Helena, Arkansas

Marianna gave the world an opera trailblazer. Robert McFerrin Sr. was born here in 1921, and in January of 1955 he became the first Black man ever to sing an operatic role on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, performing the role of Amonasro in Verdi's Aida. The great contralto Marian Anderson had broken the color line at the Met just twenty days earlier as the first Black singer of any kind, so McFerrin followed within the same few weeks, the first Black man, in one of the most storied opera houses in the world. He had a deep, warm baritone, and he spent his career singing on the biggest stages. And there is a good chance you already know his son's voice: Robert's boy is Bobby McFerrin, the singer behind Don't Worry, Be Happy. Not bad for one family with roots in this small Delta town. (Source: Encyclopedia of Arkansas.)

Marianna has a real connection to the early days of recorded blues. Back in 1913 a rail line linked this town up to Memphis, and as the story goes around here, that muddy branch line earned the local nickname the Mud Line, or the Marianna cut-off. Whether or not that is exactly the line they meant, the name Marianna made it onto a record. In 1934 the Memphis Jug Band, one of the great jug-band groups of the era, recorded a tune called Mary Anna Cut Off, and the song references this very town out in the Arkansas Delta. Jug bands made music out of whatever was at hand, a jug for the bass, a harmonica, a guitar, a washboard, and they were a huge part of the Memphis sound that fed straight into the blues. So a little railroad running out of Marianna ended up tucked inside one of the songs of that whole tradition. (Sources: Encyclopedia of Arkansas; Document Records.)

Jones Bar-B-Q Diner is a tiny cinder-block smokehouse in downtown Marianna, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta, and it is one of the most celebrated barbecue spots in the South. In 2012 it won an America's Classics award from the James Beard Foundation, the first James Beard honor ever given to the state of Arkansas. It was later inducted into the first class of the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame in 2017 and named the best barbecue in Arkansas by Food and Wine in 2019. The Jones family has run it for more than a hundred years, tracing back to the early nineteen hundreds, and it is widely believed to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the South owned by a Black family, and perhaps the oldest Black-owned restaurant in the country. The menu is short and pure: pork shoulder smoked over oak and hickory for hours, chopped and sold by the pound or piled on plain white bread with a thin vinegar sauce. There are only a couple of tables, the door opens early, and it sells out fast, often before lunch. (Sources: Wikipedia; James Beard Foundation; Arkansas Food Hall of Fame; Food and Wine.)

This is one of the great stories of Lee County. As a teenager near Marianna, Olly Neal Jr. cared a lot more about his tough reputation than about books. One day in the school library he spotted a novel by Frank Yerby, and he wanted to read it, but he did not want anyone to catch him checking out a book. So he stole it. What he did not know was that the librarian, Mrs. Mildred Grady, had seen the whole thing. Instead of punishing him, she quietly drove out of her way to a Memphis bookstore, bought another Yerby novel, and slipped it onto the shelf where she knew he would find it. He took that one too. And the next, and the next. He kept reading. Olly Neal went on to law school, became the first Black district prosecuting attorney in Arkansas, served as a judge on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, and helped start the Lee County Cooperative Clinic right here. The beautiful part is that Mrs. Grady never told him what she had done. He only learned the truth years later. As he put it in his memoir, he has had one heck of a life. (Sources: Encyclopedia of Arkansas; StoryCorps.)

Marianna is not standing where it began. The settlement started in 1848 as a place called Walnut Ridge, founded by Colonel Walter Otey, and in 1852 it was renamed Marianna in honor of Maryann Martin Harland, whose family provided the land. One careful note there: the town is named for that one woman, Maryann Harland, not, as people sometimes guess, for two separate wives named Mary and Anna. The first site did not work out, and by 1858 the whole community picked up and moved about three miles downstream to higher ground, where the L'Anguille River, whose name is French for eel, ran deep enough to use all year. After that, steamboats carried the cotton crop toward Memphis and came back loaded with manufactured goods, and a boat called the Plow Boy is remembered as the first steamboat to reach the town. So the Marianna you are driving through is the second Marianna, the one that moved to find a better river. (Sources: Encyclopedia of Arkansas; Marianna centennial marker.)