WROX

Early Wright became Mississippi's first Black disc jockey, apparently, when he joined WROX in 1947, and he stayed on air until 1998. He rarely named the song or the artist, trusting listeners to know. Between records he read church announcements and neighborhood news, unscripted, once warning of snakes in the Roundyard. Black and white listeners phoned in requests for blues, soul and gospel. Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Elvis Presley all appeared on his program, and he helped introduce a young Ike Turner to listeners. Clarksdale still gives an annual Early Wright award to people who document the blues.

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
• Clarksdale — steps away
• Wade Walton — steps away
• Big Jack Johnson — 0.3 mi