Does this song hold any cultural significance in Mississippi? (Greenville: appointed, limousine)

[allenk893]

I was very surprised to learn this song was sung by a European band and writers. According to the web, it was an international hit but never charted in America at all! How bizarre.

[jhadorn]

It holds no cultural significance for me, however, I was only 2 when this released. It was written by a guy named Joseph Foreman, but the only Mississippi artist named Joseph Foreman that holds and significance for me goes by the name Afroman.

[Ivory Lee Spurlock]

Originally Posted by allenk893

I was very surprised to learn this song was sung by a European band and writers. According to the web, it was an international hit but never charted in America at all! How bizarre.

That's very nice. That song doesn't sound like it was manufactured in Nashville for mass market appeal, and that's a good thing, in my opinion, that is. If it gets airplay in the United States, I predict it will be on the outlaw country or folk radio stations, especially in the college towns. Europeans don't seem to be as gullible for music that is mass marketed for profit as Americans are. She sounds sincere in her voice. You can tell she's real genuine. Nothing about her seems comercialized.

She kinda reminds me of a young Emmylou Harris. Emmylou is and was about as non-commercial as a successful musical artist can get. It doesn't surprise me she would be more popular in Euroope. Emmylou has always been very popular in Europe. She toured alot in Europe. I think she mighta sold as many albums, if not more in Europe as she has in the United States.

It's almost compliment when an artist is more popular in Europe than in the United States.

[GrandviewGloria]

The first time I ever heard of it, was when someone linked to it in this forum, quite a few years back. I've linked to it since then. There's a really ridiculous version of the song, filmed at the fake riverboat, in an obscure "welcome center" sort of park, beside an obscure highway, in Greenville. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ARZSWWrzQ The "riverboat" was constructed during the "Urban Renewal" era, when lots of GoofyGolf-looking pseudohistorical pastiche was being stuck in strange places. Why the band is in 'Laramie-drag Westernwear' - on a Pseudo-Antebellum riverboat..... well... I don't know what to tell you, Honey. Then again, maybe there was a company running around building fake riverboats all over the place . Maybe that one's somewhere else, like maybe Texas. But then, why would they be singing about seeing Greenville, Mississippi again?

It was the era when Greenville's main shopping street was bulldozed, and turned into a bizarre slalom-course shaped thing, accentuated with earth berms (big in the Nixon Era) planted with attractive vegetation, which was soon trampled into nonexistence by the usual people. The same era saw a whole fake Dutch village built in the middle-of-nowhere, on the Louisiana side of the river - complete with a little fake train, which, when loaded with disappointed tourist passengers, and silhouetted against the flat delta horizon, looked reminiscent of the transports from Westerbork to Auschwitz.

All that pastiche, was supposed to "attract tourism!!!", which was seen as a surefire goldmine. I suppose the cynical assumption was that Yankee factory workers (who, back then, were making ridiculous amounts of money, and had fat retirements) were so tacky and dumb, they'd stop to look at ANYTHING, as long as it was vaguely "quaint and old-timey".

This was the Era when Mansard Roofs and cypress shingles were en vogue, and also the era when Yankees were forcing desegregation of the South's schools. But this was before people realized that the destruction of the schools, meant the end of everything - gradual loss of the city's chic shops - gradual loss of the city's middle classes, as families watched their incomes and savings drained-away by private school tuition, and realized that the choices they faced were moving away, or committing suicide (sadly, several young families did just that).

I suppose Greenville in the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon Era, was like Johannesburg in 1994, or Saint Petersburg after the murder of Stolypin. Fate had set its seal, but people still had hope, even though they shouldn't have. A Greenville doctor built a three-storey Mansard-roofed mansion, and kept a Cadillac limousine for ferrying his children to their private schools. There were new Mansard-roofed mansions, everywhere. One builder did a Cypress Shingle Mansard, surrounded by earth berms, and planted with Swamp Cypress. It's still there, and actually quite pleasant https://www.google.com/maps/@33.3806...7i13312!8i6656. Some towboat millionaires built a mansard-roofed villa out from town, and had their kids schlepped to private school, in a Presidential stretched Lincoln (https://images.app.goo.gl/Moe7YFQvMtJxXHCy9). There was an Imperial Ghia limousine (https://images.app.goo.gl/gVMrYVrDwwrQmxjf7) for still more towboat people, a 'Grosser Mercedes 600 Pullman' (https://images.app.goo.gl/EEX8jq7m86aUCHDe9), another Lincoln or two, a couple more Cadillac limmies (one owned by a SteinMart Stein) - mostly for carpool purposes.

There was an elegant new Mansard-roofed shopping center, with a name like Regency Village. There were even two new malls - one featuring a spectacular pair of shops aimed at wealthy children, named 'Young Elite Fashions', and 'Jolie Boutique' ("They had the top store designer in the WORLD do those two - and it was obvious. I'll never forget those colors!"). Town & Country (back then, still a very classy magazine) was featuring Greenville people regularly, and had pronounced the city's water to be among the top five in the nation. Although the dizzyingly-tall Second Empire mansions of 'Old Greenville' were long gone, a few amazing Victorians remained downtown, and an endless array of sophisticated bungalows and mansions (https://images.app.goo.gl/pZgtjepf6bWa4pDg6), from the Early Twentieth Century Cotton Boom (https://images.app.goo.gl/sVhchghDcPvw3KtV6), lined shady, elegant boulevards reminiscent of French Saigon and Uptown New Orleans.

Then, there were the "restrained & discrete" Gamwyn Park and Wilzin Park neighborhoods - not to mention all the estate homes, on vast lots in the new 'Bayou Road' area (https://www.google.com/maps/@33.3550...7i13312!8i6656), south of town. Mrs. Abraham generally had a new Silver Shadow. But her smallish Rolls Royces were dwarfed by the gargantuan new Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Imperials you saw everywhere in Greenville - along with a few of those "odd little Mercedes cars" - although only Catholics drove anything German.

This was just before Greenville's best & brightest began buying Volvos (Greenville, for a while, had more Volvo sales, per capita, than either Marin (CA) or Greenwich (CT)) - cars which they eventually drove to distant places - never to return. There were astonishingly chic shops downtown, including 'Miller One', whose ceiling was an inverted stepped pyramid, and 'Nelms & Blum' - newly refitted in black, and oiled wood - with an impressive collection of expensively spotlighted Paul Klee paintings on the black walls (and, as if that were not enough, the Owner's wife was an internationally-acclaimed author - but that was Greenville for you). And there was 'The Book Inn' https://www.facebook.com/McCormick.Book.Inn/ , which offered a comprehensive collection of Mississippi authors, along with an array of other books - and ambiance (many people's first exposure to Baroque Chamber Music) - as erudite as anything you'd run across in East Hampton or Darien. It was a town which had more published authors, per-capita, than Paris.

When we'd come down out of the hills - I as the "Step & Fetch It" child, working for an elderly bootlegger and his wife - we mostly just went straight to the Cadillac dealership (on top of which, the senior owner's wife had a sprawling penthouse, and is reputed to have kept a fancy man - at least according to my employers, who knew the dirt on everybody in Mississippi - blackmail being as expedient as bribes, most of the time). Then, we'd go to Tenenbaum's, which had a Beverly Hills Moderne facade, slathered in pink marble (https://images.app.goo.gl/m76g4dwxadGPxmec9), and where my employer's wife got her lilac-tinted mink, and things to go with it.

Apparently, someone visited during Greenville's final glorious years, and was so moved by the vibrant, cosmopolitan Greenville of that era, he wrote that song. It seems that the band were similarly impressed, and filmed a video there. (as an impoverished little girl from 'The Hills', I was certainly indelibly impressed by Greenville) Maybe the country stations played the song. But Greenville's better types were solidly "Motown or notown" in their musical tastes, and didn't listen to Country - particularly WHINY Country, likely to make one carsick.

[Mouldy Old Schmo]

A Dutch band to be more exact. Here’s the lead singer in more recent times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKvimzdO9Kc

[Sharif662]

Originally Posted by jhadorn

It holds no cultural significance for me, however, I was only 2 when this released. It was written by a guy named Joseph Foreman, but the only Mississippi artist named Joseph Foreman that holds and significance for me goes by the name Afroman.

The only one to you is Afroman
You never heard of Big KRIT?

[jhadorn]

Originally Posted by Sharif662

The only one to you is Afroman
You never heard of Big KRIT?

The only one named Joseph Foreman...

Yes, I listen to Big Krit too. I played Soul Food about 500 times straight. Fire.

[Listener2307]

The way they pronounce "Mississippi" leads me to believe they don't really speak English, or maybe with a fairly heavy accent.

[Mouldy Old Schmo]

Originally Posted by Listener2307

The way they pronounce "Mississippi" leads me to believe they don't really speak English, or maybe with a fairly heavy accent.

The band was Dutch.

[Mouldy Old Schmo]

When I was growing up, people from other towns would go shopping in Greenville- first downtown, then at the Greenville Mall when businesses moved south (There was another mall - the Mainstream Mall - that briefly flourished, but its failure in the 1970s was one sign that Greenville was losing its luster). Now Greenville’s downtown is dead and Cleveland’s is thriving.
Several reasons for Greenville’s decline are mentioned in other threads, but one that often escapes scrutiny is the decline of the rowboat industry in the early 1980s.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news...167-story.html