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Mac McAnally to be honored with country music marker

Singer-songwriter Mac McAnally on Friday will become the sixth artist recognized with a marker on the Mississippi Country Music Trail.

A marker ceremony is scheduled that day at 1 p.m. at CC Shook Park at 389 Second St. in Belmont.

McAnally joins Jimmie Rodgers, Marty Stuart, Elsie McWilliams, Leake County Revelers and Ben Peters as a trail honoree.

“Mac McAnally is truly a Mississippi treasure. His music evokes the mood of the true South and his prolific songwriting has garnered praise throughout the music industry,” said Mary Beth Wilkerson, director of the Mississippi Development Authority’s Tourism Division. “We are pleased to add his name to the list of distinguished artists that comprise our state’s rich musical legacy, which is represented in part by the Mississippi Country Music Trail.”

Born July 15, 1957, in Red Bay, Ala., Lyman Corbitt "Mac" McAnally Jr., grew up in Belmont.

By the age of 3 he was singing gospel at the First Baptist Church as his mother played piano. By age eight he was beginning to play piano himself, and a year later writing poetry.

At 15, he was regularly playing piano in honky tonks along the Tennessee border, despite his lack of early exposure to country music, and he was writing ambitious short stories and poems, which he would soon begin converting into songs. In his junior year in high school, certain that he wanted a musical career, he left school to pursue it.

His parents came to support the move though his father was the school’s assistant principal.

Working as a session musician and fledgling songwriter at Wishbone Production and Publishing in Muscle Shoals, Ala., the teenage prodigy turned to the guitar and placed an original song, “I Need You Tonight,” on the first session he played on for Hank Williams Jr.

By the age of 19, McAnally had his own first record and a pop radio hit, “It’s a Crazy World.” He demonstrated a honeyed, jazz and R&B-influenced vocal style comparable to that of singer-songwriter James Taylor, and a direct yet detailed, observant writing style, which made natural the dedication of his first album to William Faulkner.

t was not obvious that his future would be in Nashville, or in country music, but over the next several years McAnally would see the band Alabama take his “Old Flame” to No. 1 on the country charts, and country singers including Randy Travis, John Anderson, Ricky Skaggs, Ricky Van Shelton and Charley Pride all recording his songs – even as he became a regular songwriter and working guitar ace for pop favorite Jimmy Buffett.

By the 1990s, Mac McAnally would emerge as a singular country music quadruple threat. As a producer, he would helm and sometimes engineer key releases by Marty Stuart, Sawyer Brown, Chris LeDoux and others, and operate a recording studio in Muscle Shoals.

As an expressive guitar picker, he would appear on recordings by George Jones, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton, Keith Whitley and Reba McIntyre, eventually winning the Country Music Association’s “Musician of the Year” award multiple times.

As a performer, he would still be recording much-praised records 30 years after his first album was released. His down-home, literate songwriting would take him to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007.

Back home in Mississippi, he would be inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame in 2008.

Much like the Mississippi Blues Trail, which now garners over 120 markers, the Mississippi Country Music Trail celebrates Mississippi's rich heritage of country music legends and chart toppers.

The trail will feature a variety of country music artists, including Charley Pride, Conway Twitty, Jerry Clower, Faith Hill, Paul Overstreet and others to comprise the first 30 markers across the state.