Hello, I'm Charlie Worsher, your host for Mississippi on the Map, a podcast brought to you by Visit Mississippi. This podcast explores why Mississippi is the birthplace of America's music.
Governor Barbour, thank you so much for taking the time to sit with me for this interview for the Mississippi on the Map podcast. You grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, son of a lawyer and circuit judge. You had a brother who would go on to become the city's mayor and a cousin who was a federal district judge. So, it would seem that law, politics, and public service run the family. Of course, you took that mantle and became a two-term governor of the state of Mississippi, and you led recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and you coined the phrase upon which this podcast was founded, Mississippi, birthplace of America's music. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Well, Charlie, thank you for having me. I have to confess that I didn't actually coin the phrase. Leland Speed, who was a very successful businessman here, and he volunteered to become my head of economic development. And Leland came to me very early in my administration with the idea that we ought to adopt the truth. Mississippi is the birthplace of America's music.
That's right. Well, you certainly are the big reason why that phrase, though you may not have coined it, it's on all those beautiful signs when you cross the state line and always fills my heart with pride when I'm driving home and I read those words. So, thank you for that.
Well, we appreciate you carrying on the tradition.
Yes, sir. Well, I'm very curious. What kind of music played in the house when you were growing up?
My daddy died when I was two. So my mother raised my two older brothers and me and she played big band music. The Dorsey brothers, Glenn Miller, Lawrence Welk later. But then one of my brothers, my oldest brother went off to college and he came back and he played country music all the time. And he loved Johnny Cash and he just loved country music. But when I got to be about 15 and I had my own room, then I turned on the rock and roll.
Yes. Okay. And that's what I really, that's not what I grew up around, but it's what the music that I adopted was that of my teenage years and my college years and that was rhythm and blues, rock and roll. We still had a little Johnny Cash, of course.
Well, you know, he's just across the river in Arkansas. Same river, just different bank. You can almost claim him.
Well, we got a fun story to tell that has to do with that country music trail that you helped make possible as well that has to do with Johnny Cash in Mississippi. We'll get there. Do you remember maybe a first time, just the earliest connection you made to the music you loved and the place where you were growing up, the place where you were from?
I didn't pay a lot of attention to music until I got to be in high school and learned about girls and stuff like that. By then, we were into real rock and roll. There was some country music that was played, but when you'd go to an event or something, it was mostly rock and roll and then finally the Beatles invasion. But then we bounced back to a lot more, I guess they called it crossover music where it was rock and roll singers singing country songs and country singers singing rock and roll songs and that was part of my teenage years and I still enjoy that.
I'd have to imagine Elvis Presley was one of those rock and rollers that you enjoyed. Speaking of the birthplace of American music.
That's right. You know, my wife and I had the privilege of seeing Elvis play in Las Vegas. I knew one of the guys in the band, Duke Bardwell. Duke had played bass for the Greek Fountains, which when I was in college was a hugely popular college band from LSU. And had no idea that Duke played with Elvis and we're sitting in some pretty good seats and I said, 'Marsh, that guy looks familiar to me. That guy playing bass.' So I afterwards being a little forward, I went back and I gave a card to a policeman and asked him to give it to Duke Bardwell. Dang, he didn't just come out. There he was. And he said Elvis had gone to his suite between, you know, they put on more than one show. And so I didn't get to meet Elvis, but I got to see him perform and he was every bit as great as the legend.
Absolutely. I bet he was. And you would have to have been able to make that connection of, you know, here's somebody that's from where I'm from, so to speak.
That's right. By the time I was old enough to appreciate he was living in Memphis, but we all knew he was from Mississippi. And because everybody's proud of it.
Well, and as Marty Stewart says, Memphis is just north Mississippi in some ways.
Well, you know, Charlie, funny when I was growing up and started getting interested in politics, I learned that the biggest newspaper publication in Mississippi was the Memphis Commercial Appeal, but it was bigger than any other Mississippi newspaper.
You hail from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and it's home to quite a few notable characters. Michael Henderson, a jazz fusion and R&B bassist who worked with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, put out records of his own. Fletcher Cox, who played football for the Philadelphia Eagles. Willie Brown, football player for the Denver Broncos.
All-Pro, all-time All-Pro.
Yes, sir. Stella Stevens, an actress who starred actually alongside Elvis Presley in the movie Girls! Girls! Girls!. Zig Ziglar. And I remember driving to banjo lessons with my mom and listening to Zig Ziglar motivational tapes on cassette when cassettes were the coin of the realm. But my favorite I have to say is Willie Morris. And I want to ask you more about Willie Morris, but I was just curious growing up in Yazoo, did you personally know any of these legendary hometown folks or did you have a chance to watch their career unfold and draw inspiration from that in the sense of, hey, if they're from here and they made it big somehow maybe I can too.
Well, I didn't know Zig Ziglar until I was grown, but I had a chance to be with him a couple of times. And he was from Zigglerville, which is a crossroads in Yazoo County. And Zig is hysterical. I like him because of his politics. He came up to my office in Washington for George W. Bush's inaugural parade. Our office at the time was on Pennsylvania Avenue, so the parade went right by. So, we had a nice crowd of people and Zig was one of them. And a fella asked Zig, 'Zig, if you weren't a Republican, what would you be?' He said, 'Embarrassed.' And Zig Ziglar was funny. I mean, he just had a way with words. Of course, we had another great talker, Jerry Clower.
So, I found this out at lunch because I was always under the impression he was from Liberty, Mississippi. And I guess he maybe was born there, but he lived in Yazoo.
That's right. He grew up out from Liberty. He went to Mississippi State and then when he graduated from Mississippi State, he came to work at Mississippi Chemical Corporation as a fertilizer salesman.
Okay. We used to say Jerry was the third funniest fertilizer salesman at Mississippi Chemical. He just the only one that could tell jokes in mixed company, right?
And Jerry used to say that he never told a joke for money that he couldn't have told in Sunday school. And that's very true. But he was wickedly funny.
We had some other people that were pretty famous. If you miss one football player, General Ben Williams. General Ben played defensive end for Buffalo for 10 years. Of course, Owen Cooper. Who was the CEO of Mississippi Chemical, which was our flagship industry and still a very important industry in Yazoo City. Mr. Cooper had children. One of his daughters was in my class and so I knew him very well. But he became head of the Baptist, National Baptist church. You know the organization and so he was quite famous in the religious world as well as a great businessman. And I was thinking there was one other somebody. But Yazoo City is a nice town. When I grew up there it was about 10,000 people. Half black, half white. It had very good schools and one of the reasons our schools were so good, Mississippi Chemical had about 80 engineers who worked at Mississippi Chemical out of 600 employees. And so many of those engineers' wives had gone to college and they were smart and the best job they could get was teaching school. So I was blessed with great school teachers because of the way our little town was made up.
Wow. It sounds like the inverse of one of my favorite Jerry Clower jokes of talking about people that are educated beyond their intelligence. This is people who are intelligence beyond the education perhaps available to them at the time. I can't get over Jerry Clower being from Yazoo spending that time because he is adored in Nashville where I hang my hat.
Well, of course, Grand Ole Opry. Well, he was country music comedian of the year for about 10 years in a row. He was just, and he was as nice a man as you ever met. My family's law firm, you mentioned a bunch of lawyers in the Barbour family. And our family law firm represented Jerry. And I'll never forget he and my uncle William, senior partner, my dad's little brother, went up to Nashville for Jerry to enter into a contract with somebody. And after the meeting was over and Jerry and Uncle William and everybody had signed, Uncle William said he told Jerry, 'Jerry, you better hope these people are honest because I don't know anything about what we just did.' And it worked out fine for Jerry.
Worked out. That's good. Well, I said it before, I'll say it again. I have to admit my favorite Yazooan is Willie Morris. And I was raised on Good Old Boy and the Witch of Yazoo and My Dog Skip.
Well, Willie was 11 years older than I and but we lived in the same neighborhood. We literally lived a block and a half from each other. And he lived next door to the Greyber family who had four boys. And then my family had three boys and Miss Greyber sometimes on a Saturday or something would have errands to run and she'd get Willie to come across the yard and sit on the front porch and watch us to make sure that nobody got run over by a truck on Grand Avenue or nobody got hurt. But I knew Willie from my childhood. And then as life would have it, he came back into my life two different times. Once he became the artist in residence at Ole Miss when I was up there and secondly, his mama died when I was a young lawyer and I did the will, the estate with him. And he was just a character. I mean, I was like I say I was 11 years younger than him. I just happened to know that from being asked about Willie so many times. But golly he was funny. He was just wicked. He was funny in a very different way from Jerry Clower. He was very, very sophisticated and his life is really laid out in his books. North Toward Home.
That's what I wanted to talk about and ask you about because I read North Toward Home which for those listening who don't know is sort of a memoir of his life and he spent time in Austin, Texas at the University of Texas I believe. Spent time in Oxford, England as a Rhodes Scholar. And then he became the youngest editor and chief of Harper's magazine. He was a Mississippian who traveled far beyond the state's borders as he writes in North Toward Home and as I connected with, found a deeper meaning and appreciation for where he was from by getting out of the state and then coming back. And I was curious because like Willie Morris, you spent much of your life representing Mississippi far and abroad. What about Mississippi and Mississippians do people tend to get wrong?
Well, because of the civil rights movement and I mean you go all the way back to the Civil War for when I'm old enough to remember when people still talked about the Civil War. In fact, when I was a junior at Yazoo High, everybody had to have a Civil War notebook in our American history class. We studied the Civil War and going through the Civil Rights Movement, the fact is that there's a lot that doesn't shine brightly on Mississippi. You know, there's no reason for segregation. It's indefensible. But it's what we grew up with. And fortunately, you as well as I, we lived long enough to see the end of it and to see how much better it was without it. And in a town like Yazoo City, which is still about, well, it's probably a black majority today because of people moving in from the farms over the last 50 years. It's so much better place to live when you don't have that getting in the way. And you learn that by getting away from it and coming back and seeing the improvement. You know, birthplace of America's music. But I will tell you, I think with Katrina that probably Mississippi's image was improved by our reaction to Katrina. And part of what they saw was that black people and white people got treated just alike. They, you know, if you were white and qualified for this or that kind of federal relief, you got it. And if you're black, you qualified for it, you got it. And there wasn't any question about it. We got great reviews nationally. And it wasn't just the people at state government. My mama used to say crisis and catastrophe do not create character but they reveal character. And what was revealed to the people of the United States and the world was the people of Mississippi got knocked down flat, got back up, hitched up their britches and went to work and helped themselves and helped their neighbors.
So, it sounds to me like what you're saying and I'm hearing this from my own experiences having been fortunate to travel the world playing music. And I still tell people I'm from Mississippi. I've lived in Nashville for 19 years now and I, 'Where you from?' 'From Mississippi.' But there are some stereotypes that are certainly based on the truth about Mississippi's full story. And there are some dark chapters there, but if you ascribe those stereotypes to a Mississippian that you meet, it's probably the furthest thing from the truth usually. You know, it's probably the furthest thing from the truth in terms of there being hate in their heart. I would also say that, you know, there are the stereotypes of people running around barefoot and all that. And I would humbly remind the person in that situation that William Faulkner was from Mississippi and he knew how to string words together and there are actually quite a few intellectuals with some big ideas to come from this state. But it does seem that Mississippi has to get across that speed bump of stereotypes still today.
Well, long history but you're right about Mr. Faulkner or Eudora Welty or Willie Morris. That's right. There's so many great writers from Mississippi just like there's so many great musicians from Mississippi. And I would say courageous people who spoke truth to power. You know, I was just at the civil rights museum and I'm going to ask you about that because I know you had a major role to play in it being in existence, but a lot of the heroes of the civil rights story are also from Mississippi. Oh, well, there's no question about that. But when you look at what has happened in Mississippi in the last 50 years, there's no state that's made more progress than we have. And the Civil Rights Museum, I'm very, very proud of it. I did propose it to the legislature and I'm proud of how they passed it. You know, we had a legislature that was pretty conservative, but they funded it. They never missed a step in funding it every year. After I was governor, when Phil Bryant was governor, still they funded it every year. 80% of the money in the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson is state taxpayer money, which I thought and still think is better for Mississippians that we paid for it. It didn't get paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation or by some group from New York or whatever. Mississippians paid for it. And Leland Speed again was the one who said to me, 'Let's let this be something we pay for.'
Leland Speed being the person you mentioned who coined the phrase of birthplace of America's music also played a role in that museum coming to be.
He did. And two other guys that deserve a whole lot of credit are William Winter and Reuben Anderson. Reuben Anderson was the first African-American Supreme Court justice. He went to law school at Ole Miss with one of my brothers. And that's how I got to know him. He was a circuit judge in Yazoo County.
You mentioned that my grandfather had that job in the 1940s.
Wow. And Reuben and William came to me. I had proposed the Civil Rights Museum in 2007. It didn't pass because there was an argument between Jackson and Tougaloo. The Jackson Downtown Association wanted it downtown. They wanted it where it turned out to be put. But Tougaloo was really the hotbed of the civil rights movement in Mississippi when it was all going on. Reuben went to school there. And so that was a real serious thing. Which one was going to get it? And Reuben and William came to see me and said, 'Don't let that be the issue.' The place where the most people will get to see it. And the place where it'll be the most heralded is if you put it in downtown Jackson. And there is a block sitting there where they were going to put a Mississippi history museum, not a civil rights museum. So William said, 'Let's tilt them both. Let's put them both there.'
Okay. Yeah. And so they actually make a T. The one's the Mississippi history museum and the other civil rights museum.
I was just there today and it is a world-class facility and I was just blown away. It pulls no punches in telling our story. And I was very in awe of being within those walls. Because I plan to bring my family to see it once our kids are old enough. I think it's something that they can be proud of and it doesn't sugarcoat it.
No, nor should it. It's powerful. And it tells the whole story.
And as we were touring the exhibits today, oh the man's name escapes me. I will learn it. But he was one of the youngest to participate in the sit-ins and the freedom marches and he's still there giving speeches and inspiring the next generation and it was a pretty cool thing to see for a kid growing up in Grenada. Hezekiah Watkins, that's who I saw. He was standing in the middle of that beautiful rotunda telling his story to a whole new generation. And why, you are so largely responsible for that museum taking place, Governor Barbour, and I want to thank you for that. Why is it so important for us to preserve the story of Mississippi, even those darkest chapters?
Well, there was a great philosopher once who said, 'If you fail to learn history, you are doomed to repeat it.' And that is what is very true not only about civil rights in the United States. I mean there are other countries in the world where they've got tremendously bad history because of X or Y. The Germans.
I was just in Berlin and they keep portions of the wall up and they have markers telling the story of everything that led to World War II. And it is important. It mattered to me as someone visiting that city to see that history still standing.
There is a reason throughout history we have tried to protect our history and so people can learn from it and learn from the mistakes as well as learn to celebrate the victories.
That's right. And sometimes they're woven pretty tightly together, those moments.
It was right here in the Mississippi Delta where more than 100 years ago, black sharecroppers and laborers gave America its own musical identity. Drawing on the sounds and traditions of their native Africa and the struggle of their American experience, the blues was born. This land was the epicenter of musical creativity, offering Saturday night liberation and salvation. On Sunday morning, the sounds of Mississippi gave rise to gospel, gave country music its twang, gave R&B its soul, jazz its blue note, and rock and roll its king. If you love music, there's no better place to discover its roots and its future than in Mississippi, the birthplace of America's music.
I did want to ask you about this Mississippi Country Music Trail, and I'm going to get into it a little backwards than I had planned. Because I have to tell you about my particular favorite marker that y'all put up. But on the Mississippi Country Music Trail, there's a marker honoring Jim Weatherly, who wrote Midnight Train to Georgia and who attended the University of Mississippi in the 60s. He was a star player on the Ole Miss football team in 1962, the same year that James Meredith desegregated the school. That September at the University saw riots and upheaval. Even as the school's football team would go on to achieve a perfect 10-0 season, they won the SEC title and finished the season with a win against Arkansas in the 1963 Sugar Bowl. Knowing that you attended the
University of Mississippi, just a few years after Jim Weatherly's time there, I'd love if you could take me back to your years at Ole Miss. Share your experience perhaps through the lens of civil rights. And also I'm curious if your time at Ole Miss in the wake of desegregation was influential in your vision for that civil rights museum.
Meredith came in in the fall of '62, and I came in the fall of '65. So Meredith had graduated by the time I was there, but the school was integrated by the time I was there. I'll never forget, I used to play baseball in the summers and I played baseball for a Jackson team. And in the summer I would go to Millsaps and take college courses in the morning and then play ball in the afternoon or at night. And so when I got to Ole Miss my freshman year, I didn't have to take freshman English. I'd already taken it. And so I was in sophomore lit and I sat next to an African-American girl who just was sweet as she could be and nice. And after about a month, I figured out she'd lend me her notes and let me go copy them in the library and give them back to her because I wouldn't say I was bad about going to class, but I wasn't a perfect attender. If you get my drift. Vera Lee Bailey was her name and she was from somewhere up in North Mississippi. She was great and we had a very friendly relationship and when I was in student government I got to know the head of the Black Student Union very well and stayed friends with him for years afterwards. He's not living anymore. But the race relations in Yazoo City were such that it wasn't that big a change for me. I mean, yes, the schools here were segregated, but yes, I had a lot of black friends, so I was very comfortable. It wasn't perfect. I got to be head of the concert committee in student government. So I brought in six shows a year and I had James Brown, I had Johnny Mathis, I had Dionne Warwick.
I had the Mamas and the Papas. We had just super, super music and the audiences, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people just totally integrated. And when we had James Brown, the Black Student Union threatened to have a demonstration. And I said, "Why in the world do you want to have a demonstration when everybody wants to come see James Brown?"
So they went back and talked about it and said, "If you'll give us some good seating, we won't do it." And I said, "Okay." So, here you go.
But it wasn't, like I say, it wasn't perfect.
But a lot had changed since 1962, right? You know, when I got there, there were only 5,200 students in the student body.
And that 5,200 was the smallest in several years. Attitudinally, I felt like I learned from it. I always felt that way as I entered college, you know, that I was entering a bigger world and there was an experience there to learn from for sure, but I carried with me where I was from and the community I grew up in. And it sounds like the community you grew up in in Yazoo had figured out a few things for themselves beyond the letters on the law books of the day, so to speak, which I admire that. I mentioned that country music trail and I was speaking with Marty Stuart for this podcast not long ago and he tells me that you are largely responsible for giving that green light so that we could have a country music trail. In addition to our blues trail, and of course it makes sense, the father of country music, Jimmie Rodgers, is from Mississippi just like the king of rock and roll and the king of the blues are from Mississippi. Of course Elvis Presley and B.B. King. My favorite marker on the country music trail that I was looking through tells a story of when Johnny Cash got arrested for picking wild flowers in the middle of the night in Starkville, Mississippi. And I know that because I played the flower picking festival some years later. He memorialized the tale in his song Starkville City Jail. But I was curious if you could tell me a little bit more about how that country music trail came to be. And why is it so important that we have a country music trail in addition to the blues trail? And Mississippi gets credit for great writers,
You know, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, and you just go down...
Sure. John, but we never got the kind of credit we ought to have for the musicians that came out of here. I don't remember who. Somebody on my staff actually brought the idea to me, somebody that worked at economic development. And of course we had a part of our economic development was music. They said why don't we try to do a country music trail. We'd already done the blues trail if I remember right. It fell together and of course the Starkville City Jail is one of the markers as you say because Johnny Cash, who would sometimes maybe drink a little more than he ought to, after his show in Starkville at Mississippi State, went out and had a few and ended up being found sitting in a lady's yard picking flowers. And he wasn't trying to get in or anything. He's just sitting there picking flowers.
Yeah. Maybe getting a bouquet for June to apologize. But there's a hotel in Jackson, the Westin, that has a photograph. It's, I think it's kind of a fake photograph but it's clearly the image of Johnny Cash with his inmate number.
Yeah. Got a mug shot there. I love it.
Got the mug shot. That's exactly right.
Yeah. Johnny Cash may not have been from Mississippi, but this is where he comes to get his mug shots taken. Well, I tell you something. He was very nice.
And he and June Carter were married by then and they had the Carter girls that did the show with him at Ole Miss.
