James Cotton, one of the world’s most popular and dynamic blues harmonica players, was born just east of this site on the Bonnie Blue plantation on July 1, 1935. He learned under harmonica master Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 (Rice Miller) in Helena, Arkansas, and spent twelve years in Muddy Waters’s band in Chicago before leaving in 1966 to form his own group and earning the nickname “Mr. Superharp” for his high-energy performances. Drawn to the blues as a small child, he used his first harmonica, a gift from his mother, to imitate trains and cackling hens, and although blues music was unwelcome in his parents’ religious household, he often stayed with his uncle Wiley Green, who made bootleg whiskey, gambled, and played blues piano. Around 1944 Green introduced him to Sonny Boy Williamson, whose radio broadcasts from Helena led to Cotton living for several years with Williamson and his wife Mattie in Helena and West Memphis. When Williamson moved away, he left his band and KWEM radio show to Cotton, but Cotton found himself unready to lead and worked a series of jobs while continuing to perform with Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Nix, and others. In 1952 he made his first studio appearance at Sam Phillips’s Memphis Recording Service, playing harmonica on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Saddle My Pony,” and in 1953-54 Phillips recorded his first tracks as a singer for Sun Records, including “Straighten Up Baby” and “Cotton Crop Blues.” Muddy Waters hired him in Memphis in 1954 to replace Junior Wells, and Cotton moved to Chicago, where he stayed with Waters’s band longer than any of Waters’s other harmonica players while also making his own recordings, including two records made in England in 1961. After forming the James Cotton Blues Band in 1966, he benefited from ties to Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield and from signing with Albert Grossman, which helped him work steadily in both rock venues and blues clubs and festivals while recording for Verve, Vanguard, and many other labels. Even after throat surgery limited his singing in the 1990s, he continued performing as a leading blues harmonica player, celebrated for his explosive style and for carrying forward the legacy of the blues masters who had trained him. He received several Blues Music Awards, won the 1996 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album for Deep in the Blues, and entered the Blues Hall of Fame in 2006.