MS Gulf Coast Blues & Heritage Festival

In 1991 Winston Smith, a Navy lieutenant commander just assigned to Ingalls Shipbuilding, found the coast had no blues festival. He had enjoyed the Monterey Bay Blues Festival in California. Smith and a group from the Black community pledged their own money, co-sponsored the first festival with the Biloxi Coliseum and formed the Mississippi Gulf Coast Blues Commission to hold it every September and share proceeds with youth organizations. The festival moved to the Jackson County Fairgrounds in 1998, and only Hurricane Katrina in 2005 forced a cancellation.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LaPointe-Krebs House (Old Spanish Fort) — 1.5 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 — 1.8 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 — 8.8 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.
• Walter Anderson Museum of Art — 18 mi
  A museum in downtown Ocean Springs built around the artist who rowed to Horn Island to paint, with his 1952 murals of Iberville's 1699 landing and the Seven Climates of the town.

More markers nearby

• Pascagoula Street Railroad and Power Company — 1.4 mi
• St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church — 2.3 mi
• Moss Point Blues — 2.4 mi
• Camp Jefferson Davis — 2.6 mi