The Mississippi Country Music Trail unveiled its 29th marker earlier this summer and it featured a little bit of Calhoun County.
The marker, the first out-of-state marker on the Mississippi Country Music Trail, was placed at 1111 16th Avenue South in Nashville, the home of Big Loud Shirt Industries, an independently owned and operated music publishing company established in 2003 by multiple award winning songwriter and producer Craig Wiseman. Among the many Mississippi musicians featured on the marker are the Poe Sisters, natives of Big Creek.
“Nashville country music stardom attracted many performers, songwriters and producers from nearby Mississippi, from Jimmie Rodgers to Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Moe Bandy and Faith Hill,” said Visit Mississippi Director Malcolm White. “Seeking opportunities for advancement and versatility, our talented musicians carried with them to Nashville a type of Mississippi soul, a reverberation of the deep South, heard through their blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues influenced country music sound.”
Even before Nashville became the home of country recording studios, publishers and managers, musicians journeyed to the city. Jimmie Rodgers, the former brakeman turned star vaudevillian who’d be deemed “the man who started it all,” played a midnight show on the 700-seat Hollywood showboat, docked at the Cumberland River in 1932, and among the Opry’s early vocal stars were The Poe Sisters, billed as “the female Delmore Brothers.”
The Poe sisters were raised in Big Creek playing music with their family at home, for local dances, political rallies and other events. After moving north for World War II production jobs at General Electric, the sisters landed a show on Bridgeport, Connecticut radio station WICC. The radio spots helped them book personal appearances, including the famous Stage Door Canteen in New York, entertaining American and allied soldiers.
After moving back to the South, in June 1944 the Poe Sisters secured an audition for the Grand Ole Opry, where they played the timely “We’re in the Army, Too,” and were hired immediately.
They were soon singing on the Opry every Saturday night and traveling during the week with the Opry tent show headlined by Ernest Tubb.
The Poe Sisters made no commercial recordings during their short career (1944-46) due to wartime rationing of materials needed to produce records, but a few live recordings of Opry performances survive.
In 1946, Ruth and Nelle put their careers aside to marry and raise families. Nelle returned to making music after retiring to Mountain View, a folk music center in the Ozarks.
Mississippi-raised artists often arrived in the booming Nashville scene of the 1950s and ’60s ready to fill multiple musical roles. Philadelphia, Mississippi’s Bob Ferguson would manage Ferlin Huskey, write “Wings of a Dove,” and become one of the key producers at RCA Victor Records in the Nashville Sound era. Conway Twitty, country’s “High Priest” from Friar’s Point, would forge a career in rockabilly, then become one of the field’s all-time balladeers–solo and in duets with Loretta Lynn. Johnny Russell, from Moorhead, would write “Act Naturally,” become a publishing executive, and eventually forge a career as a singer himself.
Remembered and summoned up in such recorded songs of longing, love, loss and nostalgia as Rodgers’ “Miss the Mississippi and You,” Pride’s “Mississippi Cotton Picking Delta Town,” Gentry’s “Chickasaw County Child,” McAnally’s “Where I Come From,” Stuart’s “Let There Be Country” and Hill’s “Mississippi Girl,” their starting place seemed always with them, and always in Nashville’s country.
Mississippi entertainers have been key stars of the Grand Ole Opry since the 1940s, including the Poe Sisters, Nellie & Ruth; Pete Pyle, leader of the Mississippi Valley Boys; announcer T. Tommy Cutrer, on Flatt & Scruggs’ show; and comedians Jerry Clower and Rod Brasfield.