Sonny Boy Williamson II Grave — Tutwiler, Mississippi

Sonny Boy Williamson II — born Aleck Ford, later known as Rice Miller — is buried at Whitfield Baptist Church on Gravel Hill Road outside Tutwiler, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. He died on 25 May 1965 in Helena, Arkansas, where he had been a fixture of KFFA Radio's King Biscuit Time programme since 1941. He was buried in the county of his birth, in a Delta churchyard a long way from the European tours and BBC sessions that had made him famous in his final years. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker recognises the site as the resting place of one of the most influential harmonica players and blues vocalists of the twentieth century.

Sonny Boy Williamson II (not to be confused with John Lee 'Sonny Boy' Williamson, a different musician who recorded in Chicago and died in 1948) spent decades as one of the most recognisable blues performers in the South. His King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA Helena, which began in 1941 and ran for decades, made him a household name across the Delta. He recorded for Trumpet Records in Jackson in the late 1940s and for Chess Records in Chicago through the 1950s and early 1960s, producing recordings like 'Help Me,' 'Eyesight to the Blind,' and 'Bring It On Home.' In the early 1960s he toured Europe, performing with the Yardbirds and the Animals and introducing his music to a new generation of British musicians.

The Whitfield Baptist Church cemetery is in a rural area outside Tutwiler. Tutwiler itself is also the site of a Blues Trail marker for W.C. Handy, who reportedly heard a blues musician playing slide guitar on a knife at the Tutwiler train station around 1903 — often cited as one of the earliest documented encounters with Delta blues. The two markers make Tutwiler a natural stop on any blues heritage route through the Delta.