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Thanks for the great tribute to Mississippi!

Sure, when people think of music and Mississippi, they think blues, but did y'all know that Hattiesburg is the birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll too?

Read on...

IS HATTIESBURG THE BIRTH PLACE OF ROCK AND ROLL?
October 18, 1996
http://www.lib.usm.edu/~archives/blind.htm

Have you ever wondered why a local radio station signs on by saying, "Coming to you from Hattiesburg, the birth place of rock and roll. Look it up."? One reason may be that in the book The Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, published by Rolling Stone magazine, two songs recorded in Hattiesburg in 1936 by native Mississippi musicians are identified as possibly the earliest rock and roll recordings.

The two songs are "Barbecue Bust" and "Dangerous Woman." They were recorded in Hattiesburg in 1936 by the Mississippi Jook Band, consisting of the legendary Blind Roosevelt Graves singing vocals and playing guitar and his brother Uaroy Graves on tambourine and kazoo. They were joined for the recording session by one of Mississippi's most influential musicians, Cooney Vaughn, who played piano.

According to the Rolling Stone history, "The Graves brothers of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who recorded 'rocking and reeling' spirituals for Paramount in 1929, made several blues records as the Mississippi Jook Band in 1936. Their 'Barbecue Bust' and 'Dangerous Woman' featured fully formed rock & roll guitar riffs and a stomping rock & roll beat."

Roosevelt Graves was born in Rose Hill near Meridian. After World War II, Graves moved to Gulfport, where he is said to have died in 1960. Piano player Cooney Vaughn performed weekly on radio station WCOC in Meridian prior to World War II.

In 1936 Paramount Records talent scout and Jackson furniture store owner H.C. Speir located the Graves Brothers, whom he had recorded in Indiana in 1929, performing in a church in McComb and arranged for them to do a second recording session in Hattiesburg.

To play piano in the Hattiesburg session, Speir chose Cooney Vaughn, described by Ed Komara, archivist in the Blues Archives at the University of Mississippi, as an influential live performer in Hattiesburg, where musicians from the Delta and New Orleans on their way by train to a gig would stop over in The Hub City to hear Vaughn play.

The combination of Vaughn's uninhibited piano style with the religious feeling and musical versatility of the Graves Brothers resulted in a the beginnings of a new type of music -- rock and roll.

....but did y'all know that Hattiesburg is the birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll too?

I sure didn't. That is very interesting. I didn't come across that information when I was researching Mississippi. I appreciate it so much when the "locals" come and add interesting information about their state to the thread.

From what I have seen and read, Mississippi is a great place to live and a fun place to visit. Thanks for helping us celebrate your state.

Hattiesburg is the birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll, and Meridian is the home of Jimmy Rodgers, the Grandfather of Country Music.

My grandaddy played with his band, and my mother still has the ukelele he used at that time.

The Father of Country Music. That's a heavy load for a scrawny, tubercular ex-railroader who set out only to prove to the folks back home in Meridian, Mississippi, that he wasn't the shiftless no-count they all thought he was.

When Jimmie Rodgers arrived on the scene, there was no such thing as 'country music.' It was just beginning to be called 'hillbilly' - and whatever it was, Jimmie Rodgers wasn't much interested. He dressed in the latest uptown-style box-back coat, bow tie, and snappy straw boater and cultivated a broad repertoire which, at the outset at least, leaned decidedly in the direction of current hits from Tin Pan Alley: Who's Sorry Now?, I'll See You In My Dreams, How Come You Do Me Like You Do?, and similar pop fare of the 1920's.

From the beginning, however, Jimmie Rodgers was nothing if not versatile. Over the years, scuffling from town to town as an itinerant brakeman and would-be entertainer, he had absorbed the haunting blues music of his Southern upbringing and the rowdy, colorful ballads of railroaders and rounders all across the land. So, when he met up with a big-time record producer who wanted 'old-timey' folk songs, or original compositions that sounded like them, it was altogether natural that he turned to the simple, plaintive, often whimsical music sung and played among the ordinary people he'd known from childhood. "They want these old-fashioned things," he told his wife. "Love songs and plantation melodies and the old river ballads. Well, I'm ready with 'em. And I've got some new ideas for songs too, in the back of my head - when I get 'em worked out."

The new songs he called 'blue yodels.' They combined the raw energy of jazz and the poetry of the blues with that particularly rustic, home-spun vocal embellishment known as the yodel. Add a driving, eloquent guitar and Rodger's personal magnetism - the cocky little boy grin and the winsome drawl, along with a heady sense of someone who'd done hard-traveling and lived to tell about it - and you have the beginnings of country music, even if it didn't get it's proper name for another twenty years.

JIMMIE RODGERS