Get ready to rock in Carrollton Friday and Saturday, Oct. 1 and 2, during the Carrollton Pilgrimage and Pioneer Day Festival.
That’s when a Mississippi historic marker — the kind with the image of a magnolia on it — will be unveiled, at 10 a.m. Oct. 2.
The marker will honor the rockabilly band Mack Allen Smith and the Flames as part of a day of events, exhibits, arts and crafts, antique cars, food and tours highlighting everything from historic architecture to roots music, including rockabilly, blues, country and gospel. The band will perform at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 2 at the Community House in Carrollton, which is included on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Pioneer Day festival and the Pilgrimage are being organized as complementary experiences.
The mixture of visiting 19th-century homes and listening to roots music is expected to work out well.
“They all celebrate Carroll County,” said Pam Lee, Carrollton’s mayor. She chairs a sponsoring board composed of directors of the Carrollton Pilgrimage and the Carroll Society for the Preservation of Antiquities.
Carroll County was established in 1833.
Also a part of the celebration will be recognition of the addition of Smith’s name to an existing Mississippi Country Music Trail marker that honors the late musicians William T. Narmour and Shellie W. Smith and includes a tribute to the late bluesman Mississippi John Hurt. Now, Mack Allen Smith, who is in his early 80s and lives in Greenwood, will have two markers in Carrollton that honor his musical contributions.
As a boy, Smith lived in the Hickory Grove community, and then his family moved to Carrollton, where it had a grocery store and lived in the back. As a student at J.Z. George High School in North Carrollton, he led others to two top awards in a Future Farmers of America hillbilly band contest.
Although he is a singer and not an instrumentalist, he played bass with a washtub, pole and string in the FFA band.
Smith has an accounting degree and worked for the Mississippi Tax Commission when he and his wife, Lois, who is now deceased, were raising a family in Greenwood.
Over the decades Smith and the Flames continued to perform, sometimes playing hundreds of venues a year. He and another musician toured England.
Early on, the band recorded in Memphis, Jackson and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Smith has recorded more than 20 singles. In 2019, he issued a CD, “Sitting in the Sunshine, Wishing It Was Moonshine.”
The Pilgrimage will feature visits to homes from both the 19th and 20th centuries and two churches constructed in the 19th century, Carrollton Baptist Church and Grace Episcopal Church.
The houses are Stanhope, the Captain Ray House, Shade’s Rest, The Doll House, The Oaks and Cotesworth, which is located outside town. Many of the houses inside Carrollton are near one another, and parking will be available that will allow visitors to leave their vehicles and tour the houses on foot.
Tours will be held from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Oct. 1 and 2. Tickets may be purchased at the Pilgrimage’s headquarters in Carrollton’s town hall, and tickets bought on Oct. 1 will still be good the following day. The price is $25 each for adults and $10 each for school-age children.
A $2 convenience fee will be charged when tickets are purchased with a credit card.
There is no admission charge to attend the Pioneer Day Festival, although donations will be accepted.
There will be vendors and educational exhibits, including one by the Mississippi John Hurt Foundation and another inside the Merrill Museum across the street from the courthouse.
In it, visitors can use their cellphones to access the music of Mississippi John Hurt and Mack Allen Smith by scanning in a QR code. In this way, they will be able to listen to music while they view exhibits about the two musicians.
That opportunity exemplifies the changes that have occurred over the centuries, Lee acknowledged. She had tried to devise a way to combine the visual with audio for such exhibits — “but it wasn’t until I learned how to do QR codes that it was possible.”
But festival-goers won’t need their phones for music outdoors. Benny Rigby will emcee a slate that will include the Slaton Family, Cobbins Brothers, Como Sisters and Bear Marsh Missionary Baptist Church choir.
Lee speculated that 2,000 people might turn out over the two days. But there’s plenty of room to spread out at the festival — bring a folding chair — and masks and hand sanitizer will be available indoors and out.
The celebration is receiving grant support from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Development Authority.
- Contact Susan Montgomery at 662-581-7241 or smontgomery@gwcommonwealth.com.
An earlier version of this story reported the incorrect date of when the historic marker recognizing Mack Allen Smith and the Flames will be unveiled. It will be unveiled at 10 a.m. on Oct. 2. Mack Allen Smith and the Flames will perform later that day at 6:30 p.m. at the Community House in Carrollton.
