Staple Singers

The Staple Singers recorded for Chicago's Vee-Jay label from 1956 to 1962, and their first big single, "Uncloudy Day," charted in 1959. In the 1960s they blended gospel with the message songs of the civil rights movement, then signed with Memphis's Stax label, where Pops's gentle voice met Mavis's raspy soul vocals. "I'll Take You There" reached No. 1 on the pop chart in 1972, and "Let's Do It Again" followed in 1975. Pops and Mavis also sang "The Weight" in The Last Waltz. This marker stands on Drew's North Main Street, near Dockery, where the family's story began.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 5.4 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Dockery Farms — 7.6 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 8.8 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.
• Mound Bayou — 12 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.

More markers nearby

• Jimmy Rogers — 6.0 mi
• Greasy Street — 6.0 mi
• The Cleveland Chinese Mission School — 11 mi
• Chrisman Street — 12 mi