Last month, The New York Times published a lengthy story with multiple photos that used this headline: "A Dying Southern Town Needed a Miracle. Marijuana Came Calling." That dying town is Cotton Plant.
"Mayor Willard C. Ryland looked everywhere for salvation for his dying town," Richard Fausset wrote. "He tried luring a vegetable packing company. An Asian carp processor. A Dollar General store. But he struck out again and again. Then came marijuana--and hope. Arkansas voters decided in 2016 to legalize the plant for medical use, giving the state an opportunity both to develop a new industry and to address nagging social problems. The state's licensing program encourages legal marijuana growers to set up shop where the new jobs are needed most, in perennially poor communities."
The licensing program is mired in the courts, but folks continue to hold out hope in a town where the population fell from 1,838 in the 1950 census to 649 in the 2010 census. When my grandparents lived at Des Arc, I loved leaving their home on summer afternoons for long, desultory drives through the east Arkansas countryside. Having grown up in the pine woods of southwest Arkansas, the Grand Prairie and the Delta intrigued me. Even in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I would take those drives, Cotton Plant had twice the population it has now.
Fausset wrote: "The town once had four cotton gins, but no more. The veneer mill that once employed 400 people is long gone. ... Decades ago, as the mechanization of agriculture wiped out the need for field hands, many black residents migrated north for factory jobs. Then in the early 1970s, many whites left town when the schools were forced to integrate. The schools are a moot issue now: The town's high school closed in 2004, Ryland said, and the elementary school in 2014. Today the city is 73 percent black, and 30 percent of residents live below the poverty line."
Cotton was king and Cotton Plant was thriving when Rosetta Nubin Tharpe was born there in March 1915. Her father was Willis Atkins. Her mother, Katie Bell Nubin Atkins, was an evangelist, mandolin player and singer for the Church of God in Christ.
"She went by the first names Rosa, Rosie Etta and Rosabell and used both her father's last name and her mother's maiden name, Nubin," William McNeil and Terry Buckalew write for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. "She began performing at age 4, playing guitar and singing 'Jesus Is on the Main Line.' By age 6, she appeared regularly with her mother, performing a mix of gospel and secular music styles that would eventually make her famous. As a youth, she could sing, keep on pitch and hold a melody. Her vocal qualities, however, paled beside her abilities on the guitar--she played individual tones, melodies and riffs instead of just strumming chords. This talent was all the more remarkable because, at the time, few African American women played guitar."
Almost 45 years after her death, the performer who became known as Sister Rosetta Tharpe got her due last week when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Nina Simone, Dire Straits, the Moody Blues, Bon Jovi and The Cars. She was inducted in the Early Influence category. The Hall of Fame website describes this native Arkansan as "one of the essential figures in the history of rock and roll. If she had not been there as a model and inspiration, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and other rock originators would have had different careers. No one deserves more to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sister Rosetta was the first guitar heroine of rock and roll. Her heartfelt gospel folksiness gave way to her roaring mastery of her trusty Gibson SG, which she wielded on a level that rivaled the best of her male contemporaries."
This time, Cotton Plant was mentioned in the national media in a positive manner.
"She influenced innumerable other people who we recognize as foundational figures in rock and roll," says Tharpe biographer Gayle Wald. "When people would ask her about her music, she would say: 'Oh, these kids and rock and roll. This is just sped-up rhythm and blues. I've been doing that forever.'"
As a youngster, Tharpe joined her mother in an evangelistic troupe that arrived in Chicago in the late 1920s. McNeil and Buckalew write that the women were part of "the growing Holiness movement, an offshoot of the Pentecostal denomination, which in the 1890s led to the formation of COGIC and other new religious groups." The woman billed as the "singing and guitar-playing miracle" moved to New York and married minister Thomas Thorpe in 1934. After divorcing him, she kept the last name but changed the spelling to Tharpe.
Tharpe became nationally famous in 1938 with the release of "Rock Me." She signed with Decca records and was a star into the 1950s. Her 1945 recording "Strange Things Happening Every Day" was the first gospel song to cross over to the R&B charts, reaching No. 2 in the country. She sold out arenas while recording with the likes of Cab Calloway and Lucius "Lucky" Millinder's jazz orchestra. Tharpe was one of two black gospel acts to record songs for U.S. troops. By the 1960s, her fame was fading. She died in 1973 at age 58.
Last year, the Arkansas Legislature designated Arkansas 17 from Cotton Plant to Brinkley as the Sister Rosetta Tharpe Memorial Highway. I drove down the road in an early spring storm, wishing I had brought along a recording of Tharpe's 1947 hit "Didn't It Rain."
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 04/18/2018