Five of my favourite Mississippi-born musicians – maybe it’s something in the water

Recent comments from Jackson, Mississippi resident E.F. Bartiam led me to look up a list of well-known 20th Century musicians born in the state. I knew there were a lot of them – but the list is so long, the quality so ridiculously high, and there are so many personal favourites on it that even this lifelong fan of American “Roots” music was astonished. (You can read the list here.) Apart from Bo Diddley, there’s Elvis, Sam Cooke, Jimmy Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf and on and on and on.

Because most of them left the state before they were successful, we can’t point – as we can to, for instance, New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville or Chicago - to a generic sound created by powerful local record labels to explain the emergence of so many brilliant musicians in one region: there is no particular “Mississippi Sound”. All that these artists had in common, seemingly, was oodles of God-given musical talent. Maybe there’s just something in the water.

Rather than go for the more obvious stars, I’ve chosen five Mississippi-born musicians whose work I grew to love as an adult.

I’ll start with Mississippi John Hurt, the whisper-voiced folk/blues singer and guitarist (b. Avalon, 1892 or thereabouts – American place names often have an intriguing resonance which has nothing whatsoever to do with what they’re actually like, but it’s hard to imagine a more beautifully romantic-sounding birthplace than “Avalon, Mississippi”). I didn’t used to be that keen on acoustic blues (it still isn’t my favourite musical form), but after a friend lent me an album of Hurt’s classic 1928 recording some 25 years ago, I hardly played anything else for the next six months. I found the swirling delicacy of his guitar playing and the intimate, human quality of his wavery voice mesmerising: he was one of those singers you just instantly know you’d have liked as a human being. Hard to pick a favourite track, but “Nobody’s Dirty Business” and “Ain’t No Tellin’” are particularly beautiful. (I can play the latter on the guitar fairly accurately, and I’ve got his “Candy Man Blues” down pat.)

John Hurt spent most of his life in utter obscurity in Mississippi, until a collector discovered one of his original 78s, “Avalon Blues”, which contains the lines “Avalon, my hometown/Always on my mind” – and found Hurt still living there in 1963. He was convinced to relocate to Washington DC, where the Library of Congress recorded him. His appearances on the coffee-house circuit led to a vogue for rediscovering forgotten Delta bluesmen. Hurt died back in Mississippi in 1966.

Charlie Feathers (b. Holly Springs, 1932) left Sun after Sam Phillips (who, weirdly, didn’t rate him) refused to release “Tongue-Tied Jill” on the grounds that it might prove offensive to the speech defects community. Feathers then cut some truly splendid roughhouse rockabilly classics for Meteor and King, but never sold that much. He spend most of the next twenty years toiling away in obscurity until the UK's 1970s’ Rockabilly Revival introduced him to a new generation of fans (including me – I saw him perform at a terrific Rainbow Theatre concert in London in 1977, on a bill with Jack Scott, Warren Smith and Buddy Knox - you can hear a selection from that very performance here). Until he died in 1998 Feathers suffered from the delusion that dark forces within the music industry had somehow cheated him out of millions of dollars. It’s a pity he didn’t live long enough to pick up the cheque that would have resulted from two of his best tracks – “That Certain Female” and the bluesy “Can’t Hardly Stand It” - being featured by Quentin Tarantino on the soundtrack of his Kill Bill movies.

Feathers was about as rough and rural as Rockabilly got – he sounded like the embodiment of razor-totin’ Dan in Carl Perkins’ “Dixie Fried”. My favourites are “One Hand Loose” (what a fabulous opening), the equally energetic “Bottle to the Baby”, and the lovely little country ballad, “Man in Love”, which was later covered – without irony – by English rocker, Nick Lowe.

Marty Stuart (b. Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1958) started playing mandolin for bluegrass giant, Lester Flatt, at age 14, then worked with legendary blind flatpicker, Doc Watson, before becoming Johnny Cash’s lead guitarist (he was married to Cash’s daughter for five years). He released a bluegrass album in 1982, and recorded a country follow-up towards the end of the decade, but his big break came in 1990, when the hard-edged, rockabilly-ish, Hot Country single “Hillbilly Rock” made the Country Top 10 (see below - sorry about the Mullet, and I could swear my brother appears as one of the dancers, but that seems unlikely).

His bestselling – and best – album, This One’s Gonna Hurt You, came out in 1992, and blew my socks off. During a period when Country was being taken over by gutless MOR “hat” acts, Stuart represented a more traditional, Sun Records/Bakersfield Sound tradition (he’s a serious country music memorabilia collector – this stuff means something to him). His career’s been patchy, as has his material (he got caught in a self-repeating rut in the late ‘90s), but he seems to be back on track, and now has his own deliberately hokey country show on TV (which occasionally pops up on an obscure Sky channel over here). Stuart’s version of “Doing My Time” (see him performing it live with Johnny Cash below), is wonderful, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the rather lovely, poppy country ballad, “Till I Found You”.

When the founder of The Staple Singers, Roebuck “Pops” Staples (b. Winona, 1914), died, two of his daughters presented Marty Stuart with the Telecaster the Great Man had used on a recording of “The Weight” they’d done together. There comes a time in every Tele-owner’s life when you get that mesmerising reverb and tremolo-drenched Pops Staples’ sound, but you don’t quite know what to do with it – Pops applied it to Gospel music, and, especially when combined with daughter’s Mavis’s awesome voice, the effect is quasi-mystical. “I’m Coming Home”, made in 1959, at the start of the group’s recording career, strikes me as one of the greatest religious recordings ever made. It’s right up there with The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi’s glorious “Our Father” - again, what is it about Mississippi?

I’ll end with another superb voice backed by great guitar playing. Jerry Butler (b. Sunflower, 1939) was the original lead singer with The Impressions, with whom he cut the gospel-tinged classic, “For Your Precious Love”. While I’ve always known about his work with the group, I only recently became aware of the brilliant tracks he cut after going solo in the 1960s, most of which were written by erstwhile Impressions colleague, Curtis Mayfield, who I presume is playing the lovely, airy guitar parts on “Find Another Girl” and “I’m Telling You”. Butler is apparently now a prominent Cook County, Chicago politician. What a come-down!