Stephen Wade Scott

I know Stephen Wade Scott through Red.  In my journey through the deep coastal south, I’d hit Louisiana and Alabama first.  For those of you familiar with the geography you know that a little sliver of Mississippi sits between Mobile Bay and Lake Pontchartrain.  I had one old friend in Mississippi, Driftwood John, in Clarksdale but had no other Mississippi connections.  Red said Stephen Wade Scott in Hattiesburg was a great musician of a musician in a place lot of great musicians. 

 I'd never been to Hattiesburg and reached there just before lunch to meet Stephen at Duncan Lake.  It was a sweet little splash of place. One of those spots that provides one of those delightful juxtapositions of being in the middle of nowhere in the middle of somewhere. He took off his cowboy boots and sang barefoot. Stephen writes and sings with a whole heart and makes sad songs with beautiful melancholy.  He's taken hurt and made beautiful things with it.  

Between the songs, Stephen told me about what a powerhouse of music Hattiesburg is.  This was something that I was starting to really get a handle on, or maybe just an awareness for the first time.  These spots I was going to were incredibly rich areas of music.  Sure I'd expect it from New Orleans, but to go to Mobile and then Hattiesburg and not just experience musicians, but hear them talk about each other with such respect and awe from the sheer density of talent was a window into a new world.

 When I think of music it often defaults to big cities, but as I traveled through the South I was experiencing areas of the country that seemed to form the headwaters of American music.  Sure people got famous in the coastal big cities, but it was here, somewhere in this triangle of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana where the soul of American music was bubbling up before coalescing into a form that carried it downriver to the rest of the country and then the world. @stephenwadescott