Little Walter

Marion Walter Jacobs, born in Marksville in 1930 and raised in Rapides Parish, changed what a harmonica could do. Frustrated by electric guitars drowning him out, he cupped a small microphone with the harp and ran it through an amplifier, then pushed amps past their limits for new tones. His instrumental Juke held number one on the R&B chart for eight weeks in 1952, and it is still the only harmonica instrumental to do so. My Babe reached number one in 1955. He died in Chicago on February 15, 1968, at age 37.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 1.2 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.1 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 2.1 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 6.0 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• The Jewish Temple (Congregation Gemiluth Chassodim) — 0.4 mi
• Lee Street Riot of 1942 — 1.0 mi
• Arna Wendell Bontemps Home — 1.3 mi
• Alexandria — 1.3 mi