Mac McAnally (left) with Worsham recording an episode of Mississippi On the Map (Photo Credit: Visit Mississippi)
- The Mississippi native, Nashville-based guitar slinger, and country songwriter explores how popular music and culture trace back to his home state.
In late August, Grenada, Mississippi-bred songwriter and country artist Charlie Worsham traveled from Nashville to New York, donned his guitar and stepped onstage as a guest musician with Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience.
As he stood alongside musicians like Anthony “Big A” Sherrod of Clarksdale in Manhattan’s Central Park, after sharing lunch with a larger group of well-wishers from the Delta, the 2024 CMA Musician of the Year and host of the new podcast “Mississippi on the Map” had an epiphany.
From where he stood, a thousand miles from his hometown — and only slightly less from his wife and kids back in Music City — Worsham realized that like writer Willie Morris, he had traveled north to find home. The fact that he was halfway through re-reading the Yazoo City native and Southern literary icon’s 1967 memoir, “North Toward Home,” written during Morris’s famed run as editor in chief of Harper’s, was a poignant treat.
“Here we were in one of the biggest cities in the world, a stone’s throw from Harper‘s magazine where Mr. Willie Morris was editor,” he says. “And I had done ‘Good Morning America’ that morning with Dierks Bentley, and who’s one of the hosts there but Robin Roberts, and where’s she from? Pass Christian, Mississippi.”
Unwittingly, Worsham had also proved the central tenet of “Mississippi on the Map,” produced by Visit Mississippi, where so far he’s shared the mic with Freeman and fellow musicians like Marty Stuart, Mac McAnally, and Chris Stapleton: No matter where he goes, Mississippi is there.
“One of the questions I ask every guest is, ‘What do people get wrong about Mississippi?’” he says. Recent guest Wright Thompson, the sportswriter, best-selling author and Clarksdale native whose featured episodes will post Oct. 8 and 22, gave him a half-hour’s worth of answers. But one stood out to Worsham. “My favorite part of the answer he gave was people mistaking Mississippi for being anything short of absolutely in the middle of everything going on in the world today.”
While recording that episode at the Lyceum on the University of Mississippi campus, Worsham noted the amount of consequential history surrounding them, from Ole Miss football to Civil Rights history.
“You’ve got the undefeated, winningest football season in the history of Ole Miss in 1962, which is a team named after literal Confederate soldiers, while James Meredith is trying to integrate this school, and I’m sitting in ground zero of that story talking about [that team],” he says. “And who’s on that football team? Jim Weatherley. What song did he write? ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’ A straight line from James Meredith to ‘Midnight Train to Georgia,’ and it’s a completely Mississippi story.”
These connections arise often in Worsham’s line of work. With so much of American music history rooted in his home state, he revisits the pioneers of blues, country and rock and roll who came up in Mississippi every time he sits with a guitar for his own music or while moonlighting with artists like Eric Church, Luke Combs, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban or Old Crow Medicine Show. Now as a podcast host, he gets to talk with people tied to his homeland either by birth or inspiration about their own journeys.
Other upcoming episodes will feature HARDY, the hard rock/country hybrid phenom from Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Worsham is currently working on a visit to the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman to speak with members of the recently revived Parchman blues band — a historical landmark, he says, linked to a complex story of “great pain, but also this great legacy of art and creativity and music and rising above.”
“I want to explore it all,” he says. “I want to celebrate those who made a difference, because when you make a difference from Mississippi, you probably had to work twice as hard to get there. And to take an honest look at these harder parts of our story, too.”
While Mississippi on the Map began as a way to explore how forms of music developed and spread from Mississippi, told through the eyes of its most famous musicians, Worsham sees the format continuing to expand from the original concept.
“The whole point of this podcast is music, but the deeper we go, the more we realize we also need to talk about food,” he says. “We also need to talk about the written word because I mean, Faulkner, Welty, Jesmyn Ward, Donna Tartt, John Grisham, Richard Wright — we’re stout when it comes to people of letters. And it’s all connected.”
Jim Beaugez
