I haven’t been to my birth state in close to two years. The state where I spent 17 years of my life, the state that saw me fall in love, fall into grace, learn to read, learn to swim, make friends, lose friends, become myself. I don’t have any family ties there anymore, and I’ve lost touch with many of my friends from that time in my life (or those friends have moved away, too).
*Photo Credit: http://welcomesignproject.wordpress.com/tag/mississippi-welcome-sign/
And look, I’m from Mississippi. Mississippi has plenty of shit wrong with it. But Alabama and Georgia have shit, too. New York and California have their own, if different, shits. Probably even the paradise of Hawaii has its shit.
But there’s a siren song in the letters Mississippi. It’s not like I’m the first one to try and capture it. William Faulkner supposedly said, “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” Maybe it’s true. Maybe that slow muddy river carves tracks into our hearts. Maybe the humidity makes us malleable, reshapes our psyches, worms its way into our pores.
I am not Mississippi anymore, but somehow I am still Mississippi.
And so my heart resonates when I hear a song about her, my state.
Just for fun the other day, I searched “Mississippi” on Spotify and sifted through the results. I got a lot of North Mississippi Allstars songs, and a number from the Mississippi Mass Choir (and a few from Mississippi John Hurt) that I ruled out. My criteria was that Mississippi needed to be in the title, and it needed to be a focus of the song. A few of these I knew, more of them I didn’t. Some are sweet, some are weird, some are more raucous than others. I was a little surprised by the number of them that weren’t country! I left some out that I just couldn’t even–Afroman wasn’t doing it for me, nor was Ray Stevens’ Mississippi Squirrel Revival. And I assembled this list of Mississippi.
If your heart too sometimes yearns for that place, if Mississippi will always be your home, then this list is for you.
Look, some of the songs are about the river, not the state. I’m aware of this. But seeing as how that river forms one border of my state, I’ll claim it. Thank you very much.
