Rocket "88"

Rocket 88 is often called the first rock and roll record, and its credit started a long argument. Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm cut it at Sam Phillips's Memphis studio in 1951, and Turner wrote it, but the record carried the name of the vocalist, Jackie Brenston. Brenston soon left the band, while the Kings of Rhythm went on as one of Memphis's leading session bands. Brenston and saxophonist Raymond Hill, who played the solo, are buried at Heavenly Rest Cemetery north of Lyon. The marker stands at Lyon Town Hall.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 2.2 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 19 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.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Freedom Park — 21 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.

More markers nearby

• Crossroads of 49 & 61 — 2.1 mi
• Wade Walton — 2.1 mi
• Ike Turner — 2.2 mi
• WROX — 2.2 mi