“I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.”
B.B. King
Have you been to Mississippi? Spent any time there? As someone who has been up and down and across that state a good bit, I have my own experiences and viewpoints. I would summarize them by saying that it's a fascinating and complicated place. Also, that anyone who makes broad generalizations in an attempt to explain it is not worth listening to. Walk away. The history of the state and its culture is too knotty, diverse and complex to be distilled down to any accurate conclusion of what Mississippi is. It's like someone telling you they can explain Europe. Really? What part? From whose perspective?
We should thank that complex place for the many gifts it has given us in the arts. In literature: William Faulkner, Willie Morris, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Donna Tartt, Margaret Walker, John Grisham, Larry Brown…come on, that's crazy.
In TV, stage and screen: James Earl Jones, Jim Hensen, Oprah, Morgan Freeman, Gerald McRaney, Fred Armisen.
In music: Elvis Presley, Jimmy Buffett, Tammy Wynette, Charlie Pride, Faith Hill, Britney Spears (Thanks isn't the word that comes to mind, there).
And then there's the blues. If you've ever driven through the Mississippi Delta, as Dylan would say, “down on Highway 61,” you get some idea of where the blues came from and why. Again, it's complicated. If you want to get some notion of how complicated it is, read one of these three books:
The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity / by James Cobb
When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land / by W. Ralph Eubanks
Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found In the Mississippi Delta / Richard Grant
There's an entire genre of music called “Delta Blues,” which is named for the style of blues from that region. The lineup of those players is to the blues what the 1927 Yankees were to baseball. A dream team of heavyweights and legends: Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Charley Patton, Son House, Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, R.L. Burnside, Skip James, Bo Diddly, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bukka White, Junior Kimbrough, Furry Lewis, Pinetop Perkins, Taj Mahal, Keb Mo, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Blake and Blind Mississippi Morris.
I'm not sure why sight is the only one of the five senses that blues musicians lose. It's always “Blind So and So” and never “Hard of Smelling Calhoun” or “No Taste Hawkins.”
At any rate, it's no stretch at all to argue that without the blues and its influence, rock and roll music would never have come to be. The foundation of the blues structure and its derivatives is what rock is built on. No blues, no Elvis Presley, no Buddy Holly, no Jerry Lee Lewis, no Little Richard, no Chuck Berry, no Rolling Stones, no Beatles, no Eric Clapton, no Led Zeppelin, no whoever you like, most probably. So, THANK YOU, MISSISSIPPI!
Music picks from Mississippi? I'm excluding all the bluesmen from my choices. Too many favorites in there.
Best Band: The two sons of well-known, well-respected musician and producer Jim Dickinson formed the North Mississippi Allstars in 1996. Luther and Cody Dickinson, along with Chris Chew cooked up a funky hybrid of bluegrass and blues from the North Mississippi hill country where they're from. It's good stuff. They've been nominated for a slew of Grammys in the Best Contemporary Blues category.
Best Solo Musician: Steve Forbert. He one of the true authentic troubadours, this guy. He was born in Meridian in 1954. By grade school he'd fallen in love with music and started writing songs at seventeen. He moved to New York, played on the street, slept on couches in ratty apartments (think Llewyn Davis), got a record deal in 1978 and had a big hit the following year with Romeo's Tune. If you count chart success as the goal of a life in music, that was the high point for him. Fortunately for his fans, that's not been his goal, and he's gifted us with 21 albums over the years. If someone asked me to name the truest example of a folk singer alive today, I would say Steve Forbert.
Wildcard: Cory Branan grew up in Southhaven, just over the border from Memphis. His dad was a FedEx airline mechanic (Thanks for keeping those planes in the air). Cory started playing guitar young. He credits a high school teacher for encouraging him and recommending books outside the usual curriculum that helped his writing. In his early 20s he found John Prine's music and began to write songs and play at open mic nights at the Daily Planet in Memphis (the same place where Todd Snider was discovered). He released his first album, The Hell You Say in 2002 and appeared on David Letterman (back when shows like that meant something) in 2003. He's had a steady career and put out his most recent album in 2022. He lives in Memphis with his wife and son. He also autographed my wooden bar stool, and that is a story for another day.
Mississippi music, anyone?