Po' Henry and Tookie

Henry Dorsey, a Black guitarist and singer, and Tookie Collom, a white harmonica player, both came from cotton sharecropping families around Rayville, and they began playing together in 1986. Within months the folklorist Ben Sandmel found them. They played the Louisiana Folklife Festival, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the 1997 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, and toured with Gatemouth Brown and Buckwheat Zydeco. In 2005 the state gave them its Governor's Arts Award as Folk Artist of the Year, and the region's blues revival counts them among its ambassadors.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Northeast Louisiana Delta African American Heritage Museum — 16 mi
  A museum chartered in 1994 that tells the story of the Black pioneers of Monroe and northeast Louisiana, with local art, quilts and the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail's only Ouachita Parish stop.
• Chennault Aviation and Military Museum — 18 mi
  A Monroe museum that began as a 1986 reunion of Selman Field airmen and now holds Flying Tigers displays, Delta's Monroe beginnings and a park of retired aircraft.
• Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  A cypress lake inside the city limits of Monroe, run by the Fish and Wildlife Service on a 99-year lease, with a boardwalk, a wildlife pier and a planter's house visitor center.
• Masur Museum of Art — 21 mi
  A 1929 limestone Tudor house on South Grand Street, built by a Monroe lumberman and given to the city in 1963 by the Masur family to become its art museum.

More markers nearby

• Gene Stewart — steps away
• Rayville's African American School — 0.6 mi
• Ivory Joe Hunter — 15 mi
• Jerry Cupit — 15 mi