The Hernando area was the birthplace of an important group of musicians who helped establish Memphis as a major blues center in the 1920s, including Jim Jackson, Robert Wilkins, Dan Sane, Gus Cannon, George “Mojo” Buford, and Earl Bell. Jim Jackson, born in Hernando in 1878, was among the earliest-born artists to record blues, worked for many years with traveling medicine shows including the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and Silas Green From New Orleans, recorded songs between 1927 and 1930 such as “I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop,” became best known for “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues,” and died in Memphis in 1933. Gus Cannon, born in nearby Red Banks in 1883 or 1884, performed in Hernando before settling in Memphis, was influenced as a teenager in the Clarksdale area by slide guitarist Alec Lee, played banjo with a slide, worked regularly on medicine shows often with Jackson, recorded in 1927 as “Banjo Joe,” led Cannon’s Jug Stompers in many recordings between 1928 and 1930, returned to performing in the early 1960s after “Walk Right In” became a pop hit for the Rooftop Singers, and was buried in 1979 in Greenview Memorial Gardens cemetery in north Hernando. Mary Elaine “Lane” Wilkins wrote that her grandfather Robert “Tim” Wilkins first met Jackson and Cannon in 1912 while they were performing together at Mary Cotton’s Place in Hernando’s West End; he later moved to Memphis, recorded eight singles between 1928 and 1935 including “Rolling Stone,” became a minister in the Church of God in Christ in the late 1930s, and in the 1960s performed his blues-inflected gospel on the blues revival circuit, including “Prodigal Son,” a gospel reworking of “That’s No Way To Get Along” later covered by the Rolling Stones. His son John Wilkins also performed and recorded gospel in a similar bluesy style. Dan Sane, born near Hernando in 1892 or 1896, joined Frank Stokes in Memphis in the early 1920s in a partnership that lasted several decades, and as the “Beale Street Sheiks” they recorded more than twenty duets between 1927 and 1929 and were noted for the intricacy of their guitar interplay; Sane died in 1965 in Osceola, Arkansas, and was the grandfather of Oliver Sain.