Muddy Waters's Cabin

Muddy Waters drove a tractor on Howard Stovall's plantation and already had a reputation among Delta players when Alan Lomax and John Work came looking for him in 1941. They were working for Fisk University and the Library of Congress. Lomax returned in July 1942 to record Waters with the Son Sims Four. The Library of Congress issued two songs in January 1943, and later that year Waters moved to Chicago, where he took a job in a paper factory. Those first sessions were recorded at Stovall.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 5.5 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Freedom Park — 17 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.
• Delta Cultural Center — 18 mi
  A state museum in downtown Helena where King Biscuit Time, the longest-running daily blues radio show, is broadcast live from the Visitors Center.
• Elaine Massacre Memorial — 19 mi
  A memorial dedicated in 2019 in Helena for the Black people killed by white mobs and troops in the 1919 Elaine Massacre, the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history.

More markers nearby

• Clarksdale — 5.2 mi
• WROX — 5.4 mi
• Ike Turner — 5.4 mi
• Wade Walton — 5.5 mi