Tena Clark
Founder and CEO, Dunaway Gardens — CEO and Chief Creative Officer, DMI Music & Media Solutions
First, steer your car south on U.S. Highway 45. Put Meridian, Mississippi (the nearest big town), in your rearview mirror and tune the radio to 97.1 FM (“Your Hometown Country”) or 89.7 FM (“K-Love Christian Contemporary”). Roll down the windows for a breeze and drive past long, warm fields of soybeans, cotton, and corn. After about 50 miles, you’ll find yourself in Waynesboro, Mississippi, (Motto: “Together We Can Make a Difference”), which Tena Clark called home.
“To understand the world,” wrote William Faulkner, “you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” To understand Tena Clark, you must understand that the deep South asks you to live with a divided heart. It’s “a savage place, a complicated place,” Tena writes, “but one that burrows into you.” It’s a universe Tena loved and hated fiercely.
“Appearances mattered above all,” she writes. For most, that meant living some variety of lie. You could promise to love, honor, and obey, like Tena’s father, and still have countless affairs; you could read the Bible daily and still drink most of a bottle of whiskey by dinnertime and sleep with a gun under your pillow, like Tena’s mother; you could call yourself a Christian and turn a blind eye on the Klu Klux Klan, as folks in Waynesboro did; or you could know from the time you were four or five that you liked girls more than boys and yet pretend you planned to get married, have babies, and be a traditional Southern wife, like Tena.
Or … you could try to escape. “Maybe,” wrote Tena in her autobiography Southern Discomfort, “I could find out I was stronger than I thought I was and the cycle — at least for me — would end.” Maybe she could follow her heart to LA, live openly as a gay woman and artist, and climb to the top of the music world.
On the banks of the languid, khaki-colored Chickasawhay River just outside Waynesboro, Tena’s father had a farm. The richest man in Wayne County, Nolan Clark proudly owned hundreds of rolling acres rich with pecan, willow, and magnolia trees, dotted with placid cows, goats, and horses, and perfumed by honeysuckle, jasmine, roses, and wisteria. In this Eden he lived with Tena, her three older sisters, and their mother, Vera.
Tena’s autobiography opens the morning of Tena’s 10th birthday with Vera tearing out of the house in an alcohol-fueled rage. Furious over her husband’s latest infidelity, she hurls bras, dresses, and fur stoles into her Cadillac while the family housekeeper holds a sobbing Tena. Tires spinning, gravel flying, Vera throws the car into reverse and drives away with a simple, “Aloha, baby.” She never returned home.
That was the end of the beginning. Before that, there were long days when Vera, a frustrated songwriter, filled the house with music. In love with Nolan at 14, married at 15, mother to three girls by 21, Vera was discouraged from being anything except a good Southern wife. But that didn’t stop her from dreaming. She played records by the hour — Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole. On good days, she and Tena danced across the kitchen floor, harmonizing to songs like “King of the Road.”
After Vera moved out, “I was always sitting in the back seat of my father’s car while he was doing deals and buying oil leases and negotiating,” Tena writes. Nolan lived for work. “He was business 24 hours a day,” she says.
Two parts of Tena struggled with each other — the budding entrepreneur watching her father, and the musician longing to express herself, like her mother. Since babyhood, Tena had tapped rhythms with her fingers, pencils, utensils, whatever was at hand. “Drumming felt like music, and the music felt like it was coming straight out of me,” she wrote. But good Southern girls don’t play the drums. So, she bugged the high school band director relentlessly until he agreed to let her play if she could march the entire length of the football field holding a drum nearly her size, playing the “The Pink Panther” theme. She did, and her drumming career began.
“I was so driven,” she says. “I had this mantra: The worst thing that happens is I make a fool out of myself. And I’ve done that before, so that didn’t bother me.” On a whim, one day she phoned Hal David, probably the best-known lyricist in the world at the time, to tell him she liked his work. They struck up a friendship that lasted his entire life. Another mentor was legendary drummer Hal Blaine, whom Tena met when she accompanied her father on a gambling trip to Las Vegas. Blaine was so charmed by the young girl from rural Mississippi who passionately loved drumming that they became pen pals.
When it was time for college, Tena chose the University of Southern Mississippi for its music program. When it was time to graduate, she hit the road with a band instead of marrying and settling down. For years, they played across the south, “from 9 PM to 3 AM in a fog of cigarette smoke,” says Tena. All slept in the same room — male and female, Black and white — to save money.
After a few years, though, Tena was hitting the “concrete ceiling.” The music world wasn’t kind to women drummers. Nor was there money to be made. Tena took an additional job as a sound engineer at the famous (if you’re in the music world) Studio in the Country in Bogalusa, Louisiana. She was working there when Stevie Wonder came to record his album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Wonder heard Tena play one night at a club in Biloxi and invited her to LA. “Hang out and learn what we’re doing,” he offered. Tena’s father threatened to disown her if she went — but Tena’s mother cheered her on. Tena stayed in LA for a year, and when the album was finished, she decided to return to the South and focus on writing music.
Nashville was the place for that. But Tena hesitated. Short on cash, she settled in Jackson, Mississippi, and started a booking agency for musicians. Within five years, Tena’s Sunburst Productions was one of the largest agencies in the south. She was making money and her father was proud of her. But Tena was miserable; she wasn’t creating music. She sold everything and drove to Nashville.
In Nashville, she focused on writing. One day, a music director from Warner Brothers who was working on the soundtrack for the upcoming “Police Academy” movie spoke at an ASCAP event. She admitted how challenging the music business was for women to break into, “but please don’t hand me your cassette tapes,” she told the audience. “Give them to ASCAP and we’ll listen later.” Tena waited until she saw the speaker leaving and pounced. “I know you said you wouldn’t take anybody’s tapes,” said Tena. “But you also said women never get a break in the music business and that you’d like to see that change. So please — woman to woman — listen to my tape. And if you don’t like it, throw it in the trash.” The woman relented and took Tena’s cassette. The next morning, Tena got a call. “Fly out to LA. We want you to write music for ‘Police Academy,’” they told her. Tena was launched.
In Los Angeles, she founded Tena Clark Productions and began creating music for TV and film. Leo Burnett hired her to be their music production house. Remember the McDonald’s theme, “Have you had your break today”? Tena wrote it.
She went on to found DMI Music & Media Solutions. DMI uses music as an element in marketing strategy, relying on the emotional power of music to generate brand loyalty. Through music creation, music licensing services, and producing live events, DMI serves clients that include Target, AMC/Regal, Walgreens, United Airlines, General Mills, Delta Air Lines, Kohl’s, Air Force 1, Air Force 2, and Build-a-Bear workshop, among others.
But Tena kept crashing into the concrete ceiling of music industry sexism. Women could write songs; women could perform. But women could not produce music. That was for men.
“I was like, ‘What the hell?’” Tena recalls. It took another woman to break the logjam. Vesta Williams was a well-respected recording artist under contract with A&M Records at the time. “I will have laryngitis for the next five years unless you let Tena produce me,” she told her managers. They relented, and Tena and Vesta created a hit called “Congratulations” that became the longest-running ballad on BET. In the years that followed, Tena wrote and produced for some of the biggest names in music: Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Dionne Warwick, and Gladys Knight. She won a Grammy for her work with Natalie Cole and was nominated for a Grammy with Patti LaBelle. In addition, she contributed to the soundtracks for Hope Floats and My Best Friend’s Wedding, among other movies. She wrote the theme song for NASA’s centennial (‘Way Up There”) and has been commissioned to write the anthem for the National Women’s History Museum in Washington, D.C. Her song “Break the Chain” about ending violence against women is the most globally performed song in history.
“I felt like I was doing things for myself,” says Tena, “but I was definitely doing them for my mother, too, because she never got the opportunity to see her dream fulfilled.”
And then the South called again. After 37 years in LA, Tena and her wife and children moved to Georgia. Once again, she was living on a farm, this time outside Atlanta. She was thinking about opening a recording studio there; a friend and developer introduced her a place called Dunaway Gardens. Launched in the 1930s, Dunaway Gardens was the brainchild of a former actress who designed the estate to be a creative retreat and center for the performing arts. Walt Disney and Tallulah Bankhead visited to rest and work. Despite its beauty and thousand-seat amphitheater, though, Dunaway Gardens gradually fell into disuse and kudzu-covered disrepair.
“It was like the original Sundance,” says Tena. “When I saw it, I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I decided this is where everything comes together for me.”
Tena bought Dunaway Gardens and is currently transforming it into a luxury retreat “rooted in the arts.” She plans to build a recording studio there, plus sound stages for television and film. There will be a spa, cottages, restaurants, a five-star resort and a nonprofit dance academy for underserved children. The outdoor amphitheater is being restored for concerts and Broadway theater.
“You feel this immense creativity and spirituality here,” says Tena. “This has always been a place for wellness, since the time of the Cherokee Indians.”
In this new Eden, all the parts of Tena — the businesswoman, the writer, the musician, the mother, the wife, the executive, the activist, the artist — have a place.
Tena’s home.