My very first visit to Clarksdale, Mississippi was Juke Joint Saturday six years ago.
If you remember it was during a driving spring rain storm, but the streets of Clarksdale were packed and people just put on raincoats and opened an umbrella, smiled and had a great time.
I was being recruited to be your Editor and Publisher and Sara and I were spying on you.
It’s a story people have told me repeatedly over the past six years.
They come to Clarksdale and something clicks in their heart.
Festivals
I love festivals and firmly believe they are one of the best public relation tools for any community.
Think about it: People come to Clarksdale and have a good time and then go back home and tell their friends about this neat little town in the Mississippi Delta. Then they come back and bring their friends with them.
I was wowed by the number of festivals Clarksdale had in the summer of 2019. You had them scheduled just about every weekend.
I was also impressed by the number of international tourist I saw walking past my window that first summer.
They love the warm Mississippi Spring weather, they love our fried food and they love our blues.
I have even been told that the Juke Joint website has a following from Nepal. I wonder why people from the most mountainous place on Earth are drawn to one of the flattest places on Earth.
Festivals mean fun. And that is what people from all over this globe will find in Clarksdale this weekend.
What a week
We want to point out to our visitors we are in the middle of an election this spring and you have probably noticed the billboards and candidate sign in yards and posted at major intersections. We also have political ads in this week’s paper.
Please look into those faces. Things are changing in Clarksdale this spring.
We have heard of several high profile real estate sales in our town. We urge locals to keep reading the paper and visitors to come back next year and see how things have changed in our downtown and across our community.
We also had a ribbon cutting on a custom beer brewery in our downtown this week.
Red Panther beer is a must for visitors and non-Baptist locals this weekend!
I lived in Texas for 10 years and every community had a micro-brewery that they proudly touted as their own. There is not a doubt in my mind Red Panther beer will grow to become a rising star across Mississippi and carry the Clarksdale name with it.
And did you hear Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top fame was in Clarksdale Wednesday afternoon?
One of the first albums I ever owned was Tres Hombres.
I told you I once lived in Texas and just like that Tres Hombre album cover I have dipped my body in the Rio Grande.
But just like the song says: “I'm shuffling through the Texas sand, But my head's in Mississippi.”
Guests in our house
I was proud to see city crews downtown this week weed-eating the sidewalks (you have to do that in a place where the dirt will grow anything), picking up trash and even slopping paint on our curbs.
As I said earlier, Southerners are trained to be polite and I hope you will smile and help Clarksdale put its best foot forward this weekend.
There are guests in our house and just like we have been taught, they have special privileges and they do things we don’t always understand and are glad to overlook.
Being polite is not a Southern ploy: It’s genetic, sincere and genuine. We hope to export it to the West Coast, East Coast and Washington D.C. this weekend. We feel folks there need it and could benefit from it.
I once had a state-level economic development guy from Mississippi tell me if he could get industrialist and major corporations to come to Mississippi, their stereotype of the state changed.
I have always been proud to tell folks I am from Mississippi. They seem to like my Southern drawl and the way I relate to someone I don’t really know.
Clarksdale, let’s welcome the world to Juke Joint this weekend.
Floyd Ingram is Editor of your Clarksdale Press Register. Call him on the phone at 662-627-2201 if you want to hear him talk that Southern thang!
