Marty Stuart and the pilgrim’s spot: Philadelphia, Mississippi
Marty Stuart (second from right) and His Fabulous Superlatives on stage at the Ellis Theater. Photo courtesy of the Congress of Country Music, used with permission.
By Robert Darden
Marty Stuart is a country music icon. He’s done it all. And in the process, he’s carved a richly deserved reputation as being one of the fiercest, most devoted supporters/defenders of authenticity, passion, and excellence in all genres of music, not just country.
Naturally, the best way to approach a music legend like Stuart is with a Bible verse, specifically Genesis 4:10. “Then the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground!’”
I asked him if he believed that the blood cries out.
He said, “I do. And it also takes me to the passage where he talks about there’s a great cloud of witnesses looking down upon us.”
Stuart paused a moment. “And somewhere between the voices crying out from the ground and the witnesses looking down, we’re caught in the middle, aren’t we? Puts us in the pilgrim’s spot.”
The pilgrim’s spot?
Ah, that would be Philadelphia, Mississippi.
For those of us of a certain age, just the name causes a slight, involuntary recoil.
In the blistering Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, the small, hag-ridden town of Philadelphia was the scene of the most horrific event of the modern civil rights movement, the torture and murder of three young men for the unforgiveable crime of registering African American voters.
And yet it is here, in downtown Philadelphia, that Stuart has planted his flag – in the form of a radical, completely counterintuitive plan to use music and memory to achieve redemption.
Welcome to Marty Stuart’s brave new world, one that’s being changed one song, one story, one memory, one building at a time.
In Philadelphia. The one in Mississippi.
And Stuart’s hometown.
For John Marty Stuart, born September 30, 1958, to working-class parents John and Hilda Stuart, Philadelphia was little short of idyllic. He rambled freely amid the magnolias and fireflies. After elementary school, while his parents worked, he was deposited with friends Welch and Velma Moore, owner/operators of Modern Cleaners downtown. The Moores believed in free-range childcare and little Marty found himself irresistibly, invariably drawn to the Busy Bee Café, an establishment popular with African Americans, just up the street.
“That’s where I would stay until my mom got off work and come pick me up,” Stuart recalled. “Man, you couldn’t keep me out of the Busy Bee Café because those guys were colorful, they were flashy, they wore beautiful clothes and had gold teeth. And they played guitars, and they played music that’d make you want to move. And they welcomed me because I’d go in there and dance and jump around. I never saw anybody’s color.”
But color was on just about everybody else’s mind in Philadelphia by 1964. Like many towns, large and small, in the South in the first half of the 20th century, Philadelphia was deep in the throes of a particularly brutal, unpredictable set of Jim Crow racial codes.
Few small towns anywhere have been as well-chronicled and deeply analyzed as Philadelphia in the course of a dozen thoughtful, unsettling books, including “We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and the Civil Rights Movement,” by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, “Witness in Philadelphia,” by Florence Mars, “Devil’s Sanctuary: An Eyewitness History of Mississippi Hate Crimes,” by James L. Dickerson and Alex A. Alston Jr., and the epic King trilogy by Taylor Branch, as well as hundreds, probably thousands of articles and essays.
At the center of the fear was the Neshoba County Sheriff Department, which endorsed armed citizens brigades and the very visible KKK and its countywide terror campaign, marked by numerous cross-burnings and systematic violence. African Americans felt the brunt of the department, though poor whites were not immune from the capricious violence either.
But 6-year-old Marty neither saw nor experienced any of that. Instead, he said that the undisputed highlight of his week was a Saturday block of 30-minute syndicated country shows on the family’s small black and white TV, “The Porter Wagoner Show,” “The Wilbur Brothers Show,” “Flatt & Scruggs” and, later, “That Good Old Nashville Music.” With Marty sitting as close as possible to his soft-spoken, hard-working father John, it was their time, their music.
That changed in June 1964 with the savage and sanctioned murders of three young men trying to register voters as part of the Mississippi Freedom Project – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – near Philadelphia in Neshoba County. It would be decades before any of their murderers were brought to justice.
“During the midst of that, the thing that I felt was just confusion,” Stuart said. “I felt the world go upside down. I felt the eyes of the world on my town. And I didn’t quite comprehend everything. I kind of understood it, but what I did understand was the power of music during that time.
“With the ‘Porter Wagoner Show’ especially, those guys would come on wearing those beautiful costumes and singing songs about real life situations, and the air tangibly lifted for me. When they would go off, the heaviness would return.
“But somewhere between the ‘Uncloudy Day’ and the ‘Porter Waggoner Show,’ I truly understood the power of music and its power to lift heavy and hurt hearts and dismal situations and get it up back into a divine light during that time. That was the music of civil rights to me.”
But for the citizens of Philadelphia, white and Black, the horror of what happened to the three young men and the city’s decades-long defiance to hold the murderers accountable left a bloody stain on Neshoba County – and made the town’s name a codeword for the lawlessness and extreme poverty that characterized much of the deep South.
Stuart once said that when Philadelphia schools finally integrated during his sixth-grade year, his first African American teacher was Virgil Griffith, whose records with the Rhythm Kings Marty once danced to in the Busy Bee Café. Stuart told writer Michael Streissguth that his very first response was, “...there’s Virgil Griffith, my teacher, and I thought, ‘I’ve got it made here. This guy’s so cool.’”
For Marty Stuart, it wasn’t the perpetual sense of unease or the often-brutal national media spotlight or the constant investigations or even the city’s slow economic decline that the bad publicity helped accelerate that eventually drove him to leave Philadelphia, it was his burgeoning passion for music, real music, authentic music. That passion became a quest, one that irresistibly swept everything else away.
Young Marty was a prodigy in mandolin and guitar and, in the ensuing years, was quickly invited to join the bands of bluegrass legend Lester Flatt and then Johnny Cash until he went out on his own, beginning a 40-year career marked by a reverence for authenticity – and a remarkable personal style. Twenty albums, several hit singles, five Grammy awards, innumerable concerts, television performances (even his own TV series for a time) and late-night guitar-pulls and jam sessions followed. Filmmaker Ken Burns once said that “if country music had a president, it would be Marty Stuart. He is the embodiment of the culture.”
Through it all, one constant remained – that sound. The need for that next song, be it a true mountain ballad, a spontaneous folk song, a Freedom song, a gospel song, or any song written not for commercial gain but because it had to be written or the composer would be haunted for nights on end until it was freed. That need, Stuart said, created something akin to a spiritual yearning.
By the end of the ‘90s, that yearning led him, surprisingly, back to Philadelphia. Stuart told Rolling Stone that at the time he hadn’t been home in 25 years and he was, by his own admission, “pretty fried.”
He returned at last to find that Mississippi was changing, and that – belatedly – the state had begun to embrace its unique musical heritage. Over the previous decades, Mississippi had seen the construction of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, the B.B. King Museum and the Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, the Jimmie Rodgers Museum in Meridian, Elvis Presley Birthplace in Tupelo, and the Grammy Museum of Mississippi in Cleveland.
Stuart said he wanted to do ... something. Like the Apostle Paul, just what that something could be – had to be – came to him like a blinding on the road to Philadelphia.
“Once or twice a year, B.B. King would go over to Indianola and just spend the day at his place to raise funds and awareness for the B.B. King Center,” Stuart said. “And he called me one year and asked if we would come over and play in the band. I said, ‘Of course we would!’ So there we went to Indianola. And on the way out, B.B. told me what was starting to take place in the state and with his place and what Tupelo was doing. He just sketched it out.”
After they talked, Stuart said, something came over him.
“And it was like that scene in The Blues Brothers movie when they said, ‘We are on a mission from God.’ On the way out of Indianola, this thunderbolt hit me. Oh, I could feel heaven shaking. I went, ‘Don’t put this assignment on me!’
“But I knew when the call came, it was a divinely ordered call. I realized, ‘OK, I’ll be going to Philadelphia, Mississippi, and establish a place for country music.’”
However, the Good Lord had not yet seen fit to inform the folks of Philadelphia what was going to happen to their fair city.
“And, at that point, it truly, truly, truly was setting the spaceship down in the middle of nowhere,” Stuart said. “This quiet town had just taken its licks since 1964 and everything was going along as usual. But I thought, ‘Boy, this is going to change things. And it’s going to be slow process because things change slower in Mississippi.’ But I knew that was what was in my heart to do. And I knew it was time to get to work on it. And that’s how it started.”
So, in 2003, during the Electric Barnyard Tour with Merle Haggard and Marty’s wife Connie Smith, Stuart chose William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak property in Oxford, Miss., to announce his “Mississippi Initiative.”
From the moment that he first floated the idea/ideas, folks in deeply scarred Philadelphia and financially wobbly Mississippi and imperious Nashville and just about everywhere else were... at the very least, skeptical. This was real money Stuart was talking about here.
No matter.
“I had to believe,” Stuart said. “I had to believe if we did everything and made it all-inclusive, where love was the word, without pointing any fingers. We couldn’t run from anything in the past, but in my mind, it was a healing thing.”
Stuart cited the transformation of Waco, fueled – in part – by a young couple who turned a house-flipping business into an empire and made the once-derided Central Texas town, so long identified with the Branch Davidian debacle, into the one of the top tourist destinations in the state.
“I’ve just seen the right thing take an old town with whatever its past was and offer a new life and a new chapter and a new conversation,” he said. “So, I had to believe.”
Stuart said his very first step – even before the all-important fund-raising and grant-writing – was to find out what the most important constituencies wanted. Or needed. Or dreamed about.
“One of the first things I did is go into the Black churches and meet with the clergy, meet with the parishioners, invite them to events,” he said.
Then he met with representatives from the nearby Choctaw nation, Philadelphia and Mississippi elected officials, civic organizations, NGOs, religious groups, and, well, everybody.
“I was in a position to come back home and be everybody’s friend,” Stuart said. “I loved everybody down there because they’re home folks, which is the greatest asset Philadelphia has – its people.”
Once he had the buy-in, if not the support, of all of the parties with skin in the game, Stuart said he returned to Philadelphia repeatedly over a five-year period, looking at real estate, but with an emphasis on existing buildings, always with the same question in mind: “Where do we drive flag in the ground?”
And so that’s how he found himself one day standing in front of an old downtown theater. The City Theatre first opened in November 1926, was later renamed the Strand, eventually became known as the Ellis Theater, and it was as the Ellis that a very young John Marty had happily attended films in the historic building downtown. It had also been the scene – as with most theaters in the South – of explicit racial discrimination. African Americans, when they could attend at all, saw the same movies but from the distant balcony.
After years of decline, the aging, deteriorating Ellis had fallen into the hands of the small but passionate Philadelphia Arts Council, which struggled to save the building. Philadelphia, of course, is still a relatively small town and so when he finally gave voice to his dream of doing that still-unknowable something, word soon reached a friend with connections to the arts organization:
“One night, that friend came to me and said, ‘How would you feel if we donated the theater?’ And I said, ‘Only if we could stay in partnership with the Arts Council – because kids need a place to do what they do.’”
Stuart and his small team met with representatives of the Council and quickly “figured it out.”
“The theater gave us, all of a sudden, a cornerstone to build from,” Stuart said. “And the Ellis was the cornerstone of what has become now a campus – the theater, the stage, the legacy of the theater, everything.
“And one of the very first things that could be done is that regardless of who you were, you sit where your ticket told you to sit. Not in the balcony or down below because of the color of your skin.”
For a musician, particularly one as inclusive and as aware of the area’s mixed history as Stuart was, an accessible, wholly inclusive place to hear great music in and of itself was a powerful statement, one that could hasten the process of repudiating Neshoba’s past.
But first, the money had to be raised, unexpected (and persistent) structural and electrical issues resolved, permits and licenses obtained, deep-rooted suspicions overcome. Stuart performed benefit concerts and made repeated trips to Jackson and Washington D.C. for support, even as he continued his own grueling touring and recording schedule right up until the Ellis Theater’s reopening in December 2022. By then, more than $4 million had been raised for the renovation.
The exterior of the historic Ellis Theater, the Congress of Country Music and the Philadelphia Neshoba County Arts Council. Photo courtesy of the Ellis Theater, used with permission.
That night, the Ellis opened with three prayers of consecration – Mississippi State Senator Jennifer Branning, Choctaw Chief Cyrus Ben, and Philadelphia Major James Young. Stuart, who had once happily danced with the Choctaws as a child, joined by wife Connie Smith – and various other, slightly more self-conscious big wigs, joined the Choctaw Dancers for a special performance in the street.
“The theater gave a place for music,” Stuart said. “It was a neutral setting that turned into this gorgeous, world-class music box where farmers feel welcome, comfortable, but at the same time European royalty could walk in and have to be dazzled a little bit by how dignified and integrity-based this place is. So – absolutely – this theater is ground zero for this whole operation.”
That was the first step.
During his career, Stuart’s passion (though the word “obsession” has been levied as well) for the preservation of significant artifacts reflective of authentic American music had reached epic proportions, culminating in a Smithsonian-level collection of 20,000 treasures. It includes iconic guitars, hats, costumes, boots, vehicles, original hand-written lyrics and sheet music, vintage photographs and other ephemera from the likes of Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Cash, Pops Staples, Charlie Pride and many, many more.
In 2007, Stuart’s massive collection was formally registered with the Tennessee State Museum and began a barnstorming tour of its own. “Sparkle and Twang: Marty Stuart’s American Musical Odyssey” made multiple trips across the country, including a stay at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
Finally, Stuart’s non-stop lobbying and fund-raising began to pay off. In 2013, Neshoba County donated the old Coca-Cola Bottling Company building in downtown Philadelphia and near the Ellis Theater. Stuart’s organization received $1 million in state bond money for the project. Two years later, another half million dollars was awarded for building renovations.
The renovations were completed in February 2016. Cataloguing Stuart’s archival collection began in April, when the collection was moved from Nashville to Philadelphia. And in July, the archives were organized and displayed under the title of the Congress of Country Music. Fund-raising continues for the Congress of Country Music building and Marty was reluctant to estimate just when the building would be completed. But the Ellis – and now the CCM – are just the beginning. Stuart continues to dream big.
“As we speak, plans are being drawn to expand further,” he said. “I’m calling the next building Community Hall, a gathering place for everybody. We own all of these properties. It’s a debt-free project at this point. It’s been amazing the people from outside the state who have contributed, participated. Every time there’s an event where I happen to be there, I walk out on stage and ask, ‘Where you from?’ We’ve had people from eight different countries so far and something like 30 states – all of whom have come to events in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Which tells me to just stay the course.”
In the end, for an artist whose lifeblood has been music for nearly six decades, the heartbeat of the entire complex remains the stage of the Ellis Theater.
The sheer variety of artists could be off-putting or, at the very least, a little overwhelming for a city with about 7,000 residents, especially when fabled music venues are struggling from New York to Austin to Los Angeles.
The interior of the Ellis Theater, “a gorgeous, world-class music box” where all are welcome. Photo courtesy of the Ellis Theater, used with permission.
“It’s hard to serve everybody,” Stuart said, “but at the same time, it just takes a little more work. Curating the right shows has been a big part of it. My favorite part of this is just making all kinds of music come. Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra played here. How about that? Bobby Rush. The Mississippi Mass Choir. I’ve got a call into Mavis Staples.”
Stuart’s mentor Johnny Cash once released a song titled “I Am a Pilgrim,” originally written by another one of Marty’s heroes, Merle Travis. It’s an old folk song/spiritual, with this haunting refrain:
I am a pilgrim and a stranger
Traveling through this wearisome land
I’ve got a home in that yonder city, good Lord
And it’s not, not made by hand
A pilgrim in the pilgrim’s spot.
According to my GPS, it is 15 miles from the Ellis Theater to the rebuilt Mount Zion United Methodist Church, burned to the ground by racists during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The historic African American church has a marker that serves as a memorial to the three martyrs for justice who died in Neshoba County 60 years ago, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. To Marty Stuart, son of Philadelphia, musician, keeper of tens of thousands of memories and stories and songs, the open stage at the Ellis is a tribute to them as well.
“I don’t think anybody should run from the past,” he said. “It’s said and done. And if you were part of it, own it. Shake hands. But there comes a time where you have to drop the charges. Never forget – but drop the charges and keep moving.”
In the end, he said, faith has to be at the heart of something this ambitious, this important – faith that the financing can be raised and faith that Philadelphia will accept and support this venture.
“It’s a hollow victory without it,” Stuart said. “It has taken a profound amount of faith. And sometimes I completely run out of it. I have to go to the sideline and fill back up and then jump back in when my heart’s full.
“But my goodness, if you get there, if you can ring the bells at the end of it ... well, if faith’s not present, what do you really have? That’s my argument.”
So, it appears to me, an outsider, what Stuart and his friends have done – to use an old evangelical Christian term – is to use music in an attempt to sanctify these blocks in downtown Philadelphia.
“I knew that when we entered this venture that one of the reasons that it was going to work was that it felt totally oiled up in prayer,” Stuart said. “And it felt very pure. The bricks and mortar part of it is one thing, but the spiritual matters – in my mind – are even greater.”
“It’s a sacred spot. I believe in old strongholds. I believe in inviting unwelcome spirits to leave a room, a town. And I know that there were churches before we started any of this that walked the streets and prayed and prayed for the people in this town, prayed for old strongholds to be released, to spiritually sweep the town clean.”
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Robert Darden is a member of the panel of experts at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. The website for the Marty Stuart’s Congress of Country Music is www.congressofcountrymusic.org and includes information about upcoming events at the Ellis Theater.