Woodville Blues

Woodville's most famous native, composer William Grant Still, was called the Dean of African American Composers. He completed his Afro-American Symphony in 1930, and it premiered the following year, with a banjo in the orchestra and syncopated rhythms in the score. Scholars note those rhythms tended to portray Black people as traditional and simple. Still died in Los Angeles on 3 December 1978. Woodville also claims saxophonist Lester Young and guitarist Scott Dunbar, who worked as a fishing guide on Lake Mary.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Clark Creek Natural Area — 13 mi
  A 700-acre ravine preserve in the Tunica Hills with about 50 waterfalls on loess bluffs, reached by a 4.9-mile loop trail, foot traffic only.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 21 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 21 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 22 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.

More markers nearby

• William Grant Still — steps away
• Fort Adams — steps away
• The Woodville Republican — steps away
• Carnot Posey Home — 0.2 mi