John Lee Hooker

John Lee Hooker left Mississippi as a teenager and spent years finding his footing. Cincinnati held him for seven years before Detroit, in 1943. The late chapter was the surprise. A 1971 album with Canned Heat, a part in The Blues Brothers, and The Healer, whose remake of "I'm in the Mood" with Bonnie Raitt won a Grammy, made an elder statesman of a man who could not read or write. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. This marker stands on Charley Pride Highway in Vance.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 7.2 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.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 15 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.
• Delta Blues Museum — 15 mi
  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.
• Mound Bayou — 25 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.

More markers nearby

• W.C. Handy Encounters the Blues — 6.3 mi
• Tallahatchie County — 8.1 mi
• Sunnyland Slim — 9.6 mi
• Hopson Plantation Established 1852 — 13 mi