Mississippi is properly famous as the home of the blues and of the first star of rock and roll. It is also the home of Jimmie Rodgers, described by many as “The Father of Country Music.” Rodgers had two other nicknames during his career, “The Singing Brakeman,” which referred to his work on trains, and “America’s Blue Yodeler,” which described one of his distinctive contributions to country music.
When William Hollingsworth Jr. arrived in Chicago in 1930 his head was filled with a pragmatic, far-from-airy dream. As his chums back in his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, trained for jobs as clerks, lawyers, businessmen, or engineers, he fancied success as a commercial artist.
Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935, in a two-room shotgun house in East Tupelo, then a separate municipality that some called the “roughest town in north Mississippi.” Though poor, Elvis’s parents, Gladys and Vernon Presley, were not unlike many others in Mississippi at that time, for the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate in the United States in 1935 was 20.1 percent.
Eudora Welty is one of America’s greatest writers. When she died in 2001, she left a substantial body of prose — fiction and non-fiction. Literary critics believe her work will become a more and more enduring fixture of the American literary canon, as scholars and readers continue to explore her works in order to understand them better.
Ruby Elzy was a sweet-voiced soprano from the hills of northeastern Mississippi who became a star of Broadway, radio, and the movies in the 1930s. She sang everywhere, from Harlem's Apollo Theater to the White House, and she created a highly acclaimed role in one of the greatest American operas ever written, Porgy and Bess.
Ruby Elzy overcame poverty and prejudice to become one of the most illustrious singers of her generation. Yet for many decades after her tragic death in 1943 at the age of 35, she was largely forgotten.
From the time Mississippi joined the Union in 1817 until the end of World War II, the Democrats won the state's presidential electoral votes in every election except two. Those exceptions occurred in 1840, when William Henry Harrison carried Mississippi for the Whigs, and in 1872, when the circumstances of Reconstruction virtually guaranteed victory for Republican Ulysses S. Grant.