How can I say that? Because the only music I really care about is blues, rock and roll and old country. They are pretty much offshoots of each other and the only true American music.
You’ll notice I didn’t include modern country. That corporate-created pablum just gets on my nerves.
What about classical music? Blah. Yes, it’s pretty sounding and very precise, but it has all the gut appeal of organized bird sounds. A modern AI computer could come up with better.
What about opera? Blah again. Years ago I was forced to attend the opera once a year. (That’s a story all on its own.) Few things suck as badly as sitting in a concert hall, dressed in a hot suit and listening to fat people howling in Italian for two hours.
A one hour eight minute drive from Columbus is the town of Tupelo, the birthplace of Elvis Presley, the ultimate Mississippi boy. From whom all MODERN American popular music sprang. Everything that came before was just a warm up.
The Beatles? They started out as kinda nerdy fanboys of Elvis and Carl Perkins doing wimpy versions of Mississippi rock and roll.
The gold vein of music was mined from the hills of North Mississippi.
And it caught fire and spread through, not just America, but the entire civilized world. It contains the DNA of B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis and Muddy Waters and scores of not so well known guitar players and singers who built this music from scratch.
It DID NOT originate in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Nashville or California. Other than the Mississippians who migrated to those places, the rest are just copycats.
I never trust a Yankee with a guitar and a fake blues accent. They always end up becoming some version of soulless Taylor Swift or Beyonce.
If you really dig deep and look around, you will realize how surrounded you are in your daily life by all of it. My uncle’s farm is right up the gravel road from where one of B.B. King’s ex-wives lives. When one of my aunts passed away not long ago, the funeral home’s next guest of honor was Jerry Lee Lewis. This is Mississippi.
Before my friend and Columbus music icon Stevie O started teaching me to play guitar properly, an old black guy named Reed taught me my first chords.
He worked at CAFB where we lived at the time and felt pity on the scrawny 15 year old white kid struggling to even tune an instrument.
We all taught each other. And we learned from the best. We helped each other.
The summer their big hit “The Letter” topped the charts, the Box Tops’ bass player Bill Cunningham came down from Memphis to Columbus. He filled in for Bill Love, our bass man in the Rogues who was going to be out of town. The Box Tops were on a break for a few weeks, and he was a friend. Only in Mississippi would you find someone with a nationwide Top 10 hit sitting in with a band of high school rock and rollers to play dances!
One thing’s for sure. We didn’t need to teach him to play “The Letter.”
Mississippi even has its own brand of musical instruments and equipment designed for blues and rock and roll.
Working out of the basement of his dad’s music store in Meridian, Hartley Peavey started out hand building better quality versions of Fender and Vox amplifiers and turned Peavey Electronics into a world wide name.
Our guitar player Jack Smith, a friend of Hartley’s, had bought a large amp and speaker combo from him. Today it would have been worth very large bucks, being one of a very few made by Peavey’s own hands.
Unfortunately, Jack had installed wheels on the tall speaker cabinet. Playing a school dance in Amory one weekend, he stepped up to a microphone, pulling the curly guitar cord tight.
The whole setup rolled past the shocked Jack and flew off the 5-foot wooden stage, shattering into hundreds of pieces.
Just another Mississippi musical moment.
Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired motion picture scenic artist living in West Palm Beach, Florida who hails from Columbus. He graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his real hometown.
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