Mississippi Today
Hattiesburg, Southern Miss recall Jimmy Buffett before he was legend



HATTIESBURG — Former Southern Miss president Martha Dunagin Saunders was a USM undergrad in the late 1960s at the same time as Pascagoula native Jimmy Buffett, the future billionaire singer-songwriter. The two were friends.
“My most vivid memory of Jimmy from those days is of coming out of night class, and seeing him racing across campus with a guitar over his shoulder, obviously running late to play a gig,” Saunders said Saturday, hours after learning of Buffett’s death. “All Jimmy wanted to do back then was play his music. He really had a passion for it.”

Saunders, now the president of the University of West Florida in Pensacola, described a young Buffett as, “Crazy witty. Always smiling. Always funny. Always with a story.”
That wit and passion, along with a keen business acumen developed later in life, catapulted Buffett to remarkable fame and fortune. At the time of his death early Saturday, at age 76, he was ranked No. 18 on the Forbes’ list of the Richest Celebrities of All Time with a net worth of $1 billion.
Saturday, in Hattiesburg, news of Buffett’s death superseded even the anticipation of the Golden Eagles football opener with in-state rival Alcorn State. An announced crowd of just over 30,000 watched Southern Miss defeat Alcorn 40-14 and was serenaded with Buffett’s familiar ballads during timeouts throughout the night. A video tribute and moment of silence to honor Buffett preceded the opening kickoff. Thousands stood, swayed and sang his hit anthem “Margaritaville” during a timeout midway through the second quarter. Flowers were left at the base of a bronze marker in the center of campus where Buffett met fellow student and harmonica player Greg “Fingers” Taylor in front of The Hub where the two first played music together. Taylor was a long-time member of Buffett’s famed Coral Reefer Band.

“The Southern Miss family mourns the loss of our 1969 graduate, Jimmy Buffett, whose work ethic and global success exemplified Southern Miss grit,” current USM President Joe Paul said. “Our prayers go out to his family, friends and all who knew and loved him.”
Paul, as many, attended the game in a Hawaiian shirt, a paean to the island/beach lifestyle Buffett’s music celebrated and to his millions of followers often referred to as “parrot heads.”
Paul and Saunders weren’t the only presidents mourning Buffett’s death Saturday. President Joe Biden issued a statement: “Jill and I send our love to his wife of 46 years, Jane; to their children, Savannah, Sarah, and Cameron; to their grandchildren; and to the millions of fans who will continue to love him even as his ship now sails for new shores. We had he honor to meet and get to know Jimmy over the years and he was in life as he was performing on stage – full of goodwill and joy, using his gift to bring people together.”
Buffett once told a California reporter, “I’m not a great singer, and I’m not a great guitar player. But I’m a good entertainer.”
He was also a terrific story teller, stories he told not only in his songs but in books. Indeed, he is one of six authors to have topped both the New York Times fiction and non-fiction best seller lists. Three of the others: John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Styron.
Buffett’s music often received harsh critical reviews because of its simplistic style and limited musical range. Buffett never made apologies and, in fact, received praise from the likes of Bob Dylan. Dylan once listed his six favorite songwriters: Buffett, Gordon Lightfoot, Warren Zevon, John Prine, Guy Clark and Randy Newman.
Dylan reportedly was particularly smitten by the lyrics to Buffet’s “He Went to Paris,” a ballad Buffett penned in the early 1970s after meeting musician Eddie Balchowsky, a one-armed veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Here’s the closing stanza:
Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin’s
And drinks his green label each day
He’s writing his memoirs and losing his hearing
But he don’t care what most people say
Through 86 years of perpetual motion
If he likes you he’ll smile then he’ll say
Jimmy, some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic
But I had a good life all the way
Buffett’s family moved from Pascagoula to Mobile when he was young and he grew up in Alabama’s port city. He first attended Auburn University but flunked out, and then found his way to Pearl River Junior College in Poplarville – and from there to USM.
He was very much a non-traditional student, majoring in journalism, joining the Kappa Sigma fraternity but spending much of every week playing music in the New Orleans French Quarter 100 miles away.
Petal photographer/author Vaughn Wilson was a student at Southern Miss two years behind Buffett and, like Buffett, a musician at the time. “Jimmy lived off campus in a house with about four or five other guys, and I was over there pretty much every night,” Wilson said. “When I walked into the house, Jimmy would point to his acoustic guitar standing in the corner and tell me, ‘Go have at it.’ I loved that guitar and he’d let me play it. He was just a good guy, a funny, fun-loving guy. He was just Jimmy then, before he was Jimmy Buffett. But he had that big ol’ smile that became so famous.
“He left Hattiesburg and I guess it was about four or five years later, I turned on the radio and heard him singing ‘Come Monday.’ The rest is history.”
Wilson says he never saw Buffett in person again. Dunagin did.
“Jimmy and I graduated on the same day,” Dunagin said Saturday, chuckling. “I went into academia and he became a legend.”

Saunders served as USM president from 2007 to 2012 and brought Buffett back to campus several times.
“I remember once he dropped in and it turned out we were both going to attend a New Orleans Saints game the next day,” Saunders said. “So he said, ‘Why don’t you just fly down with me?’ So my husband and I got on his fancy jet and flew to New Orleans. Jimmy was the pilot.”
Saunders said Buffett made it clear to her that although he originally attended Southern Miss because of its proximity to New Orleans, he very much enjoyed his college days in Hattiesburg. He was inducted into the USM Alumni Hall of Fame in 2018.
“I have always thought that Jimmy is proof that heart will get you further than talent,” Dunagin said. “If you want it and if you are passionate about it, that passion will take you a long, long way.
“Look at Jimmy. He brought so much joy to so many people. I was talking to a mutual friend this morning who said, ‘You can’t think of Jimmy Buffett and not smile, can you?’ It’s so true. I thought that was a perfect description. And how’s that for a legacy?”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Gov. vetoes bill providing hospitals ‘stability’

Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed a bill Thursday that would help stabilize hospitals, calling it the “Grady Twin” of a bill he vetoed in March.
Lawmakers made some changes to the previously vetoed legislation in a new bill, but kept much the same. Reeves cited many of his same concerns this time around, including alleged contradictions and the loom of a deficit.
The bill, authored by Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, sought to make several changes to the Medicaid program – from mandating providers screen mothers for postpartum depression to requiring the agency to cover a new sleep apnea device.
Blackwell did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Arguably the largest impact of Senate Bill 2386 would have been that it called for locking in place supplemental payment programs that have been a lifeline for hospitals – but which are unreliable as they vary from year to year, according to Richard Roberson, CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association.
That fluctuation makes it difficult for hospitals to plan what services they can offer.
“The supplemental payment language was intended to offer better budget predictability as hospitals move through these uncertain times and instructed the Division (of Medicaid) to maximize federal funding,” Roberson said. “… Hospitals, like other businesses, need stability to continue to serve their communities effectively.”
Supplemental payment programs bring in around $1.5 billion federal dollars to Mississippi hospitals each year.
Reeves said in his veto statements for both bills that locking the payment program in place is in contradiction with another of the bill’s mandates, which would change the program to allow out-of-state hospitals that border Mississippi to participate in the program.
“It is logically nonsensical for Senate Bill 2386 to, on the one hand, freeze the MHAP, while on the other hand, mandate that the Division open the program to include an additional hospital.”
But Roberson said the language of the bill would not prohibit the programs from growing – it would merely clarify what hospitals need to do to get paid.
Reeves again said the bill “seeks to expand Medicaid.” The bill brings forth code sections related to eligibility requirements, but it doesn’t call for expanding the Medicaid population by increasing the income threshold, which is what is typically referred to as Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
Thursday’s vetoed bill was hospitals’ last recourse for stabilizing their budgets via legislation.
Richardson says the Mississippi Hospital Association has now turned its sights toward the Division of Medicaid to secure hospitals’ payment programs without the help of the Legislature.
“With or without Senate Bill 2386, we are hopeful the Division will work to stabilize the model,” Roberson said.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Parents, providers urge use of unspent TANF for child care

Child care providers, parents, children, legislators and advocates gathered outside the state Capitol Thursday to call on Mississippi to use unspent welfare funds and resume accepting child care certificate applications.
Last month, the Mississippi Department of Human Services announced it will temporarily stop accepting new applications, redetermination applications and “add a child” applications for the child care certificate program for certain families as the result of the loss of COVID-19 relief funds. The hold, started March 31, will continue indefinitely. The program provides child care vouchers to eligible families, often with a co-payment fee.
MDHS explained that without the COVID-19 relief funding the number of families with child care certificates is more than it can support long term. When asked how long the hold would last, chief communications director Mark Jones explained the hold would end when the number of children with certificates dropped below 27,000 children and $12 million in monthly costs.
The week before the hold began, on March 28, 36,186 children had child care certificates. 25,300 of them fit into one of the MDHS’s priority categories. 10,800 did not.
The Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, Child Care Directors Network Alliance, Mississippi Delta Licensed Child Care Providers, and Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable organized Thursday’s gathering and press conference to implore MDHS to tap into unused TANF funds to book the child care payment program.
“DHS has about $156 million in money from prior grant years that has gone unspent,” said Carol Burnett, MLICCI’s executive director, at the press conference.
The child care payment program gets funding from federal and state sources. It received $127 million from the Child Care Development Fund in fiscal year 2024, as well as $7 million in state appropriations, and $25.9 million transferred from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grant.
That $25.9 million is 30% of the state’s annual TANF grant money transferred into funds for child care certificates. It is the maximum amount they’re allowed to transfer under federal law. The state also spends 85% of its money from the child care development fund on certificates, when federal law requires them to use at least 70%.
MLICCI and others want MDHS to add to that by spending current and carryover TANF funds on child care subsidies for families that qualify for child care certificates. According to a memo MLICCI prepared, this method does not require legislative action, has no spending limit, and is already used by other states.
Under the current hold, families can apply and get their certificates renewed if they fall in one of the following six categories: on Temporary Assistance for Needy FamiliesTANF or transitioning off of TANF, homeless, with foster children, teen parents, deployed military, orand with special needs. The Division of Early Childhood Care & Development will continue paying for certificates for all families until their certificates expire.
In a statement, MDHS’ chief communications officer Mark Jones said “MDHS understands these concerns and reaffirms its commitment to support child care, transportation, education, and other needs of families who need to return or remain in the workforce. Our aim is to ensure our approaches are sustainable.”
Burnett, parent KyAsia Johnson, state Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, and multiple child care providers talked about the toll the hold has taken on child care centers and families. They also stated the importance of child care to sustain the state’s workforce, keep child care providers afloat, and educate young children.
They also urged citizens to contact the state’s political leadership to get their attention.
“This decision is putting people like me in an impossible situation,” said Johnson, a child care provider and parent. “What am I supposed to do without child care?”
Each provider spoke about how they had to explain the hold to parents, many of whom have had to pull their children out of day care. Cantrell Keyes, director of Agape Christian Academy World in Jackson, had five families pull their children out of her center. “More than half of my school tuition comes from CCPP,” she said.

Rep. Summers called on MDHS to lift the hold on child care applications, use the extra TANF funds, and communicate better with parents and providers.
“Right now, thousands of Mississippi children might lose child care, not because the need has disappeared, but because the agency has made a choice,” she said.
The hold on child care certificates comes at a time when many child care providers and parents are struggling to stay afloat amid high costs, high turnover and high demand.
Deloris Suel, who owns Prep Company Tutorial Schools in Jackson, said, “Child care is in crisis. We’re not heading for crisis, we’re in crisis.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Tyler Perry comedy about a Mississippi lieutenant governor ‘She The People’ set to stream on Netflix

Netflix has announced it will stream “She The People,” a comedy written, produced and directed by Tyler Perry based on a fictional newly elected Mississippi Lieutenant Governor, Antoinette Dunkerson, played by Terri J. Vaughn.
According to a trailer released Thursday and press about the show, the new Lt. Gov. Dunkerson character realizes her new job will be extremely tough due to a sexist and condescending governor.
Executive producers for the show include Niya Palmer, Vaughn and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The cast also includes Tre Boyd, Dyon Brooks, Jade Nova, Jo Marie Payton and Drew Olivia Tillman.
The first eight-episode season debuts May 22 on Netflix, with a second eight-episode season premiering Aug. 14.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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