📍Vicksburg, MS, USA
1915 – 1936“I was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in July 1915, one of fourteen children, in a river town on the bluffs above the Mississippi, where the blues and gospel were everywhere. My mother, Daisy, had a gift for words: she would rhyme her sentences as she spoke and wrote religious poems, and I copied her, making up rhymes about everything. That love of words became my life's work. I sang my first song at the Springfield Baptist Church when I was four. At about seven, I fell in love with the music of a band featuring the pianist Little Brother Montgomery, and I hung around the honky-tonks of Vicksburg listening to the blues. A local carpenter, Theo Phelps, taught me to sing harmony, and I sang bass in his gospel quartet on the Vicksburg radio station. As a teenager I rode the freight trains, and I was arrested for hoboing and sent to work on a county prison farm, where I heard the work songs and the blues of the men around me and saw hard times close up. I wrote poems and sold them as songs to local bands. In 1936 I left Vicksburg for Chicago, and I was a big, strong man, and in 1937 I won the Illinois Golden Gloves heavyweight boxing title. But music called me back, and I learned the bass and formed the Five Breezes. At Chess Records I became the great songwriter and producer of Chicago blues, writing Hoochie Coochie Man and I Just Want to Make Love to You for Muddy Waters, Spoonful for Howlin' Wolf and Little Red Rooster. Vicksburg remembers me with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today