In a Thursday evening awards ceremony in Jackson’s Old Capitol Museum, the words “creative economy” were used multiple times to describe the dollars-and-cents benefit of the arts beyond their power to entertain and enrich.
The Mississippi Arts Commission presented its annual Governor’s Arts Awards to individuals and organizations that have contributed to the arts in Mississippi.
Gov. Phil Bryant attended the ceremony in the former capitol’s House of Representative chamber, which aired live on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and was taped for later television broadcast.
Bill Ellison, host of Mississippi Public Radio’s “Grassroots” music program, was the master of ceremonies for the event.
Bryant said, “The arts mean business, but they also mean joy,” before honoring those he called “our state’s best and most talented.”
A brief video introduced each honoree, and those involved with performing arts shared a bit of the talent the governor had described.
Blues guitarist and McComb native Vasti Jackson won the Arts Ambassador award, capping a week when an album for which he had played guitar and served as musical director — Bobby Rush’s “Porcupine Meat” — won a Best Traditional Blues Album Grammy in Los Angeles.
Jackson’s own album “The Soul of Jimmie Rodgers” had been nominated in the same category.
In his acceptance speech he said, “I heard music before I was born,” noting that his family “didn’t have a car (but) we had a piano in the pantry.”
He brought the crowd to its feet with his renditions of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Standin’ on the Corner” and his own “Blues Don’t Discriminate.”
“Jaimoe” Johanny Johanson, drummer and founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, received the Excellence in Music Award. Ocean Springs native Johanson, 72, joked, “I’m alive and walking.”
The other honorees were:
• Mississippi Opera, for Artistic Excellence.
• Delta painter Sammy Britt, for Excellence in Visual Arts.
• Lucy Richardson Janoush, as Arts Patron. Janoush spearheaded the effort to establish the Grammy Museum in Cleveland.
• William Ferris, author and founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, for Lifetime Achievement.
In his award acceptance remarks Ferris described the arts as a society’s “ultimate enduring markers.”
After the awards ceremony, Jackson, on guitar, and “Jaimoe,” manning only a single cymbal and snare drum, jammed for about 20 minutes to the lingering crowd’s delight.
