Little Junior Parker

Little Junior Parker started out in Memphis around 1950 with the Beale Streeters, a loose circle that included B.B. King and Bobby Bland. Ike Turner, scouting for Modern Records, found him in 1952, and the next year he signed with Sam Phillips's Sun label, where "Feelin' Good" reached No. 5 on the R&B chart. He kept charting into 1971, when "Drowning on Dry Land" became his last hit. He died that November at 39, during surgery for a brain tumor. The marker stands on Bobo-New Africa Road, in the Coahoma County plantation country where he was born.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 7.5 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.
• 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.
• Mound Bayou — 18 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.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Alligator Blues — 3.9 mi
• Fred Coe 1914-1979 — 3.9 mi
• Riverside Hotel — 7.4 mi
• Big Jack Johnson — 7.4 mi