Some Wholesome Rap and Traditional Blues at the Hatchie River Fest in Brownsville
Memphis bluesman Big Don Valentine had been called at the last minute to a fill a gap in the schedule of the Hatchie River Festival …
Arts
West Memphis Blossoms Along the Broadway of America
West Memphis, Arkansas is a youngster as cities go, having been founded only about 1916. Its growth was steady throughout the 1920s, and even continued …
Memphis’ South Main District on a Friday Afternoon
On what was really the first warm Friday afternoon of the year in Memphis, I headed downtown to the South Main Arts District. Memphis gets …
Suavo J and the M-Town Band at Alley Dayz in Downtown Memphis
Originally, I had just planned to go downtown and see my friends Joshua McCain and the Soul Seven, who were playing at a bar called …
Both kinds of brew at Memphis’s Cooper House Project
Somehow I had never heard of the Cooper House Project. Perhaps part of the reason was that it is being designated a “brewery,” and I …
A Little Rock Day
Because I had to do research at the Butler Center for Arkansas History and Culture, I drove out to Little Rock early, and after completing …
In Search of Harlem Alley
In the spring of 1983, I was going to Central Baptist School in the Bartlett area, and I rode with our basketball team to Forrest …
A Day of Blues at Fordyce’s Cotton Belt Festival
It is often hard to be a journalist or observer and also a working musician within the scene I am trying to document. But I …
Celebrating the Legendary Blues Researcher Axel Kustner in West Point, Mississippi
German blues researcher Axel Kustner was one of the last blues field workers to comb the southern United States looking for bluesmen, and he was …
Hot Weather and Hot Blues at the Mississippi Hill Country’s Biggest Weekend
Each year, on the last weekend in June, blues musician Kenny Brown and his wife Sarah host the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic at Betty …