Malaco Records

Malaco began as a booking agency. In 1961 Tommy Couch Sr. booked R&B bands at Ole Miss as his fraternity's social chair, then partnered in Jackson with his brother-in-law Mitchell Malouf. They moved into recording in 1966 and soon landed on Northside Drive. An early oddity was a 1970 Capitol LP by Mississippi Fred McDowell. Salvation arrived with Dorothy Moore's "Misty Blue," a 1976 Top 5 hit, and then Z.Z. Hill's "Down Home Blues" showed the industry a southern soul-blues market, which Malaco went on to dominate.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 1.2 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.
• Farish Street Historic District — 4.1 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 4.6 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Old Capitol Museum — 4.7 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.

More markers nearby

• Cassandra Wilson — 1.6 mi
• Hawkins Field Terminal — 1.9 mi
• Queen of Hearts — 2.5 mi
• Millsaps College — 3.5 mi