Special Section:
CLARKSDALE
The whole world comes to Clarksdale
Local business leaders point to progress and growth
By C. RICHARD COTTON
DBJ Contributing Writer
Having the blues can be a good thing. In Clarksdale, blues is king. What reads like bad grammar rings like truth.
The seat of Coahoma County’s government is generally recognized as the birthplace of the blues, a soulfully plaintive kind of music born of hard times and hard labor in dusty, sweltering cotton fields. The cotton fields are still there, in Coahoma County as well as throughout the Mississippi Delta, but the hard labor in them is not nearly as pervasive as it was in decades past.
Machinery took much of the manual labor out of farming while simultaneously providing jobs to build and maintain that same machinery. While the support jobs were fewer in number, they paid better and required more technical training.
The blues, the farms and the education all meet at The Crossroads, a colloquialism for Clarksdale, where U.S. 49 and U.S. 61 intersect. Those highways are historic avenues of exodus from the Mississippi Delta.
Today, those same highways are avenues to bring tourists and other visitors to Clarksdale, where they seek the blues experience.
“The whole world comes to Clarksdale,” declared Bill Luckett, attorney and a partner in Ground Zero Blues Club. The 3 -year-old enterprise, which Luckett co-owns with Howard Stovall and actor Morgan Freeman, offers live blues music three nights a week and during Sunday brunch.
Luckett recounts that guests to his club come from all over the United States, Europe and other nations: “I’ve stopped being amazed by it,” he admitted.
They come for the music experience and to experience the lifestyle. They come to Clarksdale as an alternative to cookie-cutter destinations like Disney World, Luckett said, pointing out that the travel trend is away from large cities and amusement centers to more heritage-based pursuits.
The blues and the Delta’s Southern heritage fit that trend.
But is it enough?
For an entrepreneur and a blues aficionado like Luckett – his office’s telephone “hold” music is blues – it’s more than enough.
“Entertainment is big business,” he said. “I would love to see more clubs open in this town.
“The casinos have taught me something.”
Luckett’s lesson is that, while one Tunica casino is good, the nine casinos north of Clarksdale draw many, many more people than merely multiplying nine times the number of people that would go to the single casino.
“It’s synergistic, exponential,” Luckett said. “And we’re learning competition is healthy.”
Again, though, is blues music enough to sustain the economy of Coahoma County (pop. 30,622) and Clarksdale (pop. 20,645)?
“I think we’re a long way from that,” said Ron Hudson, executive director of the Coahoma County Chamber of Commerce.
One of the prime industries in the county, according to Hudson, is one that has been a mainstay for centuries: “Agriculture is an important part of our county as it is in all of the Delta.”
He pointed out that it takes fewer people to run today’s farms “but it takes a lot of support” from outside sources. Clarksdale’s commercial landscape is dotted with all manner of agricultural support enterprises. They range from suppliers of chemicals, equipment sellers, repair shops and seed suppliers to crop consultants and plant experts.
Clarksdale is even home to Delta Farm Press, which publishes agricultural news for farmers and ancillary industries.
“It’s kind of all around,” said Hudson.
Manufacturing has not taken the hit in Clarksdale that some Delta communities have suffered. A door-hardware plant closure that cost the loss of 60 jobs has been “more than made up” by expansions at other plants.
Hudson said manufacturing employs about 1,400 people in the county; they produce products like tire components, acoustic architectural products, machining presses and shears and agricultural equipment.
“The death of manufacturing is not here,” Hudson stated. “But manufacturing has gotten a lot leaner in the last few years.”
According to figures posted on the web site of the Delta Regional Authority, a federal poverty-fighting agency headquartered in Clarksdale, only 6.9 percent of Coahoma County earnings in 2000 (the latest year available) came from manufacturing jobs. That was a decline of 3.5 percent from the previous year.
Of the $340,101,000 earned by Coahoma County workers in 2000, 35.5 percent of that came from service-industry employment. That would include the hospitality workers at Lula’s Isle of Capri Casino in the north part of the county, as well as workers in the farm-service firms and employees of Ground Zero Blues Club and Morgan Freeman’s Madidi’s Restaurant nearby.
And there is the argument that most service-sector jobs don’t pay as well as manufacturing jobs.
To the casual observer, it might seem there are two different schools of thought in Clarksdale: The proponents of blues and heritage tourists and the proponents of manufacturing.
Luckett says turning a deaf ear to the blues – he admits there are still some who think of it as “the Devil’s music” – is “a case of not seeing the forest for the trees.
“Instead of trying to pursue smokestacks,” Luckett implored, “we need to focus on alternatives.”
“In my viewpoint,” said Jon Levingston, “both are essential to the long-term wellbeing of our community.” Levingston is the third generation owner of 74-year-old Levingston Furniture store.
“It is essential to continue the manufacturing and commercial base and, at the same time, build on those elements that might be appealing to people outside our community.”
Levingston noted the Delta Blues Museum in downtown Clarksdale “is the best of its type in our region.” He said that entrepreneurs like Luckett, Stovall and Freeman offer “another element in creating attractions.”
“It’s all important,” he continued. “No single element is going to provide the exponential push for Clarksdale.”
The sum of its elements, however, already offers an attractive package for visitors, residents and businesses that might be looking for a place to relocate. Several locals pointed out that locating the eight-state Delta Regional Authority in Clarksdale was a good move for the city.
Congressmen and other national-stature officials are regularly in town to meet with agency director Pete Johnson, who was a resident of the city before being appointed to the post. He was instrumental in the agency moving its offices to Clarksdale.
Most of those officials fly into Fletcher Field, Clarksdale’s municipal airport, said Michael Barr, owner of Delta Blues Aviation that serves as the airport’s fixed base operator.
Barr is conscientious of the impression visitors get when they step off a plane for the first time in Clarksdale: “This is what they’re going to see first.” He said a surprising number of private jets – from Freeman’s to lawyers, realtors and executives of local corporations – utilize the field. It’s also home to three cropdusting operations and about two dozen private general aviation aircraft.
The airport’s board, Barr said, is trying to land a Federal Aviation Administration grant for $11.5 million that will be used to lengthen the runway from its present 5,404 feet to 8,500 feet. That and an inclusive overlay thickening of the existing runway will allow large jetliner traffic at the facility.
Landing an airline at Fletcher Field, though, is a distant dream: “It’s going to stay as it is for the immediate future,” said Barr.
Another component of the Coahoma County landscape that Levingston is bullish on is the Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center, a full-service hospital that boasts 190 beds and physicians in many specialties.
“We have in Clarksdale a tremendous health care facility that is a strong basis for health care throughout our region,” said Levingston.
Florida-based Health Management Associates have leased the former county-owned hospital since 1996; Doug Arnold is administrator and CEO of the facility.
Arnold reports that the hospital employs 520 and has 45 physicians on staff; last year, 25,000 people sought emergency room treatment, while 6,000 were admitted.
“We’re one of the busiest,” Arnold said of the emergency room patient load.
Arnold stresses the community involvement of NMRMC and its employees. The hospital’s Northwest Rehab & Sports Medicine clinic provides sports trainers for five area schools. They recently held a three-day football camp attended by 83 youth players from around the county; more camps, which incorporate character building with the athletics, are planned for later in the year.
“It’s part of our commitment to the community,” Arnold said.
He pointed out that construction of a 20,000-square-foot combined nursing school, which will eventually graduate 40 registered nurses annually, and medical office complex is about to begin on the hospital campus; it is a cooperative undertaking with HMA, Coahoma County government and Coahoma Community College.
Levingston said education is another area worthy of inspection. A joint project – another cooperative undertaking – at the former Catholic school in Clarksdale will eventually concentrate on four curriculum areas: 1) workforce training; 2) hospitality management; 3) teacher certification and training; and 4) health care training.
Renovation and construction costs for the project will be $6 million: “They have been conducting classes, with 300 students attending, in the building before it’s officially open,” said Levingston.
Cultural development will also be one of the missions of the effort shared by Coahoma Community College and Cleveland-based Delta State University. A local woman’s six-figure donation to outfit a visual arts gallery, said Levingston, will feature traveling exhibits from the nation’s large art museums as well as one-person shows by local artists.
Of the coordinated effort between DSU and CCC, Levingston said, “It’s a synergy that never existed in Clarksdale.”
If there is a way to marry education, agriculture, manufacturing and the blues, it can likely be accomplished in Clarksdale. But some believe those are elements that can’t necessarily all be pursued simultaneously.
“We’ve become a destination point in conjunction with the blues,” said Guy Malvezzi, a co-owner of Shack Up Inn, located on the old Hopson Plantation outside Clarksdale. The enterprise offers overnight accommodations in renovated sharecroppers’ shacks and has recently acquired the adjacent cotton gin that will be outfitted with rooms and other amenities.
Malvezzi is an outspoken proponent of promoting the music created on Delta plantations probably much like Hopson. He calls the growing interest in the music “a big roots movement” and “the real deal.”
“The blues,” declared Malvezzi, “can become an industry because industry itself is dead and is going to stay dead because of what’s happening overseas.”
Malvezzi added that there are “some old folks against the blues heritage.”
Luckett echoed that sentiment when he explained that the culture of the blues – nightclubs, smoking, drinking, dancing, and songs about infidelity and other vices – fly in the face of some folks’ morals.
But whether they like the music or the atmosphere that usually accompanies it is only a part of the Clarksdale scene. Steve Stewart, publisher of the Clarksdale Press-Register, said there are other concerns getting more attention.
“The U.S. 61 bypass opened six months ago,” Stewart explained. “The downside is that area is completely undeveloped.” Officials are working to provide infrastructure – water, sewage, and utilities – to the area so it can be developed.
And there’s the proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter near the new highway, which Stewart said will be only the second one in the Mississippi Delta. He says it will provide jobs but will, as Wal-Mart usually does, “clearly be hard on existing businesses.”
Stewart said other issues, like public transportation in the county, are also being studied: “A lot of people are willing and able to work but have trouble getting to jobs.”
He is optimistic that the new Clarksdale Downtown Development Association, which was instrumental in restoring the old Greyhound Bus Station, will spearhead other civic projects.
“I’m bullish on Clarksdale,” said Stewart, “but we certainly have our challenges.” DBJ
