Hello again, it's DeWayne Moore, the coimetromaniac based out of Oxford, Mississippi, as well as the executive director of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund (MZMF), a Mississippi non-profit corporation named after Mount Zion Missionary Baptist (MB) Church (f. 1909) outside Morgan City, Mississippi. Organized in 1989 by Raymond ?Skip? Henderson, the Fund memorialized the contributions of numerous musicians interred in rural cemeteries without grave markers, serving as a legal conduit to provide financial support to black church communities and cemeteries in the Mississippi Delta. The MZMF erected twelve memorials to blues musicians over a 12 year period from 1990 to 2001.
http://www.mtzionmemorialfund.org/p/musician-memorials.html I have spearheaded the renewed efforts of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund since 2010. I'm the guy who managed to get the relatives of Tommy Johnson and other interments in Warm Springs CME Church Cemetery a permanent fifteen foot wide and half-a-mile long easement to Warm Springs Cemetery. We also located the military markers of Henry "Son" Simms and Jackie Brenston. The MZMF has dedicated five new memorials--the headstone of Frank Stokes in the abandoned Hollywood Cemetery, Memphis, TN; the flat companion stone of Ernest "Lil' Son Joe" Lawlars in Walls, MS; and in Greenville, MS, the flat markers of T-Model Ford and Eddie Cusic, and the unique, yet humble, headstone of Mamie "Galore" Davis. In addition, the MZMF monitors legal actions involving cemeteries and provides technical assistance to cemetery corporations and community preservationists in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi, and South Carolina, such as the Friends of Hollywood/Mt. Carmel Cemeteries, which assists in restoring these two massive and abandoned African American cemeteries in Memphis "back to a beautiful place of rest for all" interments, including Frank Stokes and Furry Lewis.
We also recently erected a marker for Bo Carter In Nitta Yuma.
http://www.mtzionmemorialfund.org/2017/08/the-grave-of-bo-carter.htmlThank you to everyone at weeniecampbell.com for supporting that endeavor. Please read the review of the event linked above. It was pretty cool. His grandson's amazing speech can be heard here:
We have now setup another GoFundMe page--www.gofundme.com/headstonebluesinitiative--to replace the temporary grave marker of Belton Sutherland. which we found earlier this year. And we need help from folks who appreciate the music. Referring to arguably the most fierce, exquisitely iconoclastic artist that barely appeared in the late-seventies documentary, one contributor to this message board once lamented that after performing a few fine songs ?nothing else is said about him.? A subsequent comment asserts that he may have only ?recorded three songs, but they were powerful. I wish there was more of him.? One of the newer members admits, plainly, ?I don?t know how ?obscure? this bluesman is, but...he looks & sounds like a man who has lived the blues his entire life.? Some of our initial findings are published here:
www.mtzionmemorialfund.org/p/the-unmarked-grave-of-belton-sutherland.html
