anna Mae Bullock, renamed Tina, whom he married in 1958. She later accused him of violence, and he confirmed it. The corner holds both the young musician and the harder story.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — steps away
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 18 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.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Freedom Park — 22 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.

More markers nearby

• WROX — steps away
• Wade Walton — steps away
• Clarksdale — 0.2 mi
• Big Jack Johnson — 0.3 mi