Robert Kimbrough and Lady’s Night at The Hut
Authentic blues in an authentic environment is hard to come by these days, and when the Memphis juke joint Wild Bill’s closed in December, it …
Night Clubs
Soulful Sounds of Bird Williams and The Lyric Band at Mr. P’s Hot Wings in Southwind
The nightlife space at 4202 Hacks Cross Road in the Southwind area of Memphis has been through many incarnations, from its opening as The Daq …
Debut of the Lucky 7 Brass Band at Growlers
I got an invitation on Facebook a week or so ago from a musician friend, trombonist Victor Sawyer, to come to the debut performance of …
Akeem Kemp: The Future of the Blues
Sometime before New Year’s Eve, a lady friend had shared a link with me on social media about a young musician named Akeem Kemp who …
R. L. Boyce, Lightnin Malcolm & Jimbo Mathus at Clarksdale’s Deep Blues Festival
Robert Palmer’s movie and book “Deep Blues” was instrumental in introducing the world to the Hill Country Blues style and its stars, R. L. Burnside …
The King Biscuit Blues Festival and the Decline of Helena
Like all of Eastern Arkansas, Helena had seen better days by the late 1970’s, but the worst was yet to come. When the Mohawk Tire …
Some Ice Cream, A Snowball, Seafood and Blues
After the second-line, we were so hot when we got back to the car that I immediately started searching in my phone for ice cream …
Uptown with the Young Men Olympian and the TBC Brass Band
Sherena had never been to a second-line, so on our weekend trip to New Orleans, I wanted her to experience one first-hand. And by chance, …
An Afternoon in Biloxi and Ocean Springs, Dinner in Gulfport
My friend and I had visited my cousin in the Handsboro neighborhood of Gulfport, and then we had headed on east into Biloxi. We noticed …
The Legacy of Gulfport’s Shady Grove
Hewes Avenue, named for the first mayor of the modern city of Gulfport, Mississippi, was and is a major thoroughfare that leads from the East …