I had to drive five thousand miles from home to figure out what was sitting in my own front yard.
It happened in 2011, at a bed and breakfast outside San Donato in the Tuscan countryside. A British cover band was playing American rock and roll in Italian. We sat at a communal table with two women who’d driven down from Milan, and somewhere between the primi and the panna cotta, one of them asked where I lived.
“Hattiesburg,” I said. “It’s in Mississippi.”
“Like the river?” she said. That’s what they all say over there.
“No, it’s a state, too.” That’s what I always say over there. Life in the Landmass.
So, I started in on the geography lesson. I was born in a hospital on Highway 49. If one follows 49 north into the Delta, it crosses Highway 61, and at that intersection you’re standing where the blues were born. And if you believe Muddy Waters— and I do— he said, “The blues had a baby and they named the baby rock and roll,” you can drive east a couple of hours to Tupelo and walk through the shotgun house where Elvis was born. Continue south on Highway 45 from Tupelo and you’ll land in Meridian, hometown of Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. Get on Interstate 59 south out of Meridian and you’ll wind up back in Hattiesburg, where the circle closes.
Halfway down 45, it hit me.
Mississippi really IS the birthplace of America’s music.
I’d seen that slogan on road signs entering the state, and in tourism brochures for years. Always figured it came from somebody in marketing. But I wasn’t seeing the forest for the pine trees.
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll names a 1936 recording by Roosevelt Graves and the Mississippi Jook Band as the first rock and roll song ever recorded. That is 20 years before Cleveland claims the title. Fully formed rock and roll guitar riffs. A stomping rock and roll beat. Recorded in Hattiesburg. Yes, THAT Hattiesburg. Two miles from the hospital where I was born.
Nobody told me that growing up. I doubt anyone told you, either.
That haunted me for a while. The average Mississippian, born and raised here, has probably never stood on the front porch of Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo. Has never walked through the B.B. King Museum in Indianola. Has never sat at a table in Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville and watched the cooks bring out a porterhouse the size of your face. Has never stopped at McCarty’s Pottery in Merigold to watch a piece come up off the wheel. Has never walked through the little room with John Anderson at the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs. Has never had a bowl of seafood gumbo at Mary Mahoney’s, served in a building older than the country.
That’s a shame. Period. End of story.
People say Texans take their state pride to the limit. I have that, times 10, for Mississippi. I am seventh-generation, Pine Beltian to the bone, and the older I get the louder I get about it. This is the most under-visited state in the union, and most of the people who don’t visit couldn’t find Merigold on a map.
The Europeans see Mississippi as an exotic locale. It took me seeing my home state through their eyes to really understand what we have here.
The blues were born here. So was rock and roll, recorded in my hometown before Cleveland was running the numbers. Country music’s father was born and raised an hour and a half north of where I am typing this. Faulkner sat under an oak in Oxford and rewrote what the American sentence could do. Down in Jackson, Eudora Welty was making stories out of porch conversations. Out on the Gulf, Walter Anderson rowed a skiff to Horn Island to paint what nobody else had bothered to see. B.B. King’s first note out of Indianola is still ringing true.
For all of that, we get apologized to. I have lost count of the number of times someone at a dinner party in some other city said, “Oh, Mississippi. I’m sorry.” I used to bristle. I don’t anymore. Those people are wrong, and being wrong is its own punishment. And why would I try and convince someone like that about what we have? They might move down here.
I have co-hosted two Mississippi tours in my life, and on both I had guests from all over the country. People who came down expecting one thing and went home with another. People who hugged my neck on day five and said they had to come back. I love turning people on to Mississippi.
Six years of saying “soon” finally caught up with me. I sat down with the Yonderlust leadership team last winter and put it on the calendar. June 15 through 19. We’re covering a majority of the state.
Each of these places is a piece of my life. Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville doesn’t look like much from the street and somehow turns into church when you sit down at a table. The shotgun house in Tupelo is small enough to walk through in two minutes, and most of the people I’ve taken there end up standing on the front porch for half an hour trying to imagine the boy who walked out of it and changed the world. The potters at McCarty’s in Merigold pull a piece of clay out of nothing the way other people pour coffee. Vasti Jackson has played Crescent City Grill so many times I could sing his set list backwards, and he plays every song like it’s the first time. The MAX in Meridian is the most underrated museum in the South, and you can quote me on that. The Walter Anderson Museum is a small building in a small town that holds work strong enough to put any gallery in Paris to shame, and Walter’s son John still walks through it answering questions like he’s got all the time in the world. Mary Mahoney’s has been pouring gumbo into bowls in Biloxi since 1964. I have lived a small chapter of my life at every one of these places. In June I’ll be taking a small group of Mississippians, and a few outsiders who get it, and letting them live a chapter of their own.
A long drive across a beautiful place is its own argument for being alive. So, I’m putting a bus on the road for five days. There will be a bar on it, because life is short and the Delta is long. Bill Ellison and Temperance Babcock and Jeff Bullard play live on one leg of the trip. Muddy Waters’ nephew takes another. None of that is the point. The bus is just the room we’re in while Mississippi rolls by the window.
I’m not trying to sell you a trip. The June bus is full. I’m trying to sell you on Mississippi. Get in your car this weekend and drive to Indianola or Ocean Springs or Tupelo on your own. You don’t need a bus or a guide to do any of it.
My Italian friends have been to Hattiesburg more than once. They come back. They tell their friends. To them, Mississippi is an exotic land filled with people who eat together and ask strangers how their day is going. They see what we have stopped seeing.
I came home from Tuscany looking at my own state the way those Milan ladies looked at it. Like a place that gave the world its music and never got a thank-you note. A place worth a five-thousand-mile drive in either direction.
I want to put Mississippians on a bus and drive them through it.
Onward.
