Jessie Mae Hemphill

For years Jessie Mae Hemphill's birth year was reported as 1933 or 1934; later research put it in 1923. She began on bass and snare drum in fife and drum bands at community picnics, learned guitar from her grandfather Sid Hemphill and her aunt Rosa Lee Hill, and played the one-string guitar known as the diddley bow. Her own name for her sound was hypnotic boogie: strong, repeating dance rhythms built around a single tonal center. The marker stands on U.S. 51 in front of Senatobia Memorial Cemetery, where she is buried.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sardis Lake and Dam — 16 mi
  A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 29 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
• Rowan Oak — 30 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• Oxford Square — 30 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.

More markers nearby

• Sid Hemphill — 1.6 mi
• O. B. McClinton — 1.7 mi
• Senatobia — 1.8 mi
• Otha Turner — 5.8 mi