Roots of Rock 'n' Roll

The July 1936 sessions took place upstairs in the Hotel Hattiesburg at Mobile and Pine streets, where talent scout H. C. Speir and recording director W. R. Calaway set up a temporary studio. Most of what the musicians cut was never released, and the metal masters were scrapped or given to wartime recycling drives. Only three blues records appeared, two by the Mississippi Jook Band and one by the Edgewater Crows, whose unissued Mobile Street Stomp was named for the district where many of the players lived and worked.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• African American Military History Museum — steps away
  The wooden USO club that opened in March 1942 for Black soldiers training at Camp Shelby, now a museum of African American military service from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 0.5 mi
  The courthouse where Hattiesburg held Freedom Day on January 22, 1964, and where a memorial now honors Vernon Dahmer, killed by Klansmen in 1966.
• Hub City Historic District — 0.6 mi
  Hattiesburg's twelve-block downtown, a railroad town laid out in 1880s pine country, with the Saenger Theater, the courthouse and the 1910 depot.
• Mount Zion Baptist Church — 1.5 mi
  Hattiesburg's "Civil Rights Church," a Freedom School site in 1964 where Pete Seeger taught music and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke weeks before his death.

More markers nearby

• Eureka School — steps away
• St. Paul Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• Old Hattiesburg High School — 0.5 mi
• William Harris Hardy — 0.6 mi