Music & Optimism

It looks like winter is just about over on Main Street.

And with the birds chirping in the morning, and the people pulling out their short pants, and the flowers and ideas daily stretching from bud to bloom, a substantial layer of optimism has taken its annual place alongside the pollen of the spring air in our little Mississippi town.

Things are happening.

The 4th Annual County Line Music Festival is approaching at a rapid pace.  Our #2 local festival (after October’s Okeelala) will complete its solar cycle on April 21st and sprawl across downtown from The Claude Gentry Theatre to the Azalea Court Main Stage.

There will be a first-time music video film festival going on at the theater starting at 2 pm.  We already have entries from Mississippi filmmakers in Jackson, West Point, Clarksdale and Clinton, expecting plenty more.  Couched around those original works will be three or four classic movies about music – think Elvis, the Beatles, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles – showing at 10 am, 12 pm and 4 pm.

An independent film called “The Gift” will also play during the day.  This critically-acclaimed short was shot on location in Tupelo in 2015 by Scottish filmmakers Gabriel Robertson and Ken Petrie (and co-stars local actress Amye Gousset).  You can take a guess as to what musical figure it might be based on.  Tupelo … know anyone from there?

Even our own Six Shooter Studios will get into the act as we release Marietta-native Chance Stanley’s debut video “Crosstie Town” to close-out the theater day.

Down on the Azalea Court Main Stage, the festivities will start bright and early at 9 am.  Baldwyn High School’s marching band will open the day with the national anthem, followed immediately by a stage full of talented and unique musical talents from across Mississippi. Ronnie Caldwell & JoJo Jefferies, The Sean Austin Band, Rust Bucket Roadies, TomFoolery, The Paul Tate Trio, Chance Stanley & The Michael Brothers, Of Warriors & Poets, Mark “Muleman” Massey & grammy-winner Billy Earheart, AND the 1st Baptist Church children’s choir will all entertain, from 9 to 5-ish.

Baldwyn’s Eric Nanney of the band Twenty Mile will host the Main Stage, and when he’s not doing that he’ll run down the street and help Paden Bell at County Line Music with their annual Singer-Songwriter competition, another huge part of the day’s events.

And the coupe de grace, for me at least, will be the All-Day Karaoke Contest at Tom’s Drug Store.  Yes, that Tom’s Drug Store.  The one with the big neon sign.  Bimbo Griffin, Stuart Cockrell, and I have been working on restoring that historic icon for, I think, 80 years now.  And finally – good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise – I’m actually going to let the public come inside.  The answer to whether or not patrons will truly have an option of drinking a milkshake or buying a hamburger made there that fateful day remains somewhat murky.  We’ll see.  But I know we can sell you a Coke, and you can sing your heart out with Scott Bratton and his karaoke machine, and you can look around at some of the neat things on display, graciously passed down to us by local historians Simon Spight and Claude Gentry.

Mixed in with all of this are a bunch of new businesses from one end of Main Street to the other that weren’t there last year.  Nothing but good in that.

So … spring has sprung, I guess.

I asked Eric Nanney if I could get in his singer-songwriter contest – I play guitar and fiddle around with music myself – and he said “sure.”  He said, “Just brush up a couple of the songs you’ve written and come on down.  We’ll have you a spot.”

I actually hadn’t written anything yet – I just figured I could do that sometime before April  21.  Maybe on the walk over.  Maybe I don’t have too good of a chance of winning, but I’m optimistic.

A Walk Along Baldwyn’s Historic Main Street – Part 1

A walk along Baldwyn’s historic Main Street …

Miss JESSIE ARCHER’s MILLINERY at 120 West Main Street:  As early as 1865, 120 West Main was the site of a cobbler shop owned by Irishman James Richey, who immigrated to America in 1849 and whose descendants – including Forest Grisham, C. V. Grisham and Sam B. Richey – created businesses in Baldwyn and the surrounding area for generations.  Soon after the turn of the 20^th century, this historic corner passed to Miss Jessie Archer, a teacher, author and businesswoman.  When she was only 19, the near-deaf Archer penned a widely-acclaimed poem which told of the tragic loss of a legendary purple shell, said to endow the Chickasaw Indians with magical powers.  The loss of this shell into Marietta Springs led to the loss of the Chickasaw’s ancestral homeland in Mississippi, or so the legend goes.  At her millinery shop, the industrious Archer and her sisters plied one of the few trades available to women in the early 1900’s and produced the finest in hats, true works of art, sought after by gentile ladies far and wide.  Miss Archer, the recognized poet laureate of Baldwyn in her time, was also a teacher at Baldwyn High where the title of her most famous work – “The Nemo-Akin” – doubled as the title of the school yearbook for decades.

The ARCHER BUILDING at 118 West Main:  The historic paths of several of Baldwyn’s founding families – McElroy’s, Grisham’s, Archer’s and others – wound their way into this storefront on the north side of Main Street during the 20th century.  Professor Knowles Shaw Archer, a long-time Baldwyn educator, built the building and its twin on the corner before 1915.  In the 1920’s, B.L. Crawford, a farmer and minister, and his son Velma, had a grocery store here.  The Crawford’s sold their business to Will E. McElroy in 1931, and McElroy’s Grocery operated in this building for decades, periodically using it as grocery storage or sub-letting it to relatives for business endeavors of their own.  George Richey Grisham operated an ice cream parlor here before World War II, and after the war, McElroy’s son Bruce and Grisham’s brothers Forest and Chester Van partnered in the furniture business in this building.  Eventually, Raymond Miller Furniture & Appliance occupied both this location and the corner building (120 West Main) and conducted business into the 1980’s.  Today, Mary Jane Rackley & Company, a regional accounting firm, plans to double the size of their existing Baldwyn office when they expand into 118 West Main later in 2013.

The OPERA HOUSE at 110 West Main:  In the early 1900’s, a spacious “Opera House” stretched across the 2^nd story of 110 West Main and the building immediately to the west (112 West Main).  As many as 300 guests enjoyed live theater here, performed by professional travelling companies, on one of the most elaborate stages in the region.  The very earliest silent movies were also shown here.  The front curtain, remembered by historian Claude Gentry, was meticulously hand-painted with a winding stairway leading down to a beautiful lake.  Local dry goods merchants, like Herndon Thomas and John Youngblood, would solicit the patronage of attendees between acts with ads displayed on the curtain.  The street-level doorway just to the east of this building opens to a stairway that once led to the Opera House entrance.  In 1942, the upper floors of both buildings were destroyed by a deadly tornado, and the Opera House was no more.  Nevertheless, local entertainment has continued to find a home near this spot.  Gentry’s own Lyric Movie Theater provided Baldwyn with film noir and B movie classics next door at 112 West Main in the 1950’s, and now Baldwyn’s community theater group entertains in “The Claude Gentry Theater,” created by an elaborate and beautiful interior renovation of this historic building.

Pig McDonald’s BARBER SHOP at 108 West Main:  108 West Main was originally home to Edgar “Pig” McDonald’s Barber Shop where four barbers worked the chairs – McDonald, Jack Lampkin, Dewey Basden and Claude Rogers.  Edgar’s wife Ethel helped her husband establish a dry cleaning business at the rear of this bustling Main Street location in the 1920’s, and it was dry cleaning that eventually won out as the predominant activity here.  Baldwyn Dry Cleaners existed well into the 1960’s through many owners, including McDonald’s son Edgar Lee and notable Baldwyn entrepreneur Wayne Stone.  The building underwent an historic restoration in 2012 and now is home to “Art 108,” an after-school children’s art program.