Sure, we all have our favorite composers, but who’s your favorite re-composer? If the term is not on your radar, that’s understandable: It’s typically only used in reference to the contemporary classical auteur Max Richter, who, back in 2012, turned his postmodern, post-minimalist ears to Vivaldi’s masterpiece, The Four Seasons, and created Recomposed. Structured, like Vivaldi’s celebrated 18th-century string concerti, with three movements for each season, plus additional “electronic soundscapes” on the Deutsche Grammophon album where it premiered, Richter’s reimagining of the canonical work won critical acclaim for its mix of inventiveness and historical relevance.
Indeed, it quickly became almost as omnipresent as Vivaldi’s original, used to soundtrack television series as disparate as My Brilliant Friend, Bridgerton, and Chef’s Table. But, as it turned out, Richter wasn’t finished with his time-traveling. In 2022, he released a new album, The New Four Seasons – Vivaldi Recomposed, which had a slightly different approach. This Saturday, March 8th, Memphians will be able to hear this latest take on Vivaldi in person, with a live performance by Iris Collective at the Crosstown Theater, led by Elena Urioste, the virtuoso violinist featured in Richter’s most recent recording of Recomposed.
Urioste, a Philadelphia native, is one of the finest violinists of her generation, having won the Sphinx Competition for young players of minority backgrounds at an early age, then making her debut at Carnegie Hall in 2004. In 2012, she was named a BBC New Generation Artist. And so it was no great surprise when she was recruited to play on Richter’s New Four Seasons album two years ago. But it wasn’t your typical classical recording session.
“The first recording [of Recomposed] that Max released was with Daniel Hope as the violin soloist, and it’s just been so unbelievably successful,” she notes, speaking from her current home in London. “It’s performed all the time around the world in all sorts of different settings. And I think it’s such a powerful piece, and I think it also attracts a lot of different types of listeners. But anyway, the first recording was so successful that for its 10th anniversary, Max wanted to re-record the piece with everyone playing on gut strings and using period bows. So he enlisted me for that project, and we all came together and made this recording in December of 2021, with him playing a vintage synthesizer. I don’t know a whole lot about synthesizers, but he spoke very passionately about this one that he used for the project.”
For Memphis gearheads, the internet reveals that Richter used a vintage Moog keyboard, though the model is not specified. More to the point, using violins that could have been made in Vivaldi’s era took the piece back to an edgier time. “All of us were on gut strings, using Baroque bows. So it was cool to combine looking backwards and implementing historical performance techniques, feeling the purity of sound that gut strings afforded us, but also combined with what Max spoke of as a punk aesthetic. He really enjoyed the grittiness of using this sort of equipment. So I think it all came together in a really cool way, and we’re very proud of the recording.”
Indeed, the new version seems to loom large in the composer’s own view. As he told writer Clemency Burton-Hill, “I see this as a multidimensional project. It’s a new trip through this text using Vivaldi’s own colors, so you have different eras talking to one another.” He further reflected on using the ethnically diverse Chineke! Orchestra to back Urioste. “It’s also recomposing the social structure of our classical music culture to some extent, and focusing on different perspectives, which is really exciting and important to me,” he said. “I don’t see this as a replacement, but it is another way of looking at the material. It’s like shining a light through something from a fresh angle … as if a layer of dust has been blown off.”
It was a profound experience for Urioste. “Since we made the recording, I’ve performed it in a lot of different scenarios, sometimes with Max. We played it in Berlin and in a pavilion in London for Earth Day, using amplification. And then I’ve also played it really bare bones, just acoustically, even without the synthesizer. So this Iris performance will be the latter. There won’t be synthesizer. We won’t be amplified. It’ll just be the strings, just the music itself. But I think it works so beautifully in all of these different forms.”
The show will also be a homecoming of sorts for Urioste, who’s been associated with what is now the Iris Collective for years, culminating in her appearance as a featured soloist with them on a violin concerto by Korngold. “I did so many concerts with the Iris Orchestra in my early 20s,” she says, “and when I went back to play the Korngold seven years ago, there was a real sense of returning to a very healthy place, and I’m hoping to see some familiar faces there on this visit. I hope I see people who I knew back in the day.”
Beyond that, she looks forward to bringing the Richter work she knows so well to the land of her birth. “I mean, I am American,” she says, “and it’s always nice to return to home turf. Although, to be honest, the home turf is kind of terrifying for me at the moment.”
Marcella Simien, singer from Memphis, Tennessee, and
Anne Harris (right), songwriter/fiddle player/vocalist based in Chicago, Illinois, perform at the Folk Alliance’s 37th annual conference. (Photo: Karen Pulfer Focht)
Anyone who believes folk music is a male-dominated profession has never attended the Folk Alliance International Conference, where women dominated the five-day festival that ended Sunday, as they have for years.
When a singer like Marcella Simien of Memphis pulled out her antique squeeze box and started to sing, there was no question that she was in charge.
The 37th annual conference, which convened in Memphis for several years, was held at Le Centre Sheraton Montreal Hotel in a city still digging out from a blizzard that dumped more than two feet of snow five days earlier. The more than 2,400 music fans from around the world didn’t mind so much. It just meant that they stayed inside and heard intimate concerts held almost 13 hours a day by more than 1,000 performers in more than 100 spaces, as large as a theater or as small as a hotel room. How intimate? Some 2 a.m. shows were performed for only two or three people.
Memphian Savannah Brister performs on the Soul Stage. (Photo: Karen Pulfer Focht)
On a larger stage, Simien performed a show that defied convention and labeling, though she called it “psychedelic swamp soul.” A well-known music and arts figure in Memphis and daughter of two-time Grammy Award-winning zydeco artist Terrance Simien, she sometimes performs with her dad in the Zydeco Experience.
And she believes the spirit of her great-grandmother influences her life and decisions.
“She came to me in a dream,” she said. “I never met her but was told all the stories of how she married at age 15 and had 15 children. They lived off the land in rural Louisiana. We are a part of a generation of survivors.”
She said Memphis has been very good to her.
Her new CD, with the long title of To Bend to the Will of a Dream That’s Being Fulfilled, was just released.
Performing with Simien at Folk Alliance was the enigmatic singer-dancer-actress-violinist Anne Harris, originally from Yellow Springs, Ohio, a product of a Creole background. She spent nine years touring with Otis Taylor. Her exotic performances, which include dance, are captivating. Her new CD release, I Feel It Once Again, comes out on May 9th.
Memphians Savannah Brister and Rachel Maxann also played the conference’s Soul Stage. They were but a few of the hundreds of performers hoping to impress the many club promoters, festival organizers, disc jockeys, agents, and music critics that this event is designed for.
The pace is exhausting. There are practical classes in the morning, teaching artists how to find their own voice, hire lawyers, and track their taxes, as well as interviews with performers and newsmakers.
Attendees count on word of mouth to choose which shows to attend. Walking down a crowded hallway, they hear snippets of songs coming from the hotel rooms turned mini-studios, which draw them inside. Artists and promoters often offer snacks and drinks to lure people in for a song or two.
Hands down one of the superheroes of the week was Crys Matthews, a powerful singer-songwriter from Nashville, whose three songs at a late-night showcase stunned a standing room only crowd into silence — followed by massive applause.
She was on a late-night bill with Dar Williams and The Nields, who also killed. Matthews held her own with those two powerhouse acts, which is no simple feat.
Seek out her quiet protest song, “My Kind of Christianity.” That’s how it’s done.
And lest people think there were no quality male performers, there were many. Festival veteran Steve Poltz of Nashville performed before a packed house in one of the larger theaters and was a huge hit. He read lyrics scrawled on paper that he wrote the night before about a conversation with Jesus. Many other artists like Dan Navarro, John Muirhead, and David Myles brought up the testosterone level.
The next Folk Alliance International Conference will be in a much warmer city, New Orleans, January 21 to 25, 2026. Many people in Montreal fondly remembered when it was held in Memphis. For information on how to attend, go to folk.org.
Mike Mogis, Conor Oberst, and Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes (Photo: Nik Freitas)
As any Memphian knows, there are advantages to being a land-locked city far away from the coastal metropoles of money and power. While music industry towns like L.A. or New York seem to be where the action is, being left to one’s own devices in mid-America encourages a certain independence of mind, and hence some especially innovative creatives — from Sam Phillips to Jay Reatard. It turns out the same can be said for Omaha.
That Nebraska burg, like Memphis, felt relatively sleepy back in the ’90s, yet ultimately birthed a scene of its own that has endured for decades. Eventually the standard bearer for “the Omaha sound” was Bright Eyes, still going strong and set to appear at Minglewood Hall on Monday, March 17th. But they were only one of many bands sprouting up in the Omaha scene as the last century ended.
Bright Eyes multi-instrumentalist and chief recordist Mike Mogis recalls those days well. “Over the course of the last 25 to 30 years, a lot has changed about the Nebraska music scene,” he says today from his ARC studio in Omaha. “But back in the day, like the late ’90s, early 2000s, there was a very strong community of friends that all made different-sounding music. Bands that come to mind are Bright Eyes, our band, or The Faint, which is kind of an electronic band, or a band like Cursive, which is a heavier, emo kind of rock band. But we all played in bands together as well, like side projects. We’re all just friends, and that created a supportive musical community that we all felt inspired by. You know, inspired by each other.”
And the way Mogis describes it, all those bands sprang from a determination to make their own fun, despite living in the hinterlands. “I’m looking out my window, and it’s like 10 degrees and there’s snow everywhere,” he observes. “It’s sometimes a harsh place to live, but because of that, it’s also a good place to make music. When it’s cold like this, it’s what I call ‘record-making weather.’ You stay inside and you record music. Weirdly, Bright Eyes tends to record mostly in the winter. Maybe it’s coincidental, but it’s right after fall, which is kind of my favorite season. Anyway, it’s a good place to make music because, to be honest, there’s not a ton else to do.”
It was in that spirit that Mogis first worked with Bright Eyes’ chief singer/songwriter Conor Oberst. “I remember making the first proper Bright Eyes record, which is [1998’s] Letting Off the Happiness. I lived in Lincoln at the time, going to college, and I would drive to Omaha because Conor was in high school. I set up a quarter-inch Fostex eight-track reel-to-reel machine — you know, all analog — and a little mixing board. And we recorded that record in his mom’s basement. I set up in the laundry room as a control room, and then the room adjacent to that was like a little family den. Me and my brother A.J. Mogis just learned on our own, and he kind of taught me.”
That early effort already featured the fundamentals of the Bright Eyes sound, resting initially on the twin pillars of Oberst’s socially and psychologically astute lyrics and melodies over a strummed guitar, and Mogis’ delight in recorded sound and its infinite mutability. Both born of a D.I.Y. spirit, they come together to stunning effect on opening tune “If Winter Ends,” launching with a sound collage suggesting playgrounds, feedback, and traffic, then yielding to Oberst singing, “I dreamt of a fever/One that would cure me of this cold, winter-set heart/With heat to melt these frozen tears.” Record-making weather, indeed.
With a rotating cast of players, the band went from success to success into the new millennium. “We started our own record label, Saddle Creek, and just did our own thing, putting out our own records and our friends’ records,” says Mogis. “And, you know, it kind of took off for a moment there, in the early 2000s, with all those three bands that I just mentioned. We’re all still kind of kicking it today. And we all live in different places now, but Conor and myself have stuck it out here in Nebraska.”
As the band was taking off, another member of the extended Nebraska musical family, Nate Walcott, with roots in Lincoln, joined the group as a multi-instrumentalist, and 2007’s Cassadaga featured his musicianly contributions and full-on, edgy orchestral arrangements. “The first time we recorded the orchestra in L.A., at Capitol Studios, in their big room,” says Mogis, “I just got chills. I’m getting goosebumps right now, just remembering it.”
Thus the now-classic trio emerged, each bringing his own strength to the mix, as they continued to work primarily in Mogis’ studio. All the while, even after a nine-year hiatus, the group has made a point of giving every album a distinctive sonic stamp. Which holds true for their latest work, Five Dice, All Threes, released last year.
“With this one we wanted a more simplistic, sincere-sounding rock record, not too labored-over. We wanted to get back to being more of a live band again, like we used to be. It kind of had a similar approach to what we took on I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, except the fact that it’s not a folk record. This one is more akin to The Replacements, like more ruckus-y rock music.” Having said that, there are plenty of the band’s other elements present, from extended cinematic audio quips to Walcott’s arrangements for horns and strings, not to mention cameos from Cat Power and The National’s Matt Berninger. Mogis says audiences for their upcoming tour can expect an unpredictable mix of songs old and new, with a full sonic palette.
“We have a whole sample bank that Nate plays live, so he’ll trigger them throughout the show. It changes from night to night, depending on the mood,” Mogis says. “And we dig deep into our back catalog.”
Meanwhile, he’ll keep savoring the “record-making weather” that Nebraska offers. “You know, there’s not that many distractions,” Mogis reflects. “And that’s sort of what keeps me here. The fact that Conor and I built this recording studio anchors me here, because it’s a nice place. I enjoy making albums, making music, art, you know, whatever. And it’s a good place for that because it’s affordable, there’s not a whole lot else to do, and there’s a lot to be inspired by, living out here.”
Many know Jeremy Scott through his work with the now-defunct Reigning Sound, but there’s a lot more to this rock-and-roll lifer’s music career than that. After leaving that band for the first time (before the original group re-formed and then split again in this decade), he went on to found The Wallendas (featuring guitar pyrotechnics from Jim Duckworth), followed by Toy Trucks, The Subtractions, and a million ad hoc projects like the all-star tribute to Doug Sahm that he organized last month. (Full disclosure, I played with him in some of these groups.) One common thread through all of these has been the presence of the gritty, indie rock energy he often showcases on his weekly radio show on WEVL, Out On the Side, marked by a close attention to vocal harmonies.
That was also true for the first album under his own name, 2022’s Bear Grease, which he pieced together with multi-instrumentalist/engineer Graham Burks Jr. through the magic of overdubs. As the Flyer observed at the time, “though he started with acoustic intentions, he couldn’t help but let his rock instincts take over.” And, as that unfolded, the album took on a hard-rocking edge that required a full band.
And thus were the Drip Edges born, as Scott added Noel Clark on guitar and Mitchell Manley on bass to create a team that could present the album in a live setting. Now, with the release of their new EP, Kicking the Tires on the Clown Car, the quartet has come into its own. I spoke to Scott last week to see how this release compares to his solo debut.
The new EP
Memphis Flyer: The song “Dirty Sound” on the new EP seems the most like Bear Grease, and it’s the only acoustic-driven song on the record. You’ve said this new release was recorded by the Drip Edges as a band, but is that true for “Dirty Sound”?
Jeremy Scott: That’s 97 percent me, and Graham helped with the percussion tracks.
So that’s the only track done in the manner of Bear Grease?
Yes, it is. I put all the harmonies on. And Graham’s got a Mellotron, and I was playing around with it. And I’m like, “Well, maybe you can put some of this on?” Because he put Mellotron on “Fred Neil Armstrong” on the first record. And then he was like, “Well, why don’t you just do it?” I’m like, “Are you sure? People could get hurt!” But it wound up sounding not awful. Then there are weird things in there that sound almost like a trombone in spots. That’s just me on the guitar, running it through this pedal called a Slow Engine. Sometimes it can make it sound a little bit like a backwards guitar. It’s a pretty cool device.
You’ve certainly leaned into the hard rock elements of Bear Grease on this new release, but they’re revved up more, played by a seasoned band. I hear a lot of Hüsker Dü’s influence on some of the tracks.
Yeah. Hüsker Dü was so formative for me. Okay, I heard the Replacements first, and I dug them, but I got really burned out on the Replacements, and now I don’t really feel like I ever need to listen to them. Ever. That’s not their problem, that’s mine. Hüsker Dü, I can listen to whenever. It all holds up. And the one that really bit me in the ass was [1985 album] New Day Rising. That was a great combination of power and melody. That whole run from Metal Circus through Zen Arcade is so amazing. But New Day Rising is probably my personal favorite.
What exactly has stayed with you from those records, as you’ve written your own songs?
Just the songwriting combined with that guitar sound. And I picked up some things here and there from Bob Mould’s guitar style. Like, I was listening to the intro to the first song of ours — “Everything’s Gonna Have to Be Alright” — and thinking it probably sounds a little bit more like Sugar [Mould’s post-Hüsker Dü band]. Even though I didn’t have that Rat [distortion] pedal and the other stuff he used.
The intro to another song, “Nobody Wants to Drive,” almost sounds like Ratt, the band. The crunch and darker chord changes are a little more metal.
That one actually is probably more influenced by Sugar. And that one is funny because that started off when I was still doing the Toy Trucks band. We tried playing that song, but it was more like a really energetic, forceful waltz. It was in 6/8, and the chorus was the same, but the verse was entirely different — different melody, different lyrics. And I came back to it with these guys, thought about a little bit, and I’m like, “What the hell am I doing here?” So I just decided to make it 4/4, to make it more of a straightforward thing.
The band seems to really relish playing an outright rocker.
It’s a testament to how these guys can put a song over, and it’s good playing with these younger guys that have that energy. I mean, nobody’s going to confuse me with a spring chicken at this point. I guess I’m a little bit more of a winter chicken.
The Drip Edges will play a record release show at the Lamplighter Lounge on Saturday, February 15th, at 3 p.m. Joecephus & The George Jonestown Massacre will open.
If you live in Memphis, you’ve likely heard phrases like “home of the blues,” “heart of soul music,” and “birthplace of rock-and-roll.” Ask anybody; even Google AI insists (so it must be true). Yet Memphians have also seen their favorite artist skip over FedExForum for a tour stop in Little Rock. Despite the rich musical talent and history, Memphis is not a popular destination for national tours. Last-minute cancellations are not uncommon either, as seen just a few years ago with Drake and Moneybagg Yo. Still, locals pride themselves on a vibrant and historical music scene, which is undeniably true. Stax Records, Royal Studios, the Memphis Drum Shop, Easley McCain Recording, Sun Studio — the list goes on. Online lists of the nation’s distinguished music cities frequently rank Memphis in the top 10. But, over the past couple of decades, Memphis has resembled a black hole in the major touring circuit. If asked why, artists would likely say it’s not personal, just business.
Simply put, ticket sales here are unpredictable. Memphis has a reputation as a “walk-up” city, meaning tickets are typically bought as a last-ditch effort instead of far in advance. This could be related to Memphis’ relatively low socioeconomic level. This is not to say Memphis has no appetite for live music. Just look around: Music is everywhere. There are roughly 60 locations within Memphis city limits that provide live music and entertainment, and these locations would not be paying musicians without their ability to attract an audience.
Last December, a partnership between national entertainment agency Live Nation and Crosstown Concourse spawned the construction of a new Memphis venue. Sitting right next to the Concourse, the 1,500-seat venue is expected to host roughly 100 events a year, ranging from comedy to corporate meetings to concerts. Similar types of events can be seen at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts or The Crosstown Theater, albeit with smaller crowds. According to a press release, the new venue is projected to bring more than 150 music industry jobs to Memphis, with base starting salaries of $20/hour, (theoretically) filling a Nashville-sized hole in Memphis’ professional music market. The press release steers clear of this comparison; rather, their plan is to “honor Memphis’ rich musical heritage while filling a key gap in the market, providing a platform for artists eager to perform in the city.” Here, in this almost-mission statement, lies the mysterious “black hole” of live music in Memphis.
By filling a market gap, Live Nation means providing a more “legitimate” venue for big artists to schedule shows. But what about all the other larger venues in Memphis? There’s Minglewood Hall, Memphis Botanic Garden’s Radian Amphitheater, FedExForum, and even smaller locations like Lafayette’s Music Room that have boasted plenty of national acts. Is this “gap” due to a lack of venues, or is it a lack of artists’ interest? The latter seems more likely. But Live Nation’s massive list of nationwide artists likely bolsters their confidence to “fill the gap.” This is what Sherman Willmott, founder of Shangri-La Projects and local music expert, feels the public should be focusing on.
“I think the lede here … is not the venue; it’s Live Nation booking. They’re filling a big empty hole that started with the death of Bob Kelley. Over that time period of the last 25 to 30 years, there’s been no … full-service promotion in town,” Willmott says. Bob Kelley, booker and promoter of Mid-South Concerts, died in 1998. The booking world since then has become “monopolistic. … There’s very few providers.” Memphis especially is not known for large booking agencies/promoters or music business infrastructure, hence the potential impact of Live Nation booking on the Memphis music scene. Memphians will have access to hundreds more artists in pop, indie, electronic, hip-hop, country, and more. Even if the venue starts out slow, Live Nation will likely be able to keep it afloat long enough to catch on. “There’s no one with deeper pockets,” says Willmott.
The introduction of Live Nation to Memphis could point the city in a new direction regarding industry jobs, but 150 of them is a lot to promise. Willmott says he does not “see them hiring that number of people,” drawing on comparisons between the Orpheum Theatre and The Green Room, each of which has a smaller staff. But if the new venue does hire that many, it’s possible for a larger music business market to open up in Memphis.
Naturally, there are some fears and questions about a nationwide corporation like Live Nation (recently involved in an antitrust lawsuit) digging their claws into the Memphis music community. But Willmott points out the role of Crosstown Concourse in the new venue’s booking process: “Bookings at Crosstown are … between 70 and 90 percent local artists.” After all, Crosstown was designed to uplift the community arts, and events at The Green Room or Crosstown Theater do just that. Further, the vertical village supports education (Crosstown High School) and healthcare (Church Health). It is hard to imagine Crosstown wavering from this community-focused vision, even when working with a corporate giant like Live Nation.
Sure enough, things are changing around Memphis. RiverBeat Music Festival is back for its second year in a row, boasting an even bigger lineup of global artists as well as a surefire program of lively and talented local artists like Jombi and Lina Beach. Grind City Brewing Company and Barbian Entertainment just announced a new venue, Grind City Amp, boasting a max capacity of 4,500 and a deep backdrop of Downtown Memphis. The outdoor venue is set to open in the spring of 2026. Although Live Nation and Crosstown have not specified their venue’s opening date, there seems to be a new era of shows coming to Memphis. Let’s hope our favorite artists start showing up on the bills.
This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, we’re all about podcasting! Sonosphere creator and host Amy Schaftlein joins Chris McCoy to talk about her pioneering music podcast, her day job at United Housing, and The Brutalist. Read this week’s cover story here.
Delta Stardust opening for Acid Mother’s Temple. (Photo: Andrew Geraci)
The blues have always hung out at the crossroads of the mundane and the supernatural — as when Robert Johnson exhorted anyone listening to “bury my body down by the highway side, so my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.” But in spite of the blues walking side by side with the devil and buying mojo hands for so long, the genre was never quite associated with shamanic states of consciousness until the ’60s, when tripping hippies folded the blues into both the folk and the heavy rock they favored. Yet when that sonic mash up coalesced into psychedelic rock, the music lost all its grounding in a particular place. It was largely part of the everywhere/nowhere world of pop music, never spawning a site-specific tag analogous to “Delta blues,” but rather proffering a universal message of peace, love, and understanding.
Now, with the advent of a new Memphis/North Mississippi band, Delta Stardust, that may well be changing. As the band’s chief songwriter Michael Graber, aka Spaceman, puts it, “We wanted to go for this transcendence, but we also wanted to be from somewhere. It’s that whole yin-yang, push-pull thing.”
Album art by Rowan Gratz
Beyond being an abstract statement of the band’s mission, those words also capture the sound they’ve come up with, which can be heard on their debut album, Snakes Made of Light, released on January 24th. At the foundation of most tracks is the jangling, earthy, ramshackle string band sound to which Graber and his new/old bandmates have devoted themselves since at least the mid-’90s heyday of Prof. Elixir’s Southern Troubadours, through the venerable Bluff City Backsliders, and on into more recent projects under the name Graber Gryass. All these have sported, to varying degrees, Graber’s songwriting, which often blends the archaic language of the Carter Family with Graber’s more Whitman-esque, visionary poetry. This holds true for his work for Delta Stardust. But the new band also explores novel audio flavors.
“We gave ourselves permission to bring in all kinds of different textures,” says Graber of the new sonic stew. “You know, the synthesizers, the mellotrons. We recorded at the home studio of John Kilgore, who was the co-producer and engineer. He’s the engineer at Zebra Ranch studio [established near Coldwater, Mississippi, by the late Jim Dickinson 30 years ago]. But John also makes his own guitar pedals and has about 400. And we had tons of Moogs and different compressors. He’s like a Brian Eno in Senatobia. There, in his home studio, John said, ‘If you can dream it, I can find the sound equivalent.’ So we were able to add that alchemical — we call ‘stardust’ — texture that way.”
Thus the yin-yang qualities were baked into the band’s sound simply by virtue of where they cut the music. Even as they fired up old Moog synthesizers, they never forgot that they were in Senatobia, Mississippi. “That’s why we call the genre ‘roots psychedelia,’” Graber explains. “What would happen if, just to take any example, if The Chemical Brothers or The Flaming Lips were actually from the Mississippi Delta? And they had all that burden of influence, but they still wanted to hit escape velocity, too, so to speak, right? If they didn’t want to just rewrite Beatles chord structures, but wanted to talk to their ancestors, in a sense, yet also reach for new heights?”
It should be noted that this cornucopia of sounds is deployed with some restraint, compared to your typical synthesizer band, because the string band is always holding down the fort. And some of the sounds are nonelectronic, yet still unfamiliar in the jug band context. Like the chortling “Hoooo!” that opens “Owl in My Backyard,” a bit of field recording that adds a visceral dimension to a song about a bird that “kisses creation on the forehead each night.” A few tracks later, “Two Questions” opens with frogs and crickets before the swooping, lush chords of Eric Lewis’ pedal steel sweep you away.
Even that opening pastoral evolves before reaching “escape velocity,” as Graber notes. “Then you can hear The Band influences on the chorus, with the accordion and dobro, and then it gets into a weird sound somewhere between Pere Ubu and Black Sabbath, as kind of an inner dialogue, right? But then weaving it all together. Just trying to hit that range of emotions was a joy, and the band was willing to do it as well. You know, we cut most of the stuff live, and then we did some overdubs.”
Recording the basic tracks live was made possible in part by the caliber of musicianship that the core membership of Delta Stardust represents, including Andy Ratliff (a “key collaborator” who goes back to the Prof. Elixir days), Carlos Gonzales, Jesse Dakota Williams, and Scott Carter, as well as many virtuosic cameos by Grayson Smith, Mark Jordan, Victor Sawyer, Jeremy Shrader, Tom Link, Robert Allen Parker, Julia Graber, Eric Lewis, and Kitty Dearing.
The most “topical” track is arguably “Memphis Tattoo,” which brings some uniquely urban concerns into the album’s lyrical universe. “I think anyone in Memphis can relate to the story behind that song,” says Graber. “I was running on the Greenline and I got shot at. The bullet just buzzed right past me into the bushes, and my dog took off. There was smoke everywhere. I called 911, and I posted on social media about it. And then everyone started telling me about how they have these gunshot wounds. You know, people have them as almost a badge of joy. And people start piling on to that post and even posting pictures and other things about their gunshot wounds that have healed. So then I started thinking: What is a Memphis tattoo, but a healed gunshot wound?”
And therein lies yet another opposition held in tension, where the folk harmonies and strums of the music, and psychedelia’s promise of transcendence, undergird an all-too-real, yet somehow hopeful take on the gritty world of today. “The bittersweetness,” says Graber, “is that only the survivors can sing it. But it’s just life here, you know?”
Delta Stardust will celebrate the release of their debut album at the New Memphis Psychedelic Festival, Friday, February 7th, at B-Side Bar, 7 p.m. Other bands at the festival will include Twin Face Kline, Arc of Quasar, and The Narrows.
Stax salutes a fallen hero. (Photo: Courtesy
Stax Museum of American Soul)
Back during the initial flowering of Stax Records, as the label went from success to success in its first half-dozen years, and all its rooms buzzed with an ever-expanding staff trying to keep up with popular demand, one star in particular had a tendency to saunter away from the studio, where the action was, and take a detour down Stax’s back hallways from time to time. Deanie Parker, one of the label’s first office employees who soon became their lead publicist, remembers it well — that’s where she worked.
“Every now and then, he just walked in the door,” she recalls a little wistfully, “with little gifts for the girls in the office, little packages. That’s the kind of person he was.”
Now, scores of mourners will be sending flowers to that same soul singer, Sam Moore, the high tenor partner of Dave Prater in Stax super duo Sam & Dave, who died at the age of 89 on January 10th in Coral Gables, Florida, from post-surgery complications. This week, we pay tribute to the great Sam Moore by revisiting the pivotal role he played in the history of Stax and all soul music, as remembered by two who were right there with him: Deanie Parker and David Porter.
(Photo: Bill Carrier Jr. | Courtesy of The Concord API Stax Collection)
Sam Moore: The Stax Years
The quieting of one of soul music’s most expressive voices sent powerful shock waves throughout the music world — certainly among his late-career collaborators like Bruce Springsteen, but not least in Memphis, where Moore and Prater, singing the songs of Porter and Isaac Hayes, helped bring the Stax sound to its fullest fruition in the mid-’60s, becoming overnight sensations with hits like “Hold On, I’m Comin,’” “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” “I Thank You,” and “Soul Man.”
Even then, “Sam Moore got along especially well with the administrative staff,” says Parker, recalling those spontaneous gifts. “He was the most gregarious of the duo. He was a great conversationalist and very personable. Dave was rather laid-back, kind of quiet.
“Keep in mind, now, that I was not in the studio with him all the time because I was in administration,” Parker goes on. “But because of our proximity to each other, it gave me an opportunity to get up and, when the record light was not on in Studio A, go in and observe and listen — not only to their rehearsals, but to the final takes and the playback.”
Surely anyone at Stax was rushing down the hall to hear the hot new duo’s latest, once the hits were hitting, for they were taking the Stax recipe to a whole new level of artistry. Yet while those songs are now part of the Stax canon, the definitive statements of the Memphis Sound, the success of two newcomers named Sam & Dave was not a foregone conclusion when they arrived.
Deanie Parker heading up the publicity desk at Stax (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)
Newcomers
“There was no one interested in Sam & Dave,” songwriter David Porter told Rob Bowman in the liner notes for The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968. “It was like a throwaway kind of situation [to] see if anything could happen with them.” Indeed, it seemed no one at Atlantic Records, who had a distribution deal with Stax, knew what to do with this singing duo from Florida, who’d had little luck with their scattered singles on the Marlin, Alston, and Roulette labels. Despite this, said Porter, “I was very much interested in Sam & Dave.”
But were Sam & Dave interested in Memphis? Atlantic had “loaned” the duo to the smaller label that was showing so much promise, but in 1965 Stax was hardly a household name. Moore’s reaction, according to Parker, was, “Who wants to go to Memphis?” Moore had his sights set on crossover pop stardom in the Big Apple, not moving to what seemed like a backwater. “He really did not have a positive impression about Memphis,” Parker says. “And apparently he was not all that familiar with Stax, which stands to reason, because when Sam & Dave got here, we only had a couple of stars. We just had Rufus and Carla, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Mar-Keys, and Otis [Redding]. I don’t know that we had more than those in the category of the top stars.”
Moore himself described the situation hilariously in his acceptance speech for Sam & Dave’s induction into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in October 2015. “When Dave and I first came to Memphis,” Moore recalled, “the first person I saw was David Porter. He had on a small hat, a big sweater, and his pants looked like pedal pushers. Water came into my eyes.” Moore paused for laughter with impeccable comic timing. “Then it got worse: I saw Isaac. Isaac had on a green shirt with a low-cut neck, like that, a white belt, chartreuse pants, pink socks, and white shoes. I started crying harder. I wanted to go home.”
There must have been more than a little truth to that, for, as Moore went on to explain, “I had in mind to sing like Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Wilson Pickett … but then they introduced us to these two guys and we went inside and they introduced us to the songs. And they didn’t sound nothing like Jackie Wilson and all these people! And then I turned to Dave … and he was trying to get a phone number to get to the airport.
“Being the new kids on the block, we had nothing to say. So we had to go on in there.”
In fact, they were walking into the Stax brain trust, which had always dared to be different. When Sam & Dave’s pre-Stax singles tried to emulate the more polished soul of Wilson or Sam Cooke, albeit without their orchestral flourishes, the results came off as rather corny. Now it was 1965, and pop music was getting edgier, from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Even James Brown, whose biggest hits had been ballads like “Try Me,” was cooking up material like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
Porter and Hayes mapping out the next Sam & Dave hit (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)
Dream Team
David Porter, who saw their potential early on, inched them toward a rawer take on soul music when he penned the shuffling, feel-good “A Place Nobody Can Find” for them, though the B-side, written by Porter and Steve Cropper, was a more tender ballad, with sassy horns thrown in for good measure. Unlike their later hits, Prater was given the lead vocal, though Moore’s upper register parts hinted at the harmonies that were to come. It wasn’t until their next single that Porter and Hayes teamed up to produce the duo, and their nascent songwriting partnership blossomed. And they gelled not only in the substance of the songs, with Porter crafting lyrics for Hayes’ music, but in the strategy they mapped out for the two new kids on the block.
Reflecting on that strategy today, Porter says that Sam & Dave “didn’t have a concept as far as the artistic direction that they needed to go. That’s why Jerry Wexler, the president of Atlantic Records, brought them to Memphis, in hopes of finding whatever that was — he didn’t know what it was. But we had our concept of what we wanted to do, and that was to bring it out of the church, the spirituality out of the church, and have the music emphasize what we called the low end of it, the bass, drums, and guitar, and the underlying chord progressions in the low end, paired with the gospel persona of it, the spirituality of the church.”
And yet, as with Ray Charles and so much of the finest soul music, the gospel underpinnings supported very secular, worldly sentiments. Lyrically, Porter paired the world of the bluesman with the spirit of church. And that came as a shock to the singers, who had both grown up singing in church choirs.
“David Porter and Sam could clash,” Parker recalls, “but it wasn’t hostile, and it didn’t last but a few minutes. It was like they were sparring, you know? Of course, Isaac’s thing was the keyboard, he was the melody man, and Porter was the lyricist. And sometimes Porter had to stop and help both of the guys understand what he meant when he wrote, ‘Coming to you on a dusty road.’ You know what I’m saying? Because this was not Sam & Dave’s environment. This was David Porter’s environment from the area around Millington, Tennessee.”
And so a great foursome was born, beginning with the single “I Take What I Want,” which, as Bowman notes, “was to provide the model for the majority of Sam & Dave’s Stax 45s.” By the time “Hold On, I’m Comin’” dropped in March of 1966, topping the R&B charts and reaching number 21 on the pop charts, that model was locked in. After crafting a song and a sound, Porter and Hayes would only need to give the duo a brief rundown before they got it. Porter can still picture it today: “I’m standing there with them, and I’m looking at them as I give them the lyric sheet. We go through the melody at the piano, and then by the time they get on the microphone, they go into another world. They made it their own, and that’s when you know you’ve got something special.”
And so, even if “Sam was the dominant one,” as Parker recalls, and more prone to pushback, both Sam and Dave were consummate professionals. “We had to go on in there,” as Moore recalled, and they did.
Porter says, “There never was a comment like, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that song. I don’t like that song.’ Because we produced the albums, even when we were doing a song by some other writer, and on occasion we would do that, they still didn’t object. They would bring their own spirit and commitment to wanting to make it as good as it could possibly be. And they did that.”
The Key to the Speedboat
The foursome’s recipe for success not only gave Sam & Dave’s career a boost; it solidified Stax’s standing as a label. As Robert Gordon writes in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, “their album Hold On, I’m Comin’ proved to be the breakthrough for Stax’s album sales. In all the company’s years through 1965, they’d released only eight albums. … In 1966 alone they released eleven albums and Sam & Dave’s Hold On went to number one on the R&B album sales chart. Albums were good business.”
Parker likens it to the fledgling label acquiring a sleek new machine. “They reminded me of a speedboat,” she says. “A boat that nobody was 100 percent familiar with because they were not on the water in the speedboat every day. They had to figure out a lot of things mechanically, and they had to become acquainted with each other. And I’m talking about Sam and Dave and David and Isaac. Once Sam and Dave found their groove with David and Isaac, it was like they had found the key to speedboat. They then began to realize that they had more going for them with their new producers than they’d ever imagined.”
If the speedboat was designed by the producers, Porter makes it clear that Sam & Dave supplied the spark of ignition. “You, as a creator, can create something that you know is strong and good, but when you have an artist that’s able to create their own individuality through the spirit of what you’ve done, then you’ve got something special. That’s the thing that made Sam Moore such a special talent, as well as Dave: They would go into the ownership of the message. I would tell them where the vibe was, and they would have to live the spirit of the message. That’s where true artistry comes in. And the more songs we wrote for them, the more comfortable they would get into doing it.”
Or, as Porter wrote on social media after Moore’s death, Sam & Dave “were always filled with passion, purity, individuality, and believability, grounded in soul.”
The road grew dustier and rockier as the years rolled on, with Atlantic claiming ownership of all Stax masters prior to 1968, and taking Sam & Dave away from Memphis. The duo never reached the heights of their Stax records again, and split apart as Moore struggled with addiction through the ’70s. Yet, with the help of his wife Joyce MacRae, whom he wed in 1982 and who now survives him, he kicked drugs (coming to support several GOP candidates along the way) and revived his career without Prater (who died in a car crash in 1988).
By the time he spoke to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame 10 years ago, Sam Moore had fully embraced his Stax past. “Coming from a humble beginning, with no formal training in singing or anything, we were just two guys who got out there and took the church with us, like Al Green did. … I’m going to say this to you: Thank you Memphis people, the band, the friends that Dave and I met all those years. …They believed in us. They stuck with us. Every record company that we had been with just didn’t know what to do with us. Sixty years later, I’ve been doing this. I’m blessed.”
Sam Moore knew he’d helped build something for the ages. As David Porter reflects now, “The music that was done by the four of us together will live on forever. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Missy Elliott (Photo: Derek Blanks with crowdMGMT), The Killers (Photo: Chris Phelps), and Anderson .Paak (Photo: Israel Ramos)
With the new year barely begun, many of us are still recovering from holiday indulgences, just trying to get it in gear. Not so for the magical elves at Mempho Presents, who have clearly been working overtime to book yet another stellar spring music lineup.
Following last year’s successful debut, RiverBeat will return to the banks of the Mississippi River this May 2nd through 4th, with Missy Elliott, The Killers, and Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals headlining this year’s celebration. Other notable acts include Benson Boone, Cage the Elephant, Khruangbin, Ludacris, Public Enemy, and many more.
As is now standard Mempho practice, the lineup is heavy with local Memphis musicians. Producer Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell will be returning this year with Royal Studios Blues Jam featuring Bobby Rush, Duwayne Burside, Garry Burnside, Kent Burnside and Kinney Kimbrough. WYXR will be presenting the Memphis Rap OGz featuring local artists La Chat, Crunchy Black, Al Kapone, Skinny Pimp, DJ Zirk, Gangsta Pat, and DJ Spanish Fly. And the festival’s Sunday Gospel Celebration is also back, featuring local Memphis gospel legends The Wilkins Sisters, The Sensational Barnes Brothers, The Jubilee Hummingbirds, and Elizabeth King.
“RiverBeat is more than just a music festival — it’s a celebration of Memphis’s rich musical heritage and its vibrant future,” Jeff Bransford, Festival Producer at Mempho Presents, noted in a statement. “From blues and soul to rock and hip-hop, we’re looking forward to our second year as we continue to elevate Memphis’ position as a premier destination for live music and cultural experiences.”
The festival has implemented significant improvements for 2025, including two main entry points — the newly optimized North Entrance that puts attendees immediately in the heart of the action, and the Butler Street entrance, designed to enhance Downtown accessibility and support local businesses. The festival grounds will feature the return of a Ferris wheel, family-friendly activities, diverse food vendors, and nightly fireworks displays.
While some of the national acts featured have long employed local musicians, as when local axe man Khari Wynn plays guitar for Public Enemy, many full-fledged local acts will also appear, such as MonoNeon, FreeWorld, Iron Mic Coalition, Lina Beach, Salo Pallini, Black Cream, Joybomb, Jombi, Deaf Revival, the Neckbones, and Asheville-Memphis hybrid band The Hypos.
Three-day general admission tickets go on sale today at a discounted rate of $199 and VIP at $849, including all fees. The daily lineup will be announced in early February along with sales of single-day general admission and VIP tickets. Visit RiverBeat.com for more information.
Joce Reyome (Solo/Duo first place) (Photos: Nate Kieser)
Singer Shaun Murphy, formerly of Little Feat, had just finished her set as part of The Galaxie Agency’s “IBC Showcase,” held last Thursday afternoon at B.B. King’s Blues Club on Beale Street. During the lull between sets, my wife Vicki and I continued our conversation with the woman seated next to us. “I’ve never seen snow, before,” she said in a distinct Australian accent. “I live in Adelaide, which is in South Australia.” Snowfall at sea level is very rare, especially for a coastal Australian city like Adelaide.
The woman, wearing a Creamsicle-orange hoodie, went on to tell us that she’d visited several places in “the States,” but she hadn’t brought any cold weather clothing because she didn’t think it would get this chilly in the South. She hadn’t had time to go shopping for something warmer after arriving in Memphis.
Snow was forecast for Memphis and the Mid-South with predicted accumulations of five to eight inches. The woman had come to see a musician from her hometown of Adelaide compete in the 40th edition of the International Blues Challenge.
The Memphis-based Blues Foundation hosts the International Blues Challenge (IBC). Typically held in January, the annual event brings together blues musicians, fans, and industry professionals for what is essentially a week-long “blues convention,” featuring blues documentary screenings, roundtable discussions, award presentations, a free health fair for the musicians, showcase performances, and vocal/instrumental master classes conducted by blues veterans.
The challenge portion of IBC week featured mostly up-and-coming blues artists competing in two categories: Solo/Duo and Band. These acts came from all over North America and from around the world. The “challenge,” along with the other activities, took place around the Beale Street Entertainment District. This year, almost 200 acts from nearly 40 states and 12 countries performed in several rounds of competition. The musicians represented their local blues affiliates or sponsoring organizations — called “societies.” Many of the societies’ members traveled to Memphis in support of their artists, creating a home away from home atmosphere that, in many ways, is unique to the blues genre.
That atmosphere of home permeated everything on Beale, and the far-flung travelers created a temporary ecosystem dependent upon one element — a love of the blues. Community is key to blues music and once you were on Beale Street for IBC, it was easy to become a member of that community and feel right at home.
After all, Memphis is the “Home of the Blues.”
Following Galaxie’s afternoon showcase, we made our way down Beale, stopping in at several clubs along the way to take-in performances. More than a dozen Beale Street locales served as venues for the nightly challenges. From Blues City Café to Alfred’s, Beale was alive with the blues. Fans and supporters came together over three consecutive nights to hear great music and have a good time.
In the Corner Bar at Club Handy, we ran into an old friend and blues musician extraordinaire, Mick Kolassa, aka Uncle Mick, who was one of the judges for that venue’s Solo/Duo performers. IBC challengers are rated according to such criteria as musicianship, vocal abilities, and stage presence. John Klaver, representing the Dutch Blues Foundation, played an extraordinary set, and Vicki talked with him afterwards. Klaver is a friend of Vicki’s first cousin, Mark Zandveld, an accomplished jazz bassist from Amsterdam, and Cousin Mark had given us a heads-up that Klaver would be in Memphis for IBC. Maybe Vicki’s quick “hello” helped Klaver feel at home.
Internationally, blues music is as popular as ever, and fans (and musicians) from abroad love to visit Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. There’s a certain Memphis mystique that the world wants to experience firsthand. Australian Frank Sultana, the IBC’s overall 2023 Solo/Duo winner, came back for a visit this year. Sultana said he not only loves coming to Memphis, but that when you’re here you feel “a connection to that [early blues] era, remembering when it all happened.”
That connection to the origins of the blues, along with the mystique, also fosters a sense of community — of feeling like home.
Sultana went on to say that the “connection to the blues” now comes “from everywhere [around the world],” including his home country of Australia, which sent seven acts to Memphis for this year’s IBC.
Thursday night ended with a couple more stops to check out the music and to say “hello” to more old friends. We were feeling part of the blues community, an ecosystem fed by great music and good times.
Then the snow came.
Friday morning was white, very white. And cold, very cold. Vicki reminded me, several times, that she hates snow. “Nice to look at,” she said, “from inside.”
We finally ventured out around 1:00 p.m. and sloshed our way back to the Beale Street ecosystem through six inches of snow and slush. Workshop classes and more showcase performances were already underway. Later that same evening were the semifinal performances.
Saturday brought continued chill with some sunshine for the IBC Finals, held in the historic Orpheum Theatre. The international blues community was well represented with five acts, including two from Australia. Regarding that global representation, Bob Kieser, the publisher of Blues Blast Magazine and a recent recipient of the Blues Foundation’s Keeping the Blues Alive Award, said, “IBC has evolved into quite an international event [and] shows the continuing importance of blues in shaping artists across the world.”
Josh Hoyer of Josh Hoyer & Soul Colossal (Band first place)
Dutchman John Klaver was a Solo/Duo finalist, but Joce Reyome of Canada won that category with an incredible onstage performance. In the Band category, Josh Hoyer & Soul Colossal, representing the Blues Society of Omaha, Nebraska, took first place.
During Saturday afternoon’s performances, Nardia, a band out of Melbourne, Australia, broke into their song “Long Way From Home.” I looked around at the Orpheum’s audience and let IBC week soak in — the stellar music performances, the atmosphere, and that feeling of community.
Home can be wherever you make it, and for one week in January the worldwide blues community came home to Memphis.
