Magic Sam

Magic Sam learned blues from records by Muddy Waters and Little Walter and left Grenada County for Chicago in 1956. Signed to Cobra Records, he helped shape what became the West Side sound, alongside Otis Rush and Buddy Guy. After a stretch at Delmark Records, his breakthrough came at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1969, which won him bookings across the United States. He died that December at thirty-two, just as the wider world arrived. His Delmark albums West Side Soul and Black Magic still carry his name.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 4.7 mi
  The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at Line and Green streets for the 1966 Grenada movement, when Black children entering white schools were beaten by a mob and 13 white men were arrested.
• Holly Springs National Forest — 15 mi
  A patchwork national forest of about 155,000 acres in the north Mississippi hills, assembled in the 1930s from worn-out cotton fields and replanted in pine by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — 20 mi
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 22 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.

More markers nearby

• Grenada Dam — 3.6 mi
• Edward C. Walthall — 4.6 mi
• Grenada Blues — 4.6 mi
• Magic Slim — 5.2 mi