James Burton

Burton was still a teenager on the Louisiana Hayride staff band in 1957 when he built the guitar riff for Dale Hawkins's Susie Q, for which he received neither credit nor royalties. He played lead on most of Ricky Nelson's records for about eleven years from 1958, and in 1969 he bought the pink paisley Telecaster that became his stage guitar. From 1969 to 1977 he led Elvis Presley's TCB Band. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2024; his Shreveport guitar festival began in 2005.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — steps away
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Spring Street Museum — 0.4 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 0.7 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 2.7 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Oakland Cemetery — steps away
• Bishop Leonidas Polk — steps away
• First Jewish Cemetery — steps away
• Old B'nai Zion Temple — steps away