Skip James

Skip James took the only formal music lessons of his life at twelve, when his mother, the plantation cook, arranged piano study at a local school. He began learning guitar in 1917 by watching Henry Stuckey, and at first played in the rapping or frailing style, striking strings with the fingernails. He later developed a more complex three-finger picking, often with the strings tuned to an open chord. His father, a guitarist and bootlegger, left the family early and became a Baptist minister.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blue Front Cafe — 0.4 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Triangle Cultural Center — 15 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Tougaloo College — 21 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 21 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.

More markers nearby

• Jack Owens — 1.8 mi
• Tinsley Oil Field — 4.6 mi
• Flora Train Depot — 7.6 mi
• Pocahontas Mounds — 13 mi