Themed Photo Gallery and Information : Leland
Background
Leland is a city in Washington County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta. The population was 4,790 at the 2008 census. It was long a center of cotton culture, which is still an important commodity crop in the rural area. The town is located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta on the banks of Deer Creek, which is decorated each Christmas season with floats that attract visitors from afar to view the colorful displays. Farming is the basis of the local economy, as it was since before the Civil War. Mississippi State University and the federal government maintain an agriculture research station at Stoneville on Leland’s outskirts. Cotton, soybeans, rice and corn are the leading commodity crops.
Leland is in the heart of blues country and has produced a number of national and regionally famous blues musicians. There are five Mississippi Blues Trail markers in Leland commemorating the small town’s significant contribution to blues history. Highway 61, mentioned in numerous blues recordings, runs through the town and gives its name to the community’s blues museum. Leland is the burial place of the folk artist and blues musician James “Son” Thomas, who lived for many years near the railroad tracks. Thomas is buried beneath a gravestone donated by musician John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Blues musician Johnny Winter spent part of his childhood in Leland. Winter’s grandfather and father, a former mayor of Leland, operated J.D. Winter & Sons, a cotton business. One of the Blues Trail markers in Leland is dedicated to Winter.
The community is the childhood home of puppeteer Jim Henson, who was born in nearby Greenville, but raised in Leland. Here he created the character of Kermit the Frog, a Muppet. The city has a museum along the banks of Deer Creek celebrating Henson’s accomplishments
Source: Wikipedia
Mississippi Blues Trail Markers
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A major source of income for blues artists in the first half of the 20th century was tips. This corner, formerly the intersection of highways 10 and 61, was a profitable spot, particularly on Saturdays when people from the country came to town. Passengers on the “Planter,” a train that ran daily from New Orleans to Memphis, also stopped here to eat dinner and be entertained by Delta musicians.
Today Highway 61 is widely known as the “blues highway,” but early on Highway 10 was of equal importance to itinerant musicians. It crossed Greenville’s blues center and loosely followed the Southern Railway line through Leland, Dunleith, Holly Ridge, Indianola, Moorhead, Berclair, Itta Bena, Greenwood and on to points east. Highway 10’s importance declined somewhat with the completion of the considerably straighter Highway 82 in 1936.
Street corners were an important venue for blues artists in the Delta, particularly on Saturday afternoons when people from the country came to town to shop. Highways 61 and 10 met at this corner, making it a bustling center of commerce. Musicians played requests in exchange for tips, and street vendors sold hot tamales and fried fish to the gathered crowds. In the early 1900s Leland earned the nickname “the hellhole of the Delta” because of its many drinking and gambling establishments, which often featured blues. Even after Leland “cleaned up” it remained a hotbed for the blues, and this corner featured musicians regularly until the 1960s.
Early Delta blues performers who played here include master guitarist Eugene Powell (1908-1998), who recorded for Bluebird Records in 1936 under the name “Sonny Boy Nelson,” and guitarist Charlie Booker (1919-1989), a native of Sunflower County who lived in Leland during WWII. Late in his career, Nelson was an early influence on younger artists such as Keb’ Mo’.
In January 1952, Booker recorded four songs for Los Angeles-based Modern Records at a session in Greenville that featured harmonica player Houston Boines, drummer “Cleanhead” Love, and pianist Ike Turner, who was also serving as producer. One of the songs was “No Ridin’ Blues,” released on Modern subsidiary label Blues & Rhythm, a dark-themed song that suggested the influence of Charley Patton and referred to historic fires in Greenville and Leland. Booker’s record took on new meaning when, a month following its release, an entire block of Leland burned down. The song brought regional fame to Booker, who relocated to South Bend, Indiana, the following year.
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Guitar icon Johnny Winter’s emergence on the national music scene in 1969 created a sensation among rock and blues audiences. The first of his many hit albums for Columbia Records featured the song “Leland, Mississippi Blues,” which paid tribute to his roots here. Winter’s grandfather and father, a former mayor of Leland, operated a cotton business, J. D. Winter & Son, at this site. Winter was born in Texas in 1944 but spent parts of his childhood in Leland.
Johnny Winter and his younger brother Edgar were born into a prominent Leland family that was famed not only for its social, civic, and business leadership but also for its musical talent. Their father, Leland native John Dawson Winter, Jr. (1909-2001), played saxophone and guitar and sang at churches, weddings, Kiwanis and Rotary Club gatherings, and other events, including barbershop singing contests as a member of the Lamppost Quartet and front porch concerts with the Winters’ five-piece family band at the Winter home. His repertoire included pop songs such as “Ain’t She Sweet’ and “Bye Bye Blackbird,” along with comedy routines. Winter, Jr., who worked with his father, John D. Winter, Sr. (1879-1938), as a cotton classer, and later ran the family’s cotton brokerage firm, was elected mayor of Leland in 1936 and served until leaving for military service in 1941. John Dawson “Johnny” Winter III was born on February 23, 1944, while his father was away in the army. Although the family resided in Leland, his mother Edwina chose to go to her home town of Beaumont, Texas, for the birth of Johnny, as well as of Edgar on December 28, 1946. The Winters then permanently moved to Beaumont.
With encouragement from their parents, the Winter brothers, both albinos, began performing as youngsters and were already recording while still in their teens, playing rock ‘n’ roll, blues, and R&B. Despite his early childhood here in the heartland of Delta blues, Johnny only discovered the blues in Texas, listening to the radio in the kitchen with the Winters’ African American maid. Mississippi-born bluesmen Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, and Robert Johnson became his favorite blues artists, along with Bobby Bland from Tennessee, and Winter developed a fiery electric synthesis of rock and blues that began to attract national attention in the late 1960s.
The self-titled 1969 album Johnny Winter, which featured guest appearances by Mississippi natives Willie Dixon and Big Walter Horton, established Winter as a premier figure in high-energy blues-rock circles. He went on to record several more albums for Columbia Records, all of which appeared on the national charts. Multi-instrumentalist Edgar Winter played on his brother’s Second Winter LP and began recording with his own groups, scoring 1970s pop hits with the singles “Frankenstein” and “Free Ride.” In later years Johnny Winter produced albums by his idol, Muddy Waters, and recorded in the company of the Muddy Waters band, James Cotton, John Lee Hooker, and other Mississippians. In 1988, after recording three albums for the blues label Alligator Records in Chicago, he became the first white musician elected to the Blues Hall of Fame.
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Ruby’s Nite Spot, operated at this site by Ruby Edwards, was one of the most prominent blues clubs in the Delta during the 1940s and ‘50s. Edwards booked nationally known acts such as T-Bone Walker, Little Walter, and Little Richard, newcomers Ike Turner and Little Milton, and down-home Delta bluesmen Son Thomas and Eddie Cusic, among many others. Patrons here could dine, drink, dance, and gamble into the wee hours of the morning, long after clubs in nearby Greenville and Indianola had closed.
Ruby’s Nite Spot occupied a unique position among Delta nightclubs not only because of its full and varied slate of blues entertainment but also because of owner Ruby Edwards’ renowned business acumen. Edwards, always determined to please her customers, took full advantage of Leland’s “wide open” policy that allowed gambling extravaganzas and late-hour activities that few towns in Mississippi could match. Gamblers with suitcases full of cash traveled to Leland from all over the South for all-day, all-night “skin balls” that Edwards operated next to the club, often lasting for days at a time. Payoffs to the local sheriff ensured that Edwards could send her daughter Sue or other “runners” across the state line to return with liquor that was illegal during Mississippi’s extended era of prohibition. Crowds of hungry revelers dined on chicken, fish, hamburgers, and hot dogs and danced to the music of the country’s top names in blues as well as an impressive array of local and regional musicians. Ready to market anything that might sell, Edwards made tamales at one time and brewed her own corn liquor at another.
Ruby Edwards, born May 20, 1910, came to Leland from Brandon, Mississippi, with her mother shortly before the 1927 flood. Resolved to go into business for herself, she had opened Ruby’s Nite Spot by World War II. Her children, Terry Keesee, Harold Hall, Sue Carol Hall, and Jimetta Thornton, later began helping out at the club. Among the many national touring acts recalled as performing at Ruby’s were Ray Charles, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, Jimmie Lunceford, Big Joe Turner, Gatemouth Brown, Gatemouth Moore, Arthur Prysock, Percy Mayfield, Lowell Fulson, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. The variety of acts at Ruby’s ranged from the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female band that originated at Piney Woods, to Delta blues legends Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, Elmore James, and Honeyboy Edwards to the bands of the Silas Green and Rabbit Foot minstrel shows. To draw crowds, Ruby’s often offered free admission to dances when local bands were performing. Little Milton and Tyrone Davis would both take the stage alone, without backup bands, to practice their acts in the embryonic stages of their careers. Once Milton formed a band, he became a regular at the club, as did Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm from Clarksdale and the Red Tops from Vicksburg. The local blues roster also included Smokey Wilson, Lil’ Bill Wallace, Charlie Booker, Eddie Shaw, L. V. Banks, and Cleanhead Love.
In the mid-1950s Edwards took over the Club Ebony in Indianola, where her daughter Sue met her husband-to-be, B. B. King. Edwards’ son Terry Keesee then operated Ruby’s for a while, as well as the smaller Playhouse nearby. In later years Ruby Edwards ran a grocery store until she retired in the 1970s. She died on New Year’s Day of 2001.
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James Henry “Son” Thomas, internationally famed blues musician and folk sculptor, worked as a porter at the Montgomery Hotel, which once occupied this site, after he moved to Leland in 1961. Born in the Yazoo County community of Eden on October 14, 1926, Thomas made his first recordings for folklorist Bill Ferris in 1968. He later traveled throughout the United States and Europe to perform at blues concerts and exhibit his artwork. Thomas died in Greenville on June 26, 1993.
Thomas was one of the most recognized local musical figures in Mississippi during the 1970s and ’80s. He performed throughout the state at nightclubs, festivals, private parties, government social affairs, colleges, and juke joints. He also toured and recorded several blues albums in Europe, and his folk art was featured at galleries in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Thomas learned guitar as a youngster after hearing his grandfather, Eddie Collins, and uncle, Joe Cooper, at house parties in Yazoo County. He later saw the two blues legends he regarded as his main influences, Elmore James and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, as well as Bentonia bluesman Jack Owens, from whom he learned the song “Nothin’ But the Devil.” After he began playing jukes with Cooper, Percy Lee, and others, Thomas became so well-known for his rendition of the Lil’ Son Jackson tune “Cairo Blues” that he earned the nickname “Cairo.” He was also known as “Sonny Ford,” so named for his childhood fondness for making clay models of Ford tractors.
In 1961, with a wife and six children to support on a sharecropper’s income, Thomas decided to move to Leland to find better-paying work. His mother got him a job at the Montgomery Hotel where she worked, but soon Thomas joined his stepfather as a gravedigger and later worked at a furniture store. His performances had been confined to juke joints and house parties until he met Bill Ferris, who began recording and filming Thomas and other local bluesmen in 1968. The Xtra label in England released the first recordings of Thomas, who later made albums for the Mississippi-based Southern Culture, Rustron, and Rooster Blues labels as well as companies in France, Holland, and Germany.
He also appeared in several documentary films. Despite his international renown and increased income, Thomas continued to lived in bare, dilapidated shotgun houses. It fit his image, he said, knowing that blues fans, art buyers, and photographers would come looking for him. The most important place for him to earn his living was often not out on the concert circuit but at his house, where visitors would show up at his doorstep with money to hear him play or buy a skull or coffin he had sculpted. Thomas’s gaunt appearance and the deathly themes of much of his artwork led to neighborhood rumors that he was a “hoodoo man.” But his magic lay in his ability to purvey his art and music, and his songs and stories were permeated by a droll sense of humor rather than darkness. His son Raymond “Pat” Thomas earned his own niche as an authentic bluesman and folk artisan, especially noted for his drawings of cats’ heads.
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Tyrone Davis, one of America’s most popular soul singers, was born on a plantation near Leland on May 4, 1938. Davis lived in Leland before moving to Chicago, where he began his career billed as “Tyrone the Wonder Boy.” From 1969 to 1988 Davis had forty-three singles on the national rhythm & blues charts, including the No. 1 hits “Can I Change My Mind,” “Turn Back the Hands of Time,” and “Turning Point.” His aunt and uncle once operated a cafe at this site.
Tyrone Davis’ appealing brand of romantic soul music was not blues in the traditional sense, but Davis was regarded by many as a significant figure in the blues world. He was especially popular with many of the same African American listeners who appreciated bluesmen such as Little Milton, Bobby Bland, and Albert King and he often starred with these and other blues artists in concerts and festivals. Davis’ songs were also staples in the repertoires of countless blues bands in the Delta, Chicago, and across the country.
Davis’ favorite singers included Bland, Brook Benton, Sam Cooke, and Little Willie John. He often sang gospel songs at home with his family and has been recalled carrying a guitar around Leland as a teenager and rehearsing by himself at Ruby’s Nite Spot. The son of William Branch and Ora Davis, he was born on the Lawrence Paxton plantation in Wilmot and attended school in Arcola until he moved with his mother, brothers, and sisters to Leland, according to his sister, Pearl Johnson. Davis later lived in Saginaw, Michigan, and Detroit, and returned to Leland before he relocated to Chicago in the late 1950s. There he worked as a valet for blues guitarist Freddie King in addition to a job at an iron castings plant where he labored alongside his friend and fellow vocalist, Otis Clay. He performed at many South and West Side clubs and taverns and recorded several 45s as “Tyrone the Wonder Boy” before his million-selling single “Can I Change My Mind” hit the charts at the end of 1968. Overnight he was catapulted onto the national rhythm & blues circuit of larger halls, theaters, and showcase nightclubs. His records consistently made the charts thereafter, outselling all of his Chicago blues and soul contemporaries, and he remained a preeminent “chitlin circuit” figure until his death in Hinsdale, Illinois, on February 9, 2005. In addition to his hit singles on Dakar, Columbia, and other labels, Davis placed twenty-eight albums on the Billboard R&B or blues charts from 1969 through 2004, with seven crossing over into the pop charts. In his later years he recorded for Jackson-based Malaco Records, and his final album, The Legendary Hall of Famer, appeared on Endzone Entertainment, a label owned by Indianola-born singer Willie Clayton, who told the Clarion-Ledger, “Nobody was better than Tyrone Davis. He had the magic. He was my idol.”
Davis, Clayton, and Otis Clay have been among the many artists who proved that the Delta was a breeding ground not just for traditional blues artists but also for soul singers. Other Delta-born vocalists who achieved fame in soul music include Major Lance, Garland Green, Mamie “Galore” Davis, Ruby Andrews, Mary Wilson of the Supremes, J. Blackfoot, and Thelma Houston (all from Washington County), in addition to Sam Cooke, Betty Everett, Jerry Butler, James Carr, and others.
Source: http://msbluestrail.org/
Photo Gallery
Corner of 3rd and N Main Street next to ‘Corner of 10 and 61’ marker
This is the first of Leland’s murals located on the south wall of the building at the corner of 4th and Main Streets. Local artists contributed their talents to honor musicians who have origins in the immediate area. Depicted starting from the top left corner of the mural are: Caleb Emphrey, Sam Chatmon, Eugene Powell, Lil’ Dave Thompson, Alex “Little Bill” Wallace, Eddie Cusic, Willie Foster, Johnny Horton, Joe Frank Carollo, Harry “Bub” Branton, Pat Thomas, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Jimmie Reed, Boogaloo Ames, Little Milton and James “Son” Thomas.
Detail of above mural (has the shield been used as target practice??)
The second of Leland’s murals to be completed honors a local dance band called “Doc’s Bees”. Led by “Doc” Booth on sax with Boogaloo Ames on keyboards, they can be heard every Thursday night at Lillo’s Italian Restaurant located on the east edge of town right off Highway 82. This mural is located on the west wall of the building at 3rd and Main Streets.
This mural features none other than “The King of the Blues”, B.B. King from nearby Indianola, MS. This mural was designed by Cristen Craven Barnard and Billy Johnson with Jay Kirgis contrubuting his talents with a brush along with Christen Barnard. The mural spans six decades of B.B.’s career and is the first mural painted with the approval of Mr. King. You can find this mural on the south wall of the building located on the corner of 3rd and Main Streets.
Looking down N Main Street close to Tyrone Davis marker
Iconic festival poster dedcated to David “Honeyboy” Edwards