Moss Point Blues

Moss Point's Black musicians were working the minstrel circuit before the town incorporated in 1901. The Biloxi Weekly Herald reported on local bands as early as 1898. Saxophonist O. J. Tatum toured with the Huntington Minstrels, led the Blue Melody Boys and came home to open a grocery. The Nelson brothers took tuba, trombone and cornet on the road with the Florida Blossoms and other troupes, and Lamar and Elijah built an act around Triple Tongue Blues. The cornetist Romie later cut hair in Laurel and led a band there.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LaPointe-Krebs House (Old Spanish Fort) — 2.7 mi
  The oldest standing structure in Mississippi, a French colonial plantation house in Pascagoula, set on land where Pascagoula and Biloxi peoples lived before the colonists came.
• Round Island Lighthouse at Lighthouse Park — 3.3 mi
  What survives of the 1832 Round Island light, moved to the foot of the Pascagoula River bridge, with a free walking pathway through nine eras of Pascagoula history.
• Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge — 7.4 mi
  A refuge for one of the rarest birds in North America and the wet pine savanna it needs, created in 1975 as the first refuge established under the Endangered Species Act.
• Pascagoula River Wildlife Management Area — 16 mi
  State-held bottomland along one of the last unchanged river systems in the lower forty-eight, in George and Jackson counties near Lucedale.

More markers nearby

• MS Gulf Coast Blues & Heritage Festival — 2.4 mi
• Pascagoula Street Railroad and Power Company — 3.2 mi
• St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church — 4.5 mi
• The Old Place — 5.0 mi