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Jim Jackson was a singing guitarist with a folk and blues repertoire as vast as Huddie Ledbetter's and a pre- to early-20th century minstrel-like manner similar to that of Henry Thomas. Enormously popular for a short while thanks to the competitive efforts of agents working for the Victor and Vocalion record companies, Jackson became regionally famous in Memphis and Chicago during the '20s, then went back home during the Great Depression and died in 1937. Home was the town of Hernando in northwestern Mississippi (twenty miles to the south of Memphis) where Jackson was born on a farm in 1884. Hernando's other famous son was bluesman Robert Wilkins, best known for having one of his songs covered decades later by the Rolling Stones. Guitarist Elijah Avery of Cannon's Jug Stompers lived in Hernando too, as did Frank Stokes, a rough-voiced blacksmith and minstrel who later achieved modest fame after teaming up with Dan Sane to form the Beale Street Sheiks. It was Stokes who had the greatest...