Discover Copiah County’s Musical Legacy Beyond the Delta

Special to Wesson News

Blues musician Houston Stackhouse was born in Wesson.

While the Mississippi Delta is considered to be the birthplace of the blues, musicians from all across the state sang and played instruments in the unique style.  Several of them had their roots in Copiah County:

• Tommy Johnson from Crystal Springs grew up in a musical family with brothers and an uncle who taught him to play and sing.  A supreme vocalist who could jump from a falsetto to a growl, he sang about what he knew in a raw, raspy voice with a driving guitar.  His lyrics with striking blues compositions incorporated fragments of African American folk poetry and fables.  The movie O Brother, Where Art Thou, which has two scenes shot in Copiah County, portrays him telling three escaped convicts he sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play the guitar – a story first told by his brother LaDell, and a legend now popularly erroneously ascribed to Robert Johnson.   Johnson recorded 14 titles between 1928 and 1930.  He died of a heart attack in 1956 after playing at a house party, and is buried in Copiah County’s Warm Springs Cemetery.

• Hazlehurst-born Robert Johnson (no relation to Tommy Johnson) spend most of his life in the Delta, dying in 1938 at 27 years old under mysterious circumstances.  Over his short life he recorded 29 tracks in a style that has led some to consider him the “Grandfather of Rock and Roll.”  A master of the guitar, the Tommy Johnson story about selling his selling his soul to the devil became associated with him.  The film Crossroads was based on Johnson’s career, and the Blues Foundation inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1986. 

• Houston Stackhouse, born Houston Goff in 1910 at Wesson, assumed his stepfather’s surname in 1925 when he moved to Crystal Springs, and was inspired by his uncles Luther and Charlie Williams and other local musicians – notably Lonnie Chatmon and Tommy Johnson and his brothers.  He learned to play the violin, harmonica and mandolin before settling on the guitar, which he taught to renowned blues musicians Robert Nighthawk, Jimmy Rogers and Sammy Lawhorn, and performed on live Delta radio broadcasts.  In the 1970s, he often appeared in Memphis as a solo act after working with Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson and his brothers, and moving to Helena, Arkansas, in the 1940s and continuing to work in the industry.  He died in 1989 and is buried at Crystal Springs.

• Crystal Springs born Sunny Ridell in 1945 as Thomas James Oria Murray, he played as New Orleans as a backup for Fats Domino, Lee Dorsey, Little Richard and other notables when he was a teenager, and later performed, toured and recorded with musical legends.  Before embarking on an acting career in the films Leadbilly and Outlaw Blues, he led the band Sunny Ridell and the Eight Counts of Distinction.  He died in 2018 and is buried in Crystal Springs.

According to the website Mississippi Blues Trail, there are at least 16 museums throughout the state devoted to blues, including the Robert Johnson Heritage & Blues Museum at Crystal Springs and the Mississippi Music Museum at Hazlehurst.