Otis Spann & Little Johnnie Jones

Otis Spann joined Muddy Waters's band as pianist in late 1952 and played on records that defined Chicago blues, including "Hoochie Coochie Man," "I'm Ready" and "Got My Mojo Working." In 1963 he recorded an album in Copenhagen for Storyville. He died of liver cancer in Chicago in 1970, and his grave went unmarked for almost thirty years until donations from blues fans paid for a headstone in 1999. The marker, which he shares with pianist Little Johnnie Jones, stands at West South Street and South Roach Street, just south of downtown Jackson.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Farish Street Historic District — 0.6 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.
• Old Capitol Museum — 0.6 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.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 0.8 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.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 3.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Original SEC Office — 0.3 mi
• Jesse Robinson — 0.4 mi
• Ace Records — 0.4 mi
• Edwards Hotel — 0.4 mi