Jack Owens

Jack Owens rarely left Bentonia, so fans who wanted him had to come find him. Born there in 1904, he played the Bentonia school of blues, marked by falsetto singing and a crossnote minor guitar tuning. He could neither read music nor explain his chords, and his advice to students was to watch his hands. Recordings from his last decades include Bentonia Country Blues and Jack Owens and Eugene Powell: The Last Giants of Mississippi Blues. The marker stands at a rural crossing outside town, where Highway 433 meets Rosehill Road.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blue Front Cafe — 1.5 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.
• Triangle Cultural Center — 14 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 20 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 — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Skip James — 1.8 mi
• Tinsley Oil Field — 3.8 mi
• Flora Train Depot — 8.1 mi
• Civil Rights March — 12 mi