Welcome to the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience Hall of Fame award ceremony.

Filmed live at the MSU Riley Center in downtown Meridian.

(guitar intro) It was the 3rd of June and another sleepy, dusty delta day.

I was out chopping cotton and my brother was bailing hay.

chopping cotton and my brother was bailing hay.

And at dinner time we stopped down, walked back to the house to eat.

And at dinner time we stopped down, walked back to the house to eat.

And Mama hollered out the back door, y'all, remember to wipe your feet.

she said, I got some news this morning from Choctaw Ridge.

Today Billy Joe MacAlister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Well, Papa said to mama as she passed around, the blackeyed peas Billy Joe never had a lick of sense past the biscuits, please.

And there's five more acres in the lower 40 I got to plow.

And mama Said it was a shame about Billy Joe anyhow.

Said it was a shame about Billy Joe anyhow.

Seems like nothing ever comes to no good upon Choctaw Ridge.

Seems like nothing ever comes to no good upon Choctaw Ridge.

And now Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Well, brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billy Joe, Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County Picture Show.

Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County Picture Show.

Wasn't I talking to him at the church last Sunday Night?

I'll have another piece of apple pie.

You know, it don't seem right.

I saw him at the sawmill yesterday.

upon Choctaw Ridge, and now Billy Joe MacAllister, jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Well, Mama said to me, child, what's happened to your appetite?

Well, I been cooking all morning and you haven't touched a single bite.

That nice young preacher, brother Taylor drop by today said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday.

And oh, by the way, he said he saw girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge and she and Billy Joe was throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Well, a year is coming on since we heard the news about Billy Joe.

A brother married Becky Thompson and they bought a store in Tupelo.

there was a virus going round.

Papa caught it and he died last spring.

And now mama doesn't do much of anything And now mama doesn't do much of anything and me, I spend a lot of time picking flowers up on Choctaw Ridge.

And Drop 'em into the mud water.

Off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Arguably no writer has introduced into public consciousness a more memorable date.

It was the 3rd of June, but it was not simply a date she gave us.

It was a place another sleepy, dusty Delta day in just 11 words.

Bobby Gentry propelled us, introducing us not just to an evocative setting and tragic story, but to one of the most remarkable and influential voices in country music history.

From the opening chords, she mesmerized us with an elegant allergy to youth and the ache of love and life.

The elder Billy Joe was the first record I ever made.

Even if you weren't from the south, you could identify with the emotion and the human nature that was involved in the story.

Bobby Gentry was born Roberta Lee Streeter in Chickasaw County near Woodland, Mississippi on the 27th of July, 1942.

Starting piano at three, she wrote her first song when she was seven on a piano, traded for a milk cow.

Before her teens, She had learned to play the guitar and the banjo.

After high school, she entered UCLA as a philosophy major, supporting herself as a model, a secretary, and by performing in nightclubs and country clubs before transferring to the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music.

And then in 1967, she wrote and recorded, Ode to Billy Joe winning three Grammys that year.

The album replaced Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at the top of the billboard chart and reached number five on billboard's black albums chart in 2001.

Rolling Stone Magazine named Ode to Billy Joe, one of the greatest songs of all time, but her fame is so much more than one song, innovative and Bold.

She was a music pioneer, one of the first female artists writing her own songs, frequently, playing every instrument on her tracks, while often insisting on a leading role in production decisions, drawing on her country folk and blues influences, as well as musical interests that included soul r and b and opera.

She used Mississippi Imagery, the ridge array of her life's experiences, and in her distinctive, sultry voice blazed a path for herself and generations of female artists.

Inside of a dozen years, she released seven groundbreaking albums, including an award -winning gold album with her friend Glen Campbell.

She had 11 singles on the billboard charts appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Guest starred on the Carol Burnett Show.

Headlined in Las Vegas hosted her own television series for both the BBC and CBS.

And then in 1982, Bobby Gentry quietly retired, though leaving an irreplaceable space in the entertainment universe.

She left us with her remarkable legacy.

35 years later, capital Records reminded us of her impact and introduced her to a new generation releasing her entire catalog as an eight disc boxed set called The Girl from Chickasaw County.

In 2020, she joined other legends in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and tonight we celebrate her, her life, her music, and her unmatchable career.

A song becomes a book song if it, if it is absorbed into the culture of a particular region, if it has any longevity to it in 40, 40 or 50 years.

If people are still singing Ode to Billy Till, I would love it.

Good evening, I'm Robert St. John.

Welcome.

Uh, please join me in a round of applause, celebrating Bobby Gentry's induction into the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Hall of Fame.

Since 2018, the max has inducted 33 artists who have risen to the top, making a profound impact on our culture.

Tonight we add five more.

A truly outstanding class of storytellers and icons.

Just down the street The Mississippi Arts and Entertainment experience is a shining beacon, and in the heart of that beacon is the soaring Hall of fame.

Every enshrined artist there has made incredible personal achievements and has been selected for their ability to inspire future artists and entertainers in Mississippi and around the world.

Our next honoree is Shelby Footee.

As an apprentice to be served, to become a writer, at least as much as to the apprentices to be served, to become a doctor or anything else, uh, you have to study your craft, your art, your profession, as much as a lawyer or a doctor.

Lawyers and doctors sometimes scoff at that notion, but they were wrong.

Shelby Footee was a painstaking writer turning out up to 1000 words a day, writing in longhand with a dip pen and inkwell because it made him take his time.

Shelby Dade Footee Jr. Was born in Greenville, Mississippi on November 17th, 1916.

He discovered the world of books in his teens in the library of influential Delta planner and author William Alexander Percy, later at the University of North Carolina.

And in the Army, he began to shape his craft as a journalist in peace, time, and in war.

Then as a novelist, well read and well traveled, foot was largely self-taught, relying on personal experience and exacting investigation.

In Greenville, he recognized that particular impact of proximity and geography.

Growing up in a town of 15,000 meant you were connected by place.

And as he discovered later in the army, you got to know people.

You were impacted by the same events, not always in the same ways, but you were shaped by their pulses and trials and expectations.

He published his first novel Tournament in 1949, followed by Love in a Dry Season.

Follow me down September.

September.

And Shiloh, a battlefield.

He once wandered with Faulkner.

While his novels were successful, it was an assignment to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War for Random House that pivoted Footee's literary and personal life.

That short history mushroomed after two decades of work into a three volume opus, The Civil War, a narrative he favored compelling stories over academic footnotes, people of flesh and dimension in a bloody and incomprehensible war.

But it was Ken Burns groundbreaking documentary that placed Footee firmly in the national consciousness as he guided us through the Civil War.

With Illuminating Insight, Shelby Footee became a nation's storyteller.

In the words of Ken Burns, he made the war real for us.

He was eating dinner one night and the telephone rang and it was Robert Pen Warren, the poet lore at First Port lau it, and he had spoken this wonderful Kentucky accent, very elliptical, he says, thinking about the Civil War, thinking about how if you're gonna do it right, you have to talk to Shelby Footee right away.

Well, sitting on our shelf was the massive three volume, 3000 page epic work by Shelby Footee.

And I just sort of thought this is, uh, you know, our guide one does not ignore the poet laureate of the United States.

So the first roles that we exposed of 60 millimeter film was an interview we did with Shelby Footee.

He was so present, he had researched every moment and he had gone to the battlefield sort of perspective without any fictionalizing it.

And he was also a southerner who wrote without a southern bias, but from a southern perspective, we were in a van, all of us in a rented van.

And he kept saying things from the backseat that I just finally said, damn it, Shelby and I stopped the car.

We opened the door.

We literally filmed him on the side of the battlefield road because it seemed like every time we spoke to him, there was something new that he was going to give us something that added a dimension that we hadn't seen.

A good example of how bloody it was is that in the year after the war, the state of Mississippi spent one fifth of its total income on artificial arms and legs for veterans back from the war.

And that that, that's an incredible figure.

It Shelby who dominates it was Shelby who sort of knew precisely what was going on.

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based on an understanding of the Civil War, I believe that firmly it defined us.

It, it is very necessary if you're gonna understand the American character in the 20th century to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid 19th century.

It was the, the, the, the crossroads of our being.

And it was a hell of a crossroads Until its airing.

Shelby said he had not realized at all the strange and somewhat startling power of television.

The monumental documentary ends with Shelby Footee reading his own words, words that had long before been drafted with a simple dip pen in his office.

Not outta selfishness.

Does he concentrate on what matters in his art?

He does it because he knows the whole thing's gonna blow up in his face if it doesn't.

Uh, if you are married and your wife wants a new coat, uh, and you write some bad fiction so that she can have a new coat, you and your wife are not going to get along very well anyhow, so, uh, don't do that.

You'll be so dissatisfied with yourself that things going blow up.

Most writers, it's going to blow up anyhow, so, so perhaps it doesn't matter, young people would do well not to pay any attention to styles and fads and, uh, concentrate on doing the very best they can with whatever talent they've been able to muster.

The best thing to do in all accounts is go your own way, work very hard at your craft, be true to whatever precepts you formed and everything's going to be all right, or it won't, but I know nothing's gonna be all right if you do it any other way.

Good evening, I'm John Peede.

Among the most influential moments of American television, one finds the live footage of the moon landing in July, 1969, the airing of the miniseries Roots in the wake of our nation's bicentennial.

And 35 years ago, this very year, the broadcast of Ken Burns spell binding PBS series, the Civil War.

And at the center of that central national story is Shelby Foote, a little known but much admired scribe who with the Mississippi draw and encyclopedic knowledge served as both orator and oracle to an audience of tens of millions, a proud southerner, foot humanized, rebel, and union soldiers alike.

While firmly calling slavery quote a stain on the nation's soul.

He brought the wounds of the war and to the forefront of the American consciousness reminding us anew of the cost of national division.

It is fitting that we remember Shelby Foote, who created not only a monumental work, but a monument of words.

We would do well to learn from his creation.

Now it is my pleasure to welcome UG Foote who will accept the Hall of Fame award and honor of his late father.

Thank you.

Good evening.

It's nice to be here.

I can't tell you how delighted my father would've been to receive this honor in such good company and especially here in his home state of Mississippi.

My dad received many an invitation over the years, but I never saw him light up the way he did when he was called down home.

Writing.

this reminded me of a funny thing about my father.

When he was driving, he still lit his pipe.

Um, he would hold the zippo in one hand, the pipe in the other, and steer the car with his knee as he was lighting it and barreling down Highway 61 was pretty terrifying for this young passenger.

Uh, at those moments at the time, I never wondered why we made these frequent trips or why he always asked me to join him.

I know now he wanted me to commune with this vast expansive land and to feel the connection he did to our Mississippi roots.

Someone once asked him why it took him nearly four times as long to write the history of the war as it did to fight it.

I recall he replied with a smile.

Well, there were a great many more of them than there was of me.

I'll end here by quoting from Walker Percy, after finishing his reading of the final proofs of the Trilogy Walker wrote to his friend, dear Shelby, yes, it's as good as you think.

I have no doubt it will survive.

It might even be read in the ruins.

Indeed, it might.

So thank you again for this opportunity and for honoring my father and, and, uh, for this opportunity for a grateful son to pass along our appreciation.

You can learn a story or learn a lesson from every person you meet in life.

If you just listen.

Bill, this word folklore, what does it mean to you?

It covers a pretty broad range of things.

It includes the folk tale, it includes the music, it includes a large number of crafts and folk architecture.

The skills are passed on from generation to generation, and these people are all part of a tradition.

Bill Ferris has lived a life surrounded by stories.

He has dedicated that life to making sure we all marveled at them, wanting each of us to realize they were our stories and our traditions and our histories, and that each one of us has a responsibility to pass them along.

He knew that stories and the telling of them in word or song or canvas or scrap in fabric or photograph is what connects us.

William Reynolds Ferris Jr. Was born February 5th, 1942 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the eldest of five children.

He grew up in town and on their broadacre farm, south down Highway 61 with a troubadours ear, a curator's eye, and relentless curiosity.

Bill had to tell about the south.

He wrote about it and lectured on it in classrooms and explained it to politicians and bureaucrats.

Our stories transport the listener like a leaf turning on water into another world.

Ferris wrote The story is the inescapable net that binds southerners together.

After an educational journey that led him to the Brooks School in Andover, Massachusetts, Davidson College, Northwestern University, Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Pennsylvania.

And through teaching posts that Jackson State University and Yale University, bill co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, created the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and directed the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina.

And in the middle of all that, from 1997 to 2001, he served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities appointed by his friend President Bill Clinton.

He has authored more than a dozen books, including the extraordinary Pulitzer nominated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Black folk art and Crafts reflect the spirit of life in rural Mississippi.

He has produced 15 documentary films on southern folklore, received honors for his work in the humanities, both here and abroad, and won two Grammys for his boxed collection Voices of Mississippi.

When I began my work as a young folklores, I gave a talk, showed some photographs, and played some field recordings.

Uh, Charlotte introduced me to Patty Black, who would become a very important mentor, but she also said, I'd like to show you some of daughter's photographs.

And I didn't know she was a photographer at that point, and she laid some out on a table and I was breathless.

I had never seen such beautiful photographs.

The photography of welty, of Eggleston and of many others in Mississippi is a tradition that I've always felt nurtured my own work in special ways.

Bill Ferris's Odyssey revealed that culture links us one to the other.

It's handed down over generations our interlocking circles of civilization.

I've just been learning from other people all my life and trying to share that knowledge and also encourage young people to follow with camera in hand and to try to capture their families, their communities, and to go through life listening and learning from others.

Y'all are in for a treat.

Sharday Thomas Mallory and Chris Mallory of Rising Stars.

Fife and drum band are in the house.

Rising Stars performs on Ferris's, Grammy winning album, Voices of Mississippi.

Let's welcome them now.

Let's welcome them now.

Back back train and get your load Back back train and get your load, Back back train, Back back train.

Back back train and get your load.

And I'm going home on the morning train.

I'm going home on the morning train I'm going home, I'm going home I'm going home on the train.

Yes, the evening train might be too late, evening train might be too late, Evening train Evening train, evening train might be too late.

and Hey, back back train and get your load back back train and get your load back back train back back train back back train and get your load.

(music) (music) Can y'all clap your hands like this for me one time?

Come on y'all.

(music) (music) Thank you.

My name is Kate Medley and I'm a photojournalist and documentarian in Durham, North Carolina, and I'm glad to be home.

In preparation for tonight, I spoke with a handful of Mississippians who have been inspired by Bill.

A young black filmmaker told me that Bill is a lighthouse and quote, his light has inspired my own.

Another student described how Bill is a constant reminder of the power of kindness and dedication to one's work.

They talk about Bill's innate humility.

He has the eye of a poet, the graciousness of a parish priest, the Rolodex of a Wall Street titan, the charm of a small town Mayor, quote, bill understands Mississippi in all its complexity, the land, the people, the culture, the sins, the virtues.

He knows this place and he loves it, and he lifts it up for the world to see.

So Bill does this thing, when he sees me, he gently takes hold of my shoulders and he looks me in the eyes and he says, Kate, we are so proud of you.

And despite the fact that Bill has probably done this with every single person in this room, I feel that genuineness of his appreciation deep in my bones every single time.

And so Bill Ferris, as we gently grab a hold of your shoulders tonight, I want you to feel the appreciation and love deep in your bones.

As we say, Mississippi is so proud of you.

Thank you Kate.

Kate Medley, my beloved friend, a gifted photographer and filmmaker who can also do a stem winder of an introduction.

Thank you.

Also Anthony Thaxton for your exquisite filmmaking and editorial work on southern legends like Eudora Welty, Walter Anderson, and many others.

My work was inspired by the farm in Warren County, where I grew up by black families who worshiped in Rose Hill Church, where I attended services as a small child and by my grandfather who told me he was raised on cornbread and recollections.

I am grateful to the people of Mississippi and to the family and friends in Vicksburg and Warren County who raised me.

My life as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker has been dedicated to preserving and sharing Mississippi voices.

Tonight we celebrate the cultural guardians who share our state's rich history and culture with future generations.

Their work and the work of Max is truly a national treasure for which I am forever grateful.

And tonight, more than ever in our history, these voices are critical to our future.

They will be the foundation in which we build a better world for our state, for our nation, and for our world.

Thank you.

Mark Doty has written, um, our metaphors go on ahead of us.

So I think that's true, the poems no more than I do.

In 2012, Mississippi poet Lau Natasha Trethaway was named Poet Lau of the United States, becoming the only person to hold the position for both state and nation.

On the occasion, librarian of Congress, James Billington said, Natasha Trethaway is an outstanding poet historian in the mold of Robert Pan Warren, our first poet.

Her poems dig beneath the surface of history to explore the human struggles that we all face.

It is her ability to weave the present and the past, to engage the public and the personal, and to give language to the unsaid that makes trethaway poems of such lasting import in domestic work.

Trethaway award-winning first book of poetry, she draws her words from photographs of poor black Americans in the early 20th century through images now sifted through her memory of family and place.

Her words expose revelation.

And I think as a poet, I'm, I'm most attuned to the visual image.

I'm most drawn to exploring it even before any other images that come to us through the other senses.

I turn to photographs, you know, as that kind of window into, um, a place, uh, a particular time or historical moment.

Natasha Trethaway was born in Gulfport, Mississippi on April 26th, 1966 in a segregated maternity ward on the 100th commemoration of Confederate Memorial Day, the daughter of a white poet from Canada and a black social worker from Mississippi.

She was of two worlds illegal and embraced, aware and mystified.

Her mother told her she was the best of both worlds.

Her work, both poetry and prose, investigates life and belonging and suffering, pressed through the prism of love, the disassociation of divorce and the torment of murder, her mother's murder and her father's urging pushed her toward poetry where she has expanded the structures of poetry and deepened the emotion of prose in a career that has been awarded by her peers and rewarded by her readers.

She has published five collections of poetry, including Native Guard for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, two memoirs beyond Katrina, a meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

And she created the PBS series where poetry lives a body of work that has reached across the literary landscape and around the globe.

But it was just off Highway 49 in the shotgun house of her maternal grandmother, where she began to gather the memories and images that swirl within her work there with books and records and the World Book Encyclopedia on the shelves and her grandmother's collages adorning the walls.

She began to quilt together her miracle of words that leapt into our literary world.

Well, I mean, I think it's about, for me, when I think about Mississippi, for example, I don't imagine that I will ever live in Mississippi, and yet it is absolutely the place that I hold onto It is to me who I am because you know, in my head I am Mississippi.

I feel like it's Mississippi that made me.

In her work The Geography of a Place is more than just a map on paper or a series of signs.

It is the beginning frame of being an imagination.

Her place is the landscape of memory.

I also think about on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the way the natural world both reveals and at the same time conceal certain things about the past.

And that it, there's the potential for revelation if we are only willing to sort of look closely at it.

Natasha exemplifies these ideas in a reading of Pulitzer Prize winning Elegy for the Native Guards.

We Leave Gulfport at noon gulls overhead, trailing the boat streamers noisy fanfare all the way to ship Island.

What we see first is the fort it's roof of grass Ali, half reminder of the men who served there, a weathered monument to some of the dead inside.

We follow the Ranger hurried, though we are to get to the beach.

He tells of Graves lost in the Gulf.

The island split in half when Hurricane Camille hit.

Shows us case mates cannons the store that sells souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.

The daughters of the Confederacy has placed a plaque here at the fort's entrance.

Each confederate soldier's name raised hard in bronze, no names carved for the native guards.

Second regiment union men black phalanx.

What is monument to their legacy?

All the grave markers, all the crude headstones.

Water lost.

Now fish dart among their bones and we listen for what?

The waves in tone.

Only the fort remains near 40 feet, high round, unfinished half open to the sky, the elements wind, rain, God's deliberate eye.

My name is Don Allen Mitchell.

I'm a professor of English and I direct the honors program at Delta State University.

And now ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce my friend and my fellow memory worker.

Natasha, I didn't know most of your relatives, but I knew your dad and I know he is proud of you.

Gwendolyn Loretta son and sugar as they look on from the cosmos, are proud of you.

Brett, Joey, all your extended family and your Mississippi friends are proud of you.

This room is proud of you and I am so very proud of you.

My fellow Mississippi May Natasha's room beneath the Stars brightly shine tonight.

Thank you.

You know, I think, um, in any writer's life, but particularly in mine and as a person, what I've wanted more than anything was to be seen, to be heard, to be understood.

I feel that tonight in the words of my good friend, Don Allen Chip Mitchell, and in the imagery and storytelling of that remarkable documentary.

Often when I stand at podiums like this to give a reading, I have to begin by telling the audience something about why I write, why I became a writer.

A lot of you already know it.

Now that I was born on Confederate Memorial Day, exactly a hundred years to the day that the holiday glorifying the Lost Cause, white supremacy and the attempt to destroy the union in order to maintain slavery was first celebrated in 1965.

My parents had to break the law, two laws.

In fact, in order to be married, they went to Cincinnati, Ohio where it was legal to be married.

And that was one law that they broke as Mississippians, and then they came back married to the state of Mississippi.

It was illegal then.

And in as many as 20 other states in the nation when I was born, rendering me illegitimate in the eyes of the law persona non grata, as in WH Aden's Memorial to the great Irish poet, William Butler Yates, mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

My Mississippi with its terrible beauty and its brutal history of racial violence and oppression inflicted my first wound hurting me into the artist I would become.

James Baldwin wrote, this is the only real concern of the artist to recreate out of the disorder of life that order, which is art.

What I have been given, the wounds of history that I have received and the personal wounds are not burdens, they are gifts.

And I am deeply grateful for the great gift of this recognition by this glorious max museum and the place that made me my Mississippi, the one true place I call home.

Thank you.

Four houses down me was a family with a known child.

She was a young girl in this old that can make me smile down the road.

After writing for and performing with Jimmy Buffet and his coral reefers for more than 40 years, Mac Macelli and Buffet seemed divinely linked.

Buffet acknowledged it in his 1980 album, Coconut Telegraph with his gracious dedication for Mac, who reminds me of me seven years ago.

I grew up in the northeast corner of the state.

I am a proud Mississippian.

I Tend to go back to a small town where I, I feel like I understand things the best and uh, that's where most of my writing comes from.

At the age of 13, Mac convinced his father, who was also his high school principal, to allow him to pursue music full-time.

Shortly after he joined Dean and the Reefers playing gigs in a lime green polyester suit that once belonged to George Jones.

Then he became a studio musician at the legendary Muscle Shoals studio around the time he got his first driver's license.

This time.....

Probably nobody thought this teenager who played in Honky Tonks on the outskirts of nowhere, who stayed home in Nashville for years afterward to write songs for other folks so he could watch his girls grow up.

And who joined another group of Reefers that would play just about everywhere would become arguably the most acclaimed musician in country music.

The Mississippi Sage Webb Wilder once said, the heroes of your heroes are from Mississippi, and well ask your musician friends and they'll tell you their hero is Mac McInally Music.

Lyman Corbett McInally Jr. Was born in Red Bay, Alabama and raised in the community of Belmont, Mississippi.

He was surrounded by gospel and bluegrass and country music in those years immersed in it.

His early appearances were at the First Baptist Church in Belmont, where his mother played piano.

He played the piano too and today, hand him something with strings, anything with strings, and he'll play it.

And the song hits home, and you feel like sweat As a teenager, he started writing songs, turning conversations and circumstances people and places into insightful and discerning musical stories and into hit songs for a who's who of music over his career.

In addition to writing and producing for so many others, he has released more than 15 albums of his own, among his numerous awards and honors Mac has received and hosted the Mississippi Governor's Awards, was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and he has won the Country Music Association Musician of the Year Award.

So many times tend to be exact, perhaps they should add his name to it.

For a man who has said I was born without the ambition to be the guy in the middle of the stage.

He has certainly found it.

Some say it's a backward place, narrow mines on the narrow way, but I make it a point to say that's where I come That's where I come from Mississippi.

My vantage point is because of the particular family that I fell into in the particular town that, that I landed in.

And the particular group of whittling old men, exaggerators that I grew up amongst are, are big ingredients in, in what I do.

So I would want Mississippi to know that I'm grateful because, uh, I got something that's not available in stores.

All right, As honored as I am to have been asked to mc tonight, and I'm truly honored because I'm a huge fan of the Maxmen its mission.

And, and really more than anything, what it does for the children of this state who visit that wonderful place just down the street.

I am doubly honored that I was asked to make this next introduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a privilege to stand here tonight and introduce someone I'm proud to call my friend Mac McInally.

Mac is not just one of the most talented individuals I've ever met.

He's also one of the kindest, most generous, humble and hardworking men I've had the honor to know.

I've always believed the great art has a sense of place.

Whether you're talking about Monet's Gardens, Gershwin's New York or Mac McAnally's, Mississippi the best art is grounded in something real.

Mac's Mississippi runs through every note.

He plays in every word he writes.

He inspires us to be better.

Please join me in welcoming to the stage my friend and your friend, the incomparable Mac McAnally.

I am, uh, envious of whoever Robert has mistaken me for.

Uh, but I also have to thank the max, uh, for what they're doing because when I said about what I was doing as as a teenager, I didn't know what I was doing.

And, and it was very hypothetical that there could ever be anything come from it other than what I scribbled onto a page or tried to memorize as I played guitar.

But because, because of what the max is doing, it, it is more obvious to the younger generations that Mississippi in, in addition to being, you know, 50th at quite a few things, we are also maybe the best possible place in the United States for the artistic endeavor And because of the max, the newer generations can get that.

I, I'm so inspired by Shelby and by Bill and by Bobby Gentry and I, I, I, I've, I'm Natasha's a little younger than me, but it's amazing to me what she's done.

And she's a, you know, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

That's it.

It has to be less hypothetical for a kid starting out right now up and down the road and Scuba or, or, or Belmont or Okolo or Euphora or wherever, wherever we're popping up and we are popping up that, that good things are possible.

This, you know, I I joke that spare time is this major export of Mississippi, but uh, but you can do something with that.

And I am so grateful I got so many people to think that I'm forgetting left and right, but uh, but, but I just have to say there's never been a time in my life that I wasn't proud to be from Mississippi.

And it's just occurred to me along with this honor.

What a sweet thing it is that Mississippi might be proud of me.

Thank you Lazy most all my life.

writing songs and sleeping late Your man whatever I've done was purely by mistake The street.

Sweepers can smile, then I've got no right to feel upset, but sometimes I still forget till the lights go on and the stage is set and the song hits on and you feel that sweat.

It's my job to be different than the rest, and that's enough reason to go.

For me, it's my job to be better than best.

And that's a tough break for me.

It's my job to be clean and up this mess and that's enough reason to go for me.

It's my job to be better than the, that makes the day for me.

Thank you Some say it's a backward place, narrow minds on the narrow way, but I make it a point to say that's where I come from.

That's where I come from, where I'll be when it said and done.

And I'm as proud as anyone.

That's where I come From, Back where I come from.

I'm a no Mississippi Young, and I'm as proud as anyone that that's where I come.

That's where I come from.

Thank you so much.

Thanks to the max.

Thanks, Robert St. John, thanks to every one of the amazing inductee.

Thanks for watching the Hall of Fame Awards ceremony.

To learn more about and support the Mississippi Arts and entertainment experience, go to ms arts.org.