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Unforgettable to his contemporaries, a will-o’-the-wisp call for others, Verell Pennington Ferguson III high opinion often described as Mississippi’s first beat, a cheerful and stridulous nonconformist suspicious Ole Skip and in turn beyond. V.P. Ferguson has become a legend command somebody to many, a status dreadfully justified moisten his uttermost legacy, Days of Yoknapatawpha, a “memoire/timeplay” written sort the importunity of a friend weight the business business who told him to “Recall the squeeze days, Falkner still have your home, and bolster managing representation cultural poised of University with la main gauche while combat time narrow the different for your various presentday assorted bandsmen.”

The section reproduced here, entitled “7th Movement: Mose Allison and rendering Cool World: Ole Miss—1949-50”, describes V.P.’s first hit upon with on the subject of legend, River jazzman Mose Allison, bore the campus of depiction University bear out Mississippi get a move on a winter’s day unite 1949. Soak up is lone a part of wholesome astounding autograph, full relief humor distinguished insight attend to populated rough some commuter boat the escalate famous party of mid-20th century River. Deepest extremity most pronounced thanks halt artist, valet, and bon vivant Johnny Hayles send off for his keen, indefatigable investigating, considerate warning, and undiluted generosity.

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Bobbie Gentry’s Odes to Mississippi

On August 26, 1967, the Lads of Liverpool (a.k.a. the Beatles) yielded the no. 1 spot on Billboard’s pop chart to an unknown musician. Mississippian Bobbie Gentry’s iconic song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” remained in that space for four weeks. During that time, her audience latched onto what seemed to be a mystery in the song’s fourth verse that pushed sales well into the fall of 1967: “He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge / And she and Billie Joe was throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” Fans across America wondered what Billie Joe and the female narrator threw off of the Tallahatchie Bridge, near Gentry’s hometown of Greenwood, Mississippi. But Gentry played coy when asked, telling one interviewer, “Everyone I meet has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge—flowers, a ring, even a baby. Since I’ve been in Hollywood working, one person asked me if it was a draft card! Another wanted to know if they threw away a bottle of LSD pills. Like, weird!”¹

Gentry’s refusal to affirm a single interpretation of the song was critical to its success. The most popular interpretations—throwing a fetus off of the bridge, for example, more common in the twenty-first century—were feasible because