William G. "Bunk" Johnson

Johnson settled in New Iberia in the early 1920s after a celebrated New Orleans career, working in rice mills and the schools and playing with local bands. In 1931 a fight at a dance in Rayne cost him his trumpet and front teeth, and he stopped playing, turning to manual labor. The authors of the book Jazzmen found him in 1938 and 1939, and money was raised for dentures and a horn. His 1942 recordings with clarinetist George Lewis brought him back. He died in New Iberia in July 1949; his birth year is still disputed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.1 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• James Lee Burke — steps away
• George Rodrigue — steps away
• The Steamboat Era — steps away
• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — steps away