Blues Locations – Mississippi – McComb

Themed Photo Gallery and Information: McComb, Mississippi

History

McComb is a city in Pike County, Mississippi, United States, approximately 80 miles (130 km) south of Jackson. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 12,790. It is the principal city of the McComb, Mississippi Micropolitan Statistical Area.

McComb was founded in 1872 after Henry Simpson McComb of the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad, a predecessor of the Illinois Central Railroad (now part of the Canadian National Railway), decided to move the railroad’s maintenance shops away from New Orleans, Louisiana, to avoid the attractions of that city’s saloons.

The railroad purchased land in Pike County. Three nearby communities, Elizabethtown, Burglund, and Harveytown, agreed to consolidate to form this town. Main Street developed with the downtown’s shops, attractions, and business.

The rail center in McComb was one of flashpoints in the violent Illinois Central shopmen’s strike of 1911. Riots took place here that resulted in many injuries, at least three black strikebreakers killed, and authorities bringing in state militia to suppress the emergency soon after the strike started on September 30.

During the 1960s, McComb and nearby areas were the sites of extreme violence by KKK and other white supremacist opponents to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1961, SNCC conducted its first voter registration project in Mississippi in this city. White officials and local KKK members countered it with violence and intimidation to suppress black voters. Fifteen-year-old Brenda Travis was expelled from high school for being in a sit-in at an all-white luncheonette, where she ordered a hamburger. She was convicted of trespassing and sentenced to a year in a state juvenile facility. In addition to the physical attacks on activists, Herbert Lee, an older member of the NAACP, was murdered in front of witnesses at a cotton gin in nearby Liberty, Mississippi, by white state representative E.H. Hurst. The attacker claimed self-defense and was exonerated by an all-white coroner’s jury. In 1961 more than 100 black high school students in McComb were arrested for protesting Lee’s murder. After whites severely beat several staff members, SNCC pulled out of the region in early 1962. They moved north in Mississippi to work in slightly less dangerous conditions.

In January 1964, Louis Allen was murdered in Liberty, Mississippi, shortly before he planned to move north to join his brother in Minnesota. A married family man and member of the NAACP, he had been a witness to Lee’s murder by Hurst in 1961, and he had been suspected of talking to US Department of Justice officials about it. They told him they could not offer him protection.

The song, “We Shall Never Turn Back,” was related to the 1961 events in Amite and Pike counties. One verse said: “We have hung our heads and cried, Cried for those like Lee who died, Died for you and he died for me, Died for the cause of equality, But we’ll never turn back…”

In 1964, civil rights activists began the Mississippi Project and what would be called Freedom Summer, with teams returning to southwest Mississippi. They sang, “We Shall Never Turn Back.” SNCC members of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) returned to McComb in mid-July 1964 to work on voter registration. From late August 1964 through September, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, McComb was the site of eleven bombings directed against African Americans. Malcolm Boyd took part of COFO’s Freedom House as a member of a clerical delegation to assist African-American voter registration. The following summer, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 authorizing federal oversight and enforcement to enable blacks to register and vote again in the South. In Mississippi, most blacks had been disenfranchised since 1890. Even with enforcement, it took time to overcome local white resistance to black voting.

On October 20, 1977, a chartered plane carrying members and crew of rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed in a swamp near McComb, killing lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, Steve’s sister Cassie (a backup singer), and road manager Dean Kilpatrick.

Notable blues singers from McComb: Bo Diddley, Omar Kent Dykes, King Solomon Hill and Little Freddie King.

Source: Wikipedia

 

Mississippi Blues Trail Markers

 

 

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Acclaimed as a founder of rock ‘n’ roll, Bo Diddley (Ellas Bates McDaniel) was born near Magnolia, south of McComb, on December 30, 1928. Diddley wrote and recorded such hits as “I’m a Man,” “Bo Diddley,” “Say Man,” and “Road Runner.” The distinctive rhythm of his “Bo Diddley” beat and his pioneering use of electronic distortion were widely influential. His songs have been covered by Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Eric Clapton, and many others.

Bo Diddley, one of the most unconventional yet influential figures in the history of American popular music, lived his early years in Pike and Amite counties. According to the 1930 census, his name as a two-year-old was Ellis [sic] Landry; his mother, Ethel Wilson, was living at the time with her cousin, Eugene Bates (the man Diddley believed to be his father). Diddley used the surname Bates until his mother’s cousin Gussie McDaniel began raising him. In McComb the McDaniel family lived on Carver Street, near Highway 51; they moved to Chicago in the mid-1930s. There Diddley took up the violin, and at age twelve received his first guitar. His unique approach to guitar, he recalled, stemmed largely from his attempts to imitate the sound of a bow on a violin. As a teen he began playing for tips on the streets and eventually in clubs with groups that included blues recording artists Jody Williams and Billy Boy Arnold. To achieve his own sound Diddley rebuilt guitar amplifiers and constructed a tremolo unit out of a clock spring and automobile parts, and enhanced the group’s rhythm by adding maracas and drums.

In 1955 Diddley made his first single for Chicago’s Checker Records. Both sides were hits: I’m A Man was a bold declaration of pride at a time when many whites referred to an African American man derogatorily as “boy,” and was covered by Muddy Waters as Mannish Boy, while the flip side, Bo Diddley, spotlighted his trademark beat, which was similar to a traditional African American slapping rhythm known as “hambone.” Diddley said he traced his variation back to Pentecostal church services, and his younger brother, the Reverend Kenneth Haynes, recalled Bo singing the rhythm as a child. The name “Bo Diddley” was used by various black vaudeville performers prior to his birth, and was suggested as a more colorful stage name than Ellas McDaniel when he recorded.

Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were among the few African American artists to achieve crossover stardom in the 1950s rock’n’ roll market, and many bands adopted Diddley’s songs and beat. Diddley’s guitar sound became p art of the basic vocabulary of rock, influencing guitarists including Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, and the Who’s Pete Townsend, while his later funk recordings have been sampled by hip hop artists such as De la Soul and Method Man.

A member of both the Blues and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, Diddley received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, as well as a Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He died at his home in Archer, Florida, on June 2, 2008.

 

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Summit Street was a thriving African American business district during the era of segregation, as well as a hotbed of musical activity. Blues, jazz, and rhythm & blues bands entertained at various nightclubs, cafes, and hotels, and many musicians lived nearby. In McComb and many other cities, commerce in areas such as Summit Street began to decline when much of the African American trade dispersed to other parts of town after the coming of integration in the 1960s.

Summit Street, a historic center of African American culture, entertainment, and politics, was once a dirt road lined with dozens of businesses, including several cafes and clubs that featured blues music.  During McComb’s turbulent 1960s, when bombs destroyed nearby homes and businesses, club owners who supported the civil rights movement were among those beaten and arrested.  Four decades later, McComb elected a man who grew up on Summit Street, Zach Patterson, as its first African American mayor.

In the heyday of Summit Street, recalled local businessman Bennie Joseph, “People come from all over to McComb, from Chicago all the way to New Orleans, man. It was a wide open city. They had clubs, gambling, corn liquor, everything . . . Dancing, partying, drinking. Clubs, clubs, clubs . . . .” The Harlem Nightingale, which later became the Elk Rest Club, and Brock’s Mocombo No. 2 (formerly the Club Rockett) were McComb’s primary venues for touring blues, R&B, and jazz acts. Ralph Bowsky operated the Nightingale, while Van Brock called his club the McCombo in honor of McComb, although the name was usually spelled Mocombo.  As the primary stop on the “chitlin circuit” between Jackson and New Orleans, McComb drew national talent such as B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Roy Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter, Solomon Burke, Marvin Gaye, Little Milton, Bobby Rush, Archie Bell & the Drells, Lucky Millinder, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, Lloyd Price, Roy Milton, The Bar-Kays, Groove Holmes, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Redd Foxx, and McComb’s most famous native, Bo Diddley.  McComb also developed its own rich musical heritage, with Wakefield Coney, better known as “Big Moody,” a longtime local blues favorite.

The McComb area’s impressive musical roster also includes Vasti Jackson, Robert “The Duke” Tillman, Larry Addison, Randy Williams, Fread Eugene Martin (aka Little Freddie King) and his father, Jesse James Martin, Zebedee Lee, Brandy Norwood, Omar Kent Dykes, Steve Blailock, Charlie Braxton, Ric E. Bluez, Reverend Charlie Jackson, Bernard “Bunny” Williams, Pete Allen, Chainsaw Dupont, Johnny Gilmore, Robert Rembert, John Lee Allen (“Tater Boy”), vocal group singers Prentiss Barnes of the Moonglows and Robert “Squirrel” Lester of the Chi-Lites, and Leon “Pop” Williams, founder of the Williams Brothers gospel group. The area was also an active center for blues pianists in the 1920s and ‘30s, according to piano legend Little Brother Montgomery, and McComb reportedly was at one time the home of early blues and gospel recording artists King Solomon Hill (Joe Holmes), Cryin’ Sam Collins, and the Graves brothers, Roosevelt and Uaroy.

 

Source: http://msbluestrail.org/

 

Photo Gallery

 

Original site of the Bo Diddley blues marker, now re-located in front of the Illinois Central railroad depot (to the right).

We visited McComb to see Bo Diddley’s blues marker on 31st May 2008 – Bo passed away on 2nd June 2008.

 

Illinois Central railroad depot with the old marshelling yards to the left. The depot has now been re-painted in brown and cream.

 

“Illinois Central Class 2500 #2542 at the old Illinois Central, now Canadian National, depot at McComb, MS, on N Railroad Blvd, which houses the McComb Railroad Depot Museum. The museum has a collection of more than one thousand, five hundred cataloged artifacts. #2542 appears to be well looked after and it is one of only two survivors of the IC 2500 class”.

You can see the scale of the engine with a rare shot of me standing in the foreground (with my ‘Earlyblues.com’ t-shirt of course!).