Tyrone Davis

Tyrone Davis learned the hard way that imitation does not carry a singer. In Chicago he worked clubs sounding like Bobby "Blue" Bland, until Bland let him sing at a concert and told him, "Be you, don't be me." Earlier he had valeted for Freddie King and worked a steel mill with fellow Mississippian Otis Clay. False starts as Tyrone the Wonder Boy ended in the late 1960s, when "Can I Change My Mind" reached No. 1 on the R&B chart. The marker stands on Leland's North Main Street.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Greenville Levee and the 1927 Flood — 9.8 mi
  The 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.
• Winterville Mounds — 11 mi
  A Mississippian ceremonial center north of Greenville, built by hand from about AD 1000, with a 55-foot Temple Mound and twelve of its original twenty-three mounds still standing.
• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 15 mi
  A 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 — 17 mi
  A 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

• Son Thomas — steps away
• Johnny Winter — steps away
• Ruby's Nite Spot — steps away
• Birthplace of Kermit the Frog — 0.2 mi