Entries - County: Clay - Starting with J

Roland Janes was a well-known session guitar player who worked with Sam Phillips at the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. He was elected to the Southern Legends Entertainment & Performing Arts Hall of Fame and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. His guitar is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Roland Janes was born on August 20 ,1933, in Brookings (Clay County) to R. D. Janes and Mary Pearl Janes; he had three brothers and three sisters. Janes learned to play guitar and performed in country bands with his cousins while living in Arkansas. His parents divorced when he was about ten, and his mother moved to St. Louis, Missouri; he shuttled back and …

Francis M. “Buck” Jenkins was a horse thief who was lynched on or around December 16, 1878, at Corning (Clay County). The 1870 federal census shows that fourteen-year-old Francis M. Jenkins and his twelve-year-old brother Charles C. Jenkins lived in Jefferson County, Illinois, with their mother Sarah, thirty-five, and sister Martha, sixteen. At some point during that decade, the Jenkins brothers became part of a gang of horse thieves that operated in northeastern Arkansas and that included Milt and Bud Montgomery and Elias Hensen. “Buck” Jenkins, who had lost an arm, was detained in Jefferson County, Illinois, by local officers in early December 1878 after a $50 reward was offered for his arrest. He was returned to Clay County on …