During the warm summer days of her childhood, jazz singer Cassandra Wilson and her friends would often roam the streets of Jackson’s Shady Oaks neighborhood barefoot from 9 a.m. until the street lights turned on in the evening. Among their pastimes was gathering in groups to hold competitions to determine who could come up with the most original songs.
“We were essentially free-range children with a strong connection to nature,” the Jackson native artist says. “Back then our streets were so much safer, and there were so many children out on those streets running free with no worries about getting in trouble.”
Music also filled Wilson’s childhood home on many a night after she and her father, musician Herman Fowlkes Jr., started up a tradition wherein the two would sit together in their living room, with Wilson’s father playing guitar or bass while she sang or played the piano to accompany him.
Wilson eventually transitioned from watching her father play guitar to picking up the instrument herself when she was 12 years old. The first she ever held was an archtop Gibson, a six-stringed guitar with a hollow body and arched top and back popular with jazz musicians.
“I remember the way the notes that guitar made overlapped with each other, and the high harmonics it produced,” Wilson says in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press. “I thought those strings had an angelic quality to them whenever we played together.”
The Hal’s St. Paddy’s Parade & Festival has taken place on the third Saturday in March since its first iteration in 1983, barring when the COVID-19 pandemic suspended its execution. The parade now takes place on the fourth Saturday each March, with the connected running events occurring on the third. Photo courtesy The Tell Agency
Today, Wilson is a Mississippi jazz icon with two Grammys as well as an Edison Music Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship, a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail and more. She also played a lead role in jazz musician Wynton Marsalis‘ oratorio “Blood on the Fields,” which became the