Mable John

Mable John was born in Bastrop in 1930 and raised in Arkansas, where her brother, the singer Little Willie John, was born. The family reached Detroit in 1941, and she worked for an insurance company run by Berry Gordy's mother, Bertha. Gordy ended her Tamla contract in 1962, and she sang backup as a Raelette for Ray Charles. At Stax, her first single, Your Good Thing (Is About to End), reached number six on the R&B chart. She left secular music in 1973, started a Los Angeles outreach to end homelessness, and died there in 2022 at 91.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chemin-A-Haut State Park — 9.8 mi
  A 1935 park on the ridge above Bayou Bartholomew, the 359-mile bayou, named for the French 'high road' that followed the ridge.
• Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 14 mi
  A cypress lake inside the city limits of Monroe, run by the Fish and Wildlife Service on a 99-year lease, with a boardwalk, a wildlife pier and a planter's house visitor center.
• Northeast Louisiana Delta African American Heritage Museum — 20 mi
  A museum chartered in 1994 that tells the story of the Black pioneers of Monroe and northeast Louisiana, with local art, quilts and the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail's only Ouachita Parish stop.
• Chennault Aviation and Military Museum — 20 mi
  A Monroe museum that began as a 1986 reunion of Selman Field airmen and now holds Flying Tigers displays, Delta's Monroe beginnings and a park of retired aircraft.

More markers nearby

• Morehouse Parish Training School — 0.6 mi
• "Ben and the Boys" — 6.9 mi
• Fant-Ewing Coliseum — 19 mi
• Selman Field Navigator Memorial — 20 mi