Duncan holds an important place in blues history as the birthplace or home of performers with local, national, and international reputations, and as part of the Highway 61 blues legacy of juke joints and plantations where local musicians played before some found wider acclaim elsewhere. Among those with roots in Duncan were Jimmy Reed, who lived on the nearby McMurchy plantation in his youth and worked there before leaving Mississippi; pianists Willie Love and Ernest Lane; singer Willie "Rip" Butler; guitarist Anthony "Big A" Sherrod; Chicago bluesman Eddie C. Campbell; gospel singer Percell Perkins; and saxophonist and label owner Menard Rogers. Willie Love, born in Duncan in 1906, became a prominent Delta blues figure through radio broadcasts, including work at KFFA in Helena with Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, and recordings for the Trumpet label in Jackson from 1951 to 1953. Ernest Lane, born in Duncan in 1931, grew up in Clarksdale alongside Ike Turner, earned notice for his work with Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, made his own recordings in the U.S. and Europe, relocated to Los Angeles, and also recorded with Robert Nighthawk, the Monkees, Canned Heat, and Eddie C. Campbell. Campbell, born in Duncan in 1939, lived for a time in Clarksdale before moving to Chicago, where he joined the circle of Mississippi musicians associated with the West Side sound, later toured and recorded widely, lived in Europe in the 1980s, and appeared in a German production of William Faulkner’s "Requiem for a Nun." In Chicago he sometimes served as bandleader for Jimmy Reed, one of the best-known performers connected to Duncan. Robert "Bilbo" Walker, familiar in juke joints around Clarksdale, Bobo, Alligator, and Duncan, also knew Campbell in Chicago in the 1960s. Willie Lee "Rip" Butler, a local favorite born in 1948, was a key member of the Wesley Jefferson Band and also worked with Robert Walker, while Anthony "Big A" Sherrod, a Clarksdale bluesman, said he was born on a Greyhound bus traveling through Duncan in 1984. Some historians have suggested that Willie Brown, an associate of Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson, may have been the Will Brown counted in the Duncan area in the 1920 U.S. census. Longtime Duncan resident Rosetta Patton Brown, daughter of Charley Patton, was not a performer but became well known to visitors and blues enthusiasts, and Jimbo Mathus later recorded a tribute album in her honor after learning of her family connection.