This Week’s Featured Marker:
Blues Foundation {module_photogallery,22316,5,,5,80,,true}
Mississippi’s stature as the birthplace of more Blues Hall of Fame members than any other state was highlighted on the Mississippi Blues Trail marker dedicated outside the Blues Foundation headquarters in Memphis on May 11, 2012, the morning following the Foundation’s 33rd annual Blues Music Awards show. Among those present at the dedication were current Foundation director Jay Sieleman and past directors Howard Stovall (a former Mississippian) and Joe Savarin, who founded the organization in 1980, along with a number of blues artists including Jackson resident Bobby Rush and Camden, Mississippi, native John Primer.
On May 9 the Blues Foundation honored its 2012 Hall of Fame inductees, including — as usual — a contingent of Mississippians: Matt “Guitar” Murphy (born in Sunflower, Mississippi), Furry Lewis (born in Greenwood), deejay Pervis Spann (born in Itta Bena), and Frank Stokes (a Memphian and onetime Mississippi resident). Also inducted were the recording “All Your Love” by Magic Sam (a native of Grenada) and the book Voice of the Blues by former Mississippians Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel.
Mississippi is the birthplace of 46 artists who have been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. In the first year of balloting (1980), the top five slots in the voting went to Mississippi-born bluesmen: in order, they were Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Elmore James and Robert Johnson. Louisiana ranks a distant second with 19 natives in the Hall of Fame, followed by Tennessee (14), Arkansas (11) and Texas (10). In the Hall of Fame category for business and media inductees, Mississippi also leads with six, ahead of Pennsylvania (5) and New York (4).
In addition to the Blues Music Awards and the Blues Hall of Fame ceremonies each year, the Blues Foundation also presents the International Blues Challenge and the Keeping the Blues Alive awards. The Foundation also administers the Handy Artists Relief Trust (HART) Fund and sponsors health care and education programs. Hundreds of blues societies and organizations around the world have affiliated with the Foundation and many have sponsored bands in the IBC competitions. More than two hundred Blues Music Awards have gone to Mississippi natives or one-time residents as Performers of the Year in various categories or for their contemporary, traditional, acoustic, soul-blues, or reissue recordings.
The Blues Foundation is in the midst of a fundraising drive to create a permanent Blues Hall of Fame exhibit. To donate or to join the Blues Foundation, go to www.blues.org or wrote to 421 S. Main St., Memphis TN 38103.
The Blues Foundation’s office is across the street from the Main Street location of the National Civil Rights Museum. It was from a bathroom window in the museum building — which was a rooming house in the 1960s –that James Earl Ray fired the shot that killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in 1968. The building also has a historic Mississippi blues connection — the name of the company that originally owned the structure, Young and Morrow, is still etched above the front door. This was the Memphis headquarters of the Young and Morrow Plantation near Ruleville, Mississippi, where a young Chester Arthur Burnett once lived and picked cotton. Burnett is, of course, better known as Howlin’ Wolf, one of the Blues Hall of Fame’s first class of inductees.
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