Charles Evers’s connection to the blues grew out of a career that joined music, business, and civil rights activism in Mississippi and Chicago. Born in Decatur, Mississippi, on September 11, 1922, he later attended Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College with his brother Medgar Evers after their service in World War II, and both became involved in civil rights activities. In 1951 Charles Evers moved to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he worked at a family funeral home and ran several businesses, including the Evers Hotel and Lounge, which featured blues bands. In 1954 he became one of the first African American deejays in Mississippi when he began hosting a show on WHOC, playing blues records and urging African American listeners to register to vote. Segregationist threats drove him and his family to Chicago in 1956, where his nightclubs featured Mississippi-born blues artists including Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and B. B. King. After Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson on June 12, 1963, Charles Evers returned to Mississippi, succeeded his brother as NAACP field secretary, organized boycotts, protests, and voter registration campaigns, and in 1969 became mayor of Fayette as the first African American mayor of a racially mixed Mississippi town in the post-Reconstruction era. In 1973, encouraged by B. B. King, he helped found the annual Medgar Evers Homecoming to honor his slain brother, and he and King began cosponsoring concerts there. Over the following decades, the celebration expanded into a multi-day festival held in Fayette, Jackson, and other locations across the state, with blues, soul, gospel, and R&B performers and appearances by public figures such as Muhammad Ali, Kris Kristofferson, Shirley MacLaine, and Dick Gregory. In 1987 Evers began a long tenure managing WMPR in Jackson, where the station became a major outlet for blues programming and concert promotion while he continued discussing political issues on his show, “Let’s Talk.”