Mississippi Blues Trail — Biloxi Blues Marker

The Biloxi marker on Main Street commemorates a Gulf Coast club scene that placed Jelly Roll Morton at a Reynoir Street gambling den called the Flat Top, hustling pool and playing piano. Bill Johnson's Creole Band, based on Delauney Street, introduced New Orleans jazz to audiences across America. Soul-blues singer Ted Hawkins was born here. The Bihari family from the coast founded Modern Records in Los Angeles — one of the most important independent R&B labels. Mississippi entered the Union in 1817 with most of its population in the northern counties. The coast held 2.5% of the state's total, remained frontier, drew cultural influence from the Mediterranean. A deputy historic preservation officer at the state Department of Archives and History described the coast's position along the Gulf as having "facilitated the region's ethnic diversity and maintained its ties to the rest of the world much more easily than was possible for other regions of Mississippi." The clubs documented by the marker belong to that formative openness — a music scene built by people who came from somewhere else and stayed. The Mississippi Blues Trail was created by the Mississippi Blues Commission in 2006 to place interpretive markers at historical sites related to the birth and influence of the blues. The marker texts are researched and written by Jim O'Neal and Scott Barretta, former editors of *Living Blues* magazine. By the end of 2016, nearly 200 markers had been placed across the state and beyond. Free to visit.