Jack Owens became one of Mississippi's most venerated blues artists in the 1980s and 1990s after spending most of his life as a farmer in Yazoo County. Born November 17, 1904, or 1906 according to some sources, he belonged to the pioneering generation of Bentonia bluesmen that included Nehemiah “Skip” James and Henry Stuckey. Although Owens began his recording career in 1966 and his first album, produced by musicologist Dr. David Evans, was released in 1971, he did not perform outside Mississippi until 1988. In his final years he and harmonica player Bud Spires traveled to many festivals and performed on Owens's front porch for hundreds of visitors, while tour buses, vans, and cars with out-of-state license plates regularly came to his house north of this site off Rose Hill Road. Evans wrote that the music of Owens and James was marked by haunting, brooding lyrics about loneliness, death, and the supernatural, creating one of the eeriest, loneliest, and deepest blues sounds ever recorded. Owens's music and lifestyle in Bentonia changed little over the years: he clung to old ways and superstitions, buried money in the ground, hung bottles from trees, was reputed to be the last farmer in the area to plow with a mule, once made moonshine, and ran juke joints in or near his house. He also appeared in Alan Lomax's Land Where the Blues Began, Robert Mugge's Deep Blues, and a commercial for Levi's 501 Blues. After festival appearances in Mississippi, he accepted offers to perform in Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Europe, and elsewhere, took his first plane flight in 1992, received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993, and died on February 9, 1997. Only at his funeral was his real name, L. F. Nelson, revealed. He was buried in the Day Cemetery east of Bentonia and left protégés Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and Bud Spires to carry on the Bentonia blues tradition.