R. L. Burnside

R. L. Burnside spent most of his life as a sharecropper, tractor driver and commercial fisherman who played music on weekends. In Chicago after the war he watched Muddy Waters and took up his slide technique, then found the city too rough and came home. Stardom arrived in the early 1990s, almost by accident, through Oxford's Fat Possum Records and a marketing strategy aimed at rock audiences. He was born in Harmontown, north of Oxford, and raised in Coldwater. This marker stands at a Holly Springs corner it shares with Junior Kimbrough's.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 0.2 mi
  The house in Holly Springs where Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862, now a museum of African American history, art and culture.
• Rust College — 0.5 mi
  The first historically Black college founded in Mississippi, started in 1866 in a Holly Springs church by a formerly enslaved minister and a white Methodist clergyman.

More markers nearby

• Junior Kimbrough — steps away
• Holly Springs — steps away
• Mississippi Central R.R. Campaign — steps away
• Yellow Fever House — 0.2 mi