Roma Wilson & Leon Pinson

Elder Roma Wilson left Mississippi in 1935 and ended up near Detroit, where he and three of his sons played gospel harmonica on the street. In 1948 record shop owner Joe Van Battle covertly recorded them and sold the tracks to the Gotham label as 78s, "Lily of the Valley" and "Better Get Ready." The records reached Europe and the United States, but Wilson did not learn of them until the 1980s. After his wife died in 1976 he came home, reunited with Leon Pinson, and won a National Heritage Fellowship in 1994.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 16 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.
• Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center — 20 mi
  The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 21 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 22 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.

More markers nearby

• Union County, Mississippi — 0.5 mi
• William Faulkner — 0.6 mi
• Mosley and Johnson — 0.6 mi
• Myrtle — 8.2 mi