Slim Harpo

James Moore, born in 1924 at Lobdell in West Baton Rouge Parish, was never a full-time musician. He worked as a longshoreman and construction hand in New Orleans and in the 1960s ran a trucking business. His wife Lovelle suggested the stage name and co-wrote many songs without credit. I'm a King Bee came out in 1957 from Jay Miller's studio in Crowley, and Baby Scratch My Back reached No. 1 on the R&B chart in 1966. He died of a heart attack in Baton Rouge on January 31, 1970, aged 45, and is buried in Port Allen.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 5.1 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Caroline Durieux — steps away
• The Founding of Baton Rouge — steps away
• Votes For Women — steps away
• Capture of Baton Rouge by Galvez, 1779 — steps away