Themed Photo Gallery and Information : Itta Bena, Mississippi
Itta Bena is a small town of some 2000 people in Leflore County, Mississippi. The town’s name is derived from the Choctaw phrase iti bina, meaning “forest camp”. It developed as a trading centre of an area of cotton plantations.
Itta Bena has the following historical blues interest:
Ralph Lembo’s store
Ralph Lembo operated a furniture and music store in the 1920’s and 1930’s but also had a sideline as a blues promoter and a talent scout for record labels, including Paramount, Okeh and Columbia. This store is still standing at 114 Humphreys Street in downtown Itta Bena.
B.B. King Birthplace
B.B. King was born in Berclair (at County Roads 513 and 305) near Itta Bena in 1925.
Full Marker Text:
The long and remarkable life of B.B. King began near this site, where he was born Riley B. King on September 16, 1925. His parents, Albert and Nora Ella King, were sharecroppers who lived in a simple home southeast of here along Bear Creek. After his parents separated when he was four, King lived in Kilmichael and Lexington before moving as a teen to Indianola, which he referred to as his hometown.
“Ambassador of the Blues” and “King of the Blues” are titles Riley “B.B.” King earned as the result of decades of touring around the world. But the life of King, who is probably the most influential musician in the history of the blues, could not have begun more humbly. His earliest years were spent at a sharecroppers’ cabin a little more than half a mile southeast of this marker.
King’s parents split up when he was a small child. He and his mother moved around, eventually settling fifty miles east in Kilmichael with his grandmother, Elnora Farr; both died while King was young. Following a brief stay with his father’s new family in Lexington and living on his own in Kilmichael, King moved in 1943 to Indianola. There he worked as a tractor driver, got married, performed with a gospel quartet, and began actively playing the blues.
In the late ’40s King moved to Memphis to pursue a musical career. By 1949 he had found work as a deejay on radio station WDIA, in addition to winning talent contests at the Palace Theater. At WDIA he earned the nickname “B.B.”—short for “Blues Boy.” His career took off in 1952 with his first No. 1 rhythm & blues hit, “Three O’Clock Blues,” and over the next decades he scored dozens of hits on the RPM, Kent, ABC, BluesWay, and MCA labels. He toured relentlessly, performing over 350 one-night stands one year. Until the 1960s the vast majority of King’s fans were African Americans, but by the end of that decade young whites had embraced his music. His guitar playing has served as a model for countless blues, rock, and rhythm & blues musicians.
King’s 1970 crossover hit “The Thrill Is Gone”—which provided him with the first of over a dozen Grammy awards—was the launching point for international stardom. Among his many subsequent recordings were collaborations with artists across the musical spectrum including Willie Nelson, U2, Eric Clapton, Luciano Pavarotti and Heavy D. All the while King never forgot the folks back home, and in the ’60s began making regular visits back to Mississippi for events including an annual celebration in honor of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and later, a “B.B. King Homecoming” celebration in Indianola and workshops with students at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena. In 2004 the school created the B.B. King Recording Studio in his honor, and in 2008 Mississippi honored one of its favorite sons with the opening of the elaborate B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola.
Source: http://msbluestrail.org/
Itta Bena History
The indigenous Choctaw Indians occupied the Delta region for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of European settlers, with ancestors stretching thousands of years into the past. The first removal treaty carried out under the Indian Removal Act was the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, by which the Choctaw ceded about 11 million acres of the Choctaw Nation (now Mississippi) to the United States in exchange for about 15 million acres in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).
Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, a state senator from Claiborne County, Mississippi, is credited with the founding of Itta Bena. Following several crop failures in the 1850s at his home in Claiborne County, Humphreys took a trip by river steamer up into the Yazoo wilderness to look for a new farming opportunity in the former Choctaw area.[3]
He found such an opportunity on Roebuck Lake, a stretch of old channel that the river had discarded a few miles west of Greenwood, in what was then Sunflower County. Bringing a group of slaves up from his plantations during the winter, when boats could use high water to pass from the Yazoo into Roebuck, he directed them in clearing timber and brush from the overgrown bottomland to develop agricultural fields for cultivation of cotton. Longtime Claiborne County friends became interested in his project, and others began to acquire land in the area two years later.[3]
Humphreys had established a permanent winter residence, “Lucknow,” in Claiborne County. He did not bring his family to his Itta Bene plantation until slaves had completed construction of a substantial home in 1857, which he christened as Itta Bena, the Choctaw words for “camp in the woods.” It was built from lumber from the land of the plantation, logs which were plastered and painted. The earliest substantial home built in the frontier Yazoo country, it was the center of the plantation’s many hundred acres. The main portion of the original Humphreys home was still used as a residence in 1954 (thought to be the home of Dr. B. B. Harper on Lakefront Street).[3] Following the Civil War, Humphreys was elected as governor of Mississippi.
As other settlers moved into the area, the village that grew up around the plantation was also called Itta Bena. Planters used the Yazoo River to ship cotton downriver, ultimately to New Orleans for transport to markets in the United States and Great Britain. Cotton continued as the commodity crop and the source of local wealth after the American Civil War.
Construction of the Columbus and Greenville Railway, begun in 1888 and serving the village, stimulated trade and growth. Among the first to build stores were J. B. Humphreys, P. Cohen, and Uriah Ray. The first store was operated by H. M. Weber and a man named Long. The town’s first school, a one-room building only for white students, was built in 1888 and Emma Cross served as the first teacher.[4]
Development of the growing city continued in the early 20th century. The first high school was erected in 1905, across from the present-day First Baptist Church. The post office in Itta Bena was opened in 1918. The white minority dominated politics and the economy, as the state legislature essentially disenfranchised blacks by the constitution of 1890. Working as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, they had difficulty getting ahead in the agricultural economy. During the 20th century, many left the county for work in industrial cities of the north and midwest, in the Great Migration.
On a march in 1966 between Itta Bena and nearby Greenwood, coordinated by the SNCC but led by Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael coined the rallying phrase “Black power!”. Byron de la Beckwith, widely known at that time as the murderer of Medgar Evers (although he had been acquitted of charges), drove his truck by the marchers three times while the local police looked on.[5]
The city reached its peak of population in 1980. Population has declined since then, reflecting limited opportunities in the rural region. The population has decreased more markedly in the county outside the city, as agricultural jobs have been reduced.
Souce: Wikipedia
Itta Bena Photo Gallery
Photo of the Columbus and Greenville railroad running between Humphries Street and Front Street (pretty much the view from Ralph Lembo’s store)
