Rufus Thomas

Rufus Thomas made his stage debut at six, hopping around as a frog in a school play, which turned out to be a preview. His later records ran to a musical menagerie of dogs, penguins and chickens, and his clothes were as loud: one outfit combined hot pants, studded platform boots and a white cape. Born in Cayce, he grew up in Memphis, where deejay Nat D. Williams became his comedy partner. Over more than seven decades he went from minstrel shows to the rise of hip-hop. The marker stands outside the Cayce volunteer fire department.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rust College — 16 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.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 16 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.
• Graceland — 24 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 26 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.

More markers nearby

• "Mississippi" Fred McDowell — 7.3 mi
• Martyn Mission — 16 mi
• Asbury United Methodist Church — 16 mi
• Junior Kimbrough — 16 mi