Baptist Town, established in the 1800s alongside the growth of the local cotton industry, is one of Greenwood’s oldest African American neighborhoods and was known for a strong sense of community centered on McKinney Chapel M.B. Church and a former cotton compress. During the era when life revolved around cotton plantations, gins, compresses, and oil mills, African American workers settled in Baptist Town and other Greenwood neighborhoods, while most lived on outlying plantations, and blues and gospel music flourished in town, on the outskirts, and on the plantations. In blues lore, Baptist Town is closely tied to David “Honeyboy” Edwards’s recollections of Robert Johnson, whom he identified as having lived on Young Street there in 1938 as his final residence; according to Edwards, Baptist Town offered musicians a safe haven from work in the cotton fields, and he and Johnson stayed there and performed locally at the Three Forks juke joint with Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 before Johnson, allegedly poisoned there, spent some of his final days on Young Street and died on August 16, 1938, on the Star of the West Plantation. Greenwood’s African American music life also centered on places such as McLaurin Street and Johnson Street, and Baptist Town remained connected to later performers including Mississippi John Hurt’s son John William “Man” Hurt, Harvie Cook, Robert “Dr. Feelgood” Potts, Sheba Potts-Wright, Willie Cobbs, and many other blues and R&B artists from the Greenwood area.
