A young girl plays with a dead bird shot by her uncle at their home on the Stovall plantation outside Clarksdale, MS. Blues legend Muddy Waters was living in a cabin a few feet away from this site when he made his first recordings for Alan Lomax of the library of congress in 1941. Two years later Waters moved to Chicago, where he made the pivotal Aristocrat and Chess recordings that urbanized country blues and laid the foundation for rock and roll. In July of 1949, apparently homesick for Stovall, Muddy sang: “Hello canary bird, this is a letter home/ Well I want you to fly the whole world over/And find out how my baby been gettin’ along/ Well, canary bird when you get to Clarksdale, fly down on second street/Well you know I don’t want you to stop flying/ Until you take the letter out to Stovall for me/ Fly on canary bird fly on.” 

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