Otis Clay

Otis Clay is remembered for a song that outlived its first release. "Tryin' to Live My Life Without You" reached No. 24 on the R&B chart in 1972, and Bob Seger's 1981 cover climbed to No. 5 on the pop chart. Clay had come up through Chicago gospel groups after settling there in 1957, and he cut his biggest pop hit, "She's About a Mover," at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals in 1968. He died in Chicago in 2016. The marker stands at a Waxhaw crossroads on Hofstra Road, in the community where he was born.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mound Bayou — 14 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.
• Rohwer Relocation Center Memorial Cemetery — 21 mi
  A National Historic Landmark cemetery built by Japanese Americans incarcerated at Rohwer from 1942 to 1945, with monuments they made and audio panels narrated by George Takei.
• Arkansas Post National Memorial — 23 mi
  The site of Arkansas's first European trading post, opened in 1686 beside the Quapaw town of Osotouy, later a territorial capital and the scene of a January 1863 Union victory.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 24 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.

More markers nearby

• Rosedale — 5.7 mi
• Hot Tamales and the Blues — 5.8 mi
• Mildrette Netter — 6.1 mi
• Henry Townsend — 12 mi