Historical Marker
Sam Chatmon
Hollandale, Washington County · Mississippi
Erected 2009
Sam Chatmon came from a family that filled a whole string band. His father, Henderson Chatmon, had at least thirteen children, and seven of the sons formed a band around World War I, playing square dances for Black and white audiences near Bolton. Several brothers moved to Hollandale around 1928, then on to Jackson. As the Mississippi Sheiks they recorded "Sitting on Top of the World," written by Walter Vincson. In 1972 Chatmon and Vincson reunited on a Rounder album and played the Smithsonian's folk festival in Washington.
Where it stands
33.16826, -90.85583 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Lakeport Plantation — 18 miArkansas's grandest surviving Greek Revival plantation house, built about 1858 by a planter who held 155 enslaved people in 1860, now an Arkansas State University museum.
- Greenville Levee and the 1927 Flood — 21 miThe Mississippi River levee at Greenville, where thousands of mostly Black refugees camped in the flood of April 1927 and where the Department of Archives and History has placed markers.
- B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 23 miA museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
- Lake Chicot State Park — 24 miA state park on the largest natural lake in Arkansas, a 20-mile oxbow of the Mississippi River that was cleaned up and reopened after decades of silt.
More markers nearby
- Freedom Village — 12 mi
- Hampton Plantation — 13 mi
- Birthplace of Kermit the Frog — 16 mi
- Johnny Winter — 17 mi