Pops Staples

Pops Staples spent about twelve years without touching a guitar. After his family moved to Chicago in the 1930s he worked in the stockyards and later the steel mills, singing with gospel groups on the side. Evenings, while his wife Osceola worked shifts, he taught the children to sing, and that home schooling became the Staple Singers. When the guitar came back, so did the tremolo-laden sound he had learned in Mississippi. His late album Father Father returned to Mississippi blues and gospel and earned him a Grammy. The marker stands beside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Winona.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — steps away
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 11 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 21 mi
  The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at Line and Green streets for the 1966 Grenada movement, when Black children entering white schools were beaten by a mob and 13 white men were arrested.

More markers nearby

• Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway — 0.3 mi
• George A. McLean — 0.4 mi
• Ensign William Devotie Billingsley — 0.5 mi
• Fannie Lou Hamer — 10 mi