Music Mecca in the Making

With a burning desire to sing and write songs, Tricia Walker had to leave Mississippi 34 years ago to pursue her entertainment dreams. A native of Fayette, the budding star headed to Nashville for a shot at the big-time and stayed 26 years, carving out her place in the music industry.

“Being from a small town, New York was too big and L.A. was too far away, and so Nashville made the most sense, because I knew if it didn’t work out, I could be back home in a day,” she said. “It was a great time to be in Nashville. I learned the school of hard knocks, began to learn the business.”

The now-accomplished singer-songwriter is back home.

“I had to leave to go do what I did and then come back. My hope would be that there would be enough critical mass and enough development of appreciation,” she said. “If you get those young people to stay here and begin to grow those businesses, then you have something really happening. You have to have a population that not only enjoys music but values it.”

Tricia, after earning a couple of gold records for album cuts she penned, running a successful publishing business and recording her own record, The Heart of Dixie, decided in 2005 it was time “to give back.” At the time, Tricia didn’t know how she would give back, but all roads pointed home.

“It was a very quiet kind of, it’s time to go home now,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow. What am I going to do? How am I going to live?'”

Around the same time, Delta State University was looking for someone to lead its Delta Music Institute, an independent center under the College of Arts and Sciences offering technological, creative and business areas of the music and entertainment industries.

Tricia was asked to lead the institute as its new director, a role she took on in 2006.

“It’s really grace and mercy. Everything I’ve learned in 26 years in Nashville has been able to apply to this program, because it is so entrepreneurial,” she said. “It really is trying to help students understand there are no guarantees in the entertainment industry and you really are going to have to go out and craft your own opportunities. If you’re called to the creative lifestyle, you’re going to have to make your own way and have multiple skillsets with which to eat and with which to live. That’s what we’re trying to build here.”

DMI, which began with a donation by Fred Carl of the Viking Range Corporation in 2003, is in the Whitfield Building, a former gymnasium, on the Delta State campus. The building houses two world-class recording studios comparable to the renowned Abbey Road studios in London as well as a small project studio and state-of-the-art computer lab for creating, editing and mixing digital media.

DMI also has a Mobile Music Lab program, which is used to teach the basics of songwriting, process of recording, producing and performing original musical works, beginning video production and the importance of Mississippi’s musical heritage. The bus has professional-level audio equipment, musical instruments and software for recording sessions, performances, tours and instruction in media arts.

While in Nashville, Tricia learned the ropes by doing it all. She joined Connie Smith’s band on the Grand Ole Opry and traveled with Paul Overstreet and Shania Twain. She was a member of a swing, jazz and blues trio called The Mud Cats and was a founding member of “Women in the Round” nights at the legendary Bluebird Cafe, where women songwriters would take turns playing music and telling stories. Tricia penned album cuts for some of the most well-known women entertainers, including Alison Krauss, who won a GRAMMY in 1998 for her performance of “Looking in the Eyes of Love,” a song Tricia wrote.

“The music industry is a very entrepreneurial kind of world. It’s rare that you get to do one thing. You have to do many things,” she said.

A goal of the institute, especially since Tricia came on board, is to draw on Mississippi’s musical heritage to produce the next generation of Mississippi entertainment industry professionals and entertainers. Tricia believes the Mississippi Delta could become a musical mecca and a place people flock to experience music, much like how the sounds of Austin, Texas, draw music-lovers from all over the world.

“You can’t really design for this. Nobody designed for Austin to become what it is, but it happened because people value music. They value entertainment,” she said. “For here, it’s not that there is a lack of talent, but we’re trying to educate the public on how to treat music and entertainment professionals. We could position DMI and Delta State to be the next recording center of the Mid-South and sort of the incubator for the entertainment industry.”

Tricia is the department’s administrator, but she, along with fellow seasoned entertainment professionals, producer and engineer Miles Fulwider, touring musician and music promoter Charly Abraham and touring musician Barry Bays, teaches classes.

“We’ve all come from that. We’ve all gone to school and done the academic thing as well, but nobody here has a Ph.D. It doesn’t really exist in the music industry, on the professional side,” said Miles, a professional audio engineer and music producer who just finished his first year as an instructor with DMI. “We all come from that, and we’re always trying to push that with the students in giving them that real-world experience.”

Students can earn a bachelor of science of entertainment industry studies through DMI. The degree offers two concentrations, audio engineering technology, which allows students to get deep into recording and the art and science of sound, and entertainment industry entrepreneurship, which is more the backside of the business, publishing, management, being an agent, concert promotion, copyrights and contracts. The classrooms are full recording studios with the most up-to-date technology and all of the students are required to have laptop computers with the latest recording and engineering software.

“It really facilitates how the industry works. Some people are making records on laptops. Others are in big, big studios. We’re trying to give them that whole breadth of understanding and experience,” Miles said. “When they’re thrown into DMI, they’re working in all the different kinds of the creative fields, just kind of getting experience and getting their feet wet. And, as they choose from there, they may want to focus on songwriting or recording or touring and promotion. Then they kind of get a feel for it.”

Students are required to take business courses as part of the degree, which furthers DMI’s emphasis on creating entertainment professionals who understand the real world.

“Whatever you’re going to do, you’re going to be a small business, so you have to understand a little bit about accounting, a little bit about management, a little bit about marketing,” Tricia said. “We’re not like any other department on campus. We don’t do the 8-to-5 thing very well. We’re here late hours in the night, working on weekends doing gigs, so, we’re a little different.”

Horace Willis, a musician and audio engineer in training, is quickly and thoroughly learning the tricks of the trade. The Arcola native, a senior in the program, is concentrating in audio engineering but dabbling in entrepreneurship.

“It’s helped me discover who I am as a person. It’s also been the thing that’s really grooming me into adulthood. A lot of what they teach you is trying to be your own manager, being an entrepreneur. A lot of the being an entrepreneur requires you to grow up eventually, learn how to schedule your gigs, learn how to book and network with people and talk to people,” he said.

Tricia said Horace, also known as “Mr. DMI,” has been a great representative for the program and the use of people skills it takes to make it in the business.

“We’ve watched him grow and mature. He’s seen it all and done it all,” she said.

Horace is a member of the DMI All-Stars, a hand-picked group of DMI musicians. The program has two other bands, Ol’ Skool Revue and Delta Rox, which allow students to not only receive credit and scholarships, but also perform at on-campus and regional events. The DMI All-Stars have had opportunities to perform during GRAMMY week in Los Angeles and at the White House in Washington, D.C., through a partnership between DMI and the GRAMMY Museum.

In 2010, the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles announced it would build a satellite GRAMMY Museum in Mississippi on the campus of Delta State. The museum, scheduled to open fall 2015, is already helping boost enrollment for DMI, currently boasting about 60 majors with about 35 freshmen coming in the fall, and will, hopefully, help the area become the musical haven Tricia envisions.

“Our students will have some really unique opportunities through the museum,” she said. “The museum’s mission is fundamentally an educational one. The mission is outreach to the community, not only music education but to make students in Mississippi aware of their own really rich musical heritage. When you have a global name like GRAMMY attached to you, you have access that you didn’t have before. That’s going to be key.”

The studios are open to the public to allow community members an opportunity to reserve and use the state-of-the-art recording equipment. Tricia, along with several musician friends, has recorded at DMI in one of the studios, which she claims are comparable to any Nashville recording studio.

“We’ve set up the studios to where they’re open to the public at a reasonable rate, because we’re an educational institution first of all, and we built that into the program so our student engineers could have on-the-job training and an opportunity to earn money while they’re doing it,” she said.

Keeping the studios full of musicians is one way Tricia and the DMI staff will draw people to the Delta for the music.

“I’d love to see the studios fill up every day. There is enough talent and enough people who are interested in recording, whether they’re amateur or professional, that we ought to have people in here every day,” Tricia said.

Even though technology now allows musicians to record music at home from their computers, Tricia is confident that the engineers coming out of DMI are home-grown professionals.

“One of the challenges with digital technology is that anyone can sit at home with their computer and do a recording, so why should I come over to DMI and pay you more?” she said. “Well, it’s because we’re better at it. We have this expertise level, so you’re paying for a professional. If you’re trying to take it to the next level, you’ve got to have a professional.”

While Tricia can do a lot of the recording herself, she always turns to a professional audio engineer for her records.

“When we talk to the students about budgeting, there is a do-it-yourself mentality, but, at some point, you can’t do it all really well. I’ve never tried to engineer my own records,” she said. “I’ve always spent the majority of my recording budget on a really good engineer. I can play a lot of the instruments. I can sing a lot of parts, but I need a really good engineer, and I’m willing to pay for that.”

Chris Moore from Greenwood, a recent graduate specializing in audio engineering, is a prime example. He grew up around music and recording, but DMI put him on a professional level.

“I learned exactly how everything works. Not just on a surface level, but on an internal basis, what causes what to work how,” he said.

Chris, who was awarded a $2,500 prize, funded by the Steve Azar St. Cecilia Foundation, plans to start his own audio and video production business. He plans, for now, to stay in Mississippi.

“I think Mississippi definitely has the opportunity here,” he said.

For Tricia, keeping DMI graduates open for business and opportunity in Mississippi is key for what the program, and she, personally, stands for.

“When it was first conceptualized, the thought was, ‘So much great music came out of Mississippi and so much talent is still in Mississippi.’ For me, if I was going to do the music business, I had to leave Mississippi to do it. I think somebody kind of popped up and said, we could do a recording studio,” she said. “Mississippi is home of the blues, which so many American genres of music really spun off the blues, you know, the whole crossroads, just the mystique that is the Delta, it made sense. I think it was a concerted effort to try to keep talent in the state.”

Tricia, who is Ms. Tricia to her students, keeps that at the heart of the institute and her desire to share her experiences and love of the business.

“Mississippi is a unique place. For all the things that people think we don’t have, we are certainly rich in many ways, culture, music and art and certainly people is that handful of things that we are spectacularly rich in. And, I think that’s worth celebrating and worth trying to try to give back to.

“This is the time of life where it’s time to give back, so it’s a great gift for me to be able to come back and tell these students, I can certainly tell them what not to do, and share that with them. I’m very blessed to have been able to do what I love to do all my life. It’s rare.”

STORY Lauchlin Fields
PHOTOGRAPHS Melanie Thortis