Wade Walton

Walton barbered first and played second, and his percussion was a barber's: he slapped a razor against the leather strop for rhythm while he played harmonica or guitar. He trained at a barber college in Memphis, opened a shop in Clarksdale and stayed. He was a local NAACP leader in the early 1960s, and William Ferris filmed him for the 1975 documentary Give My Poor Heart Ease. Allen Ginsberg was among the visitors who came to meet the blues barber.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — steps away
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 18 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.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Freedom Park — 22 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.

More markers nearby

• Ike Turner — steps away
• WROX — steps away
• Big Jack Johnson — 0.3 mi
• Clarksdale — 0.3 mi