Memphis Flyer

“It must be something in the water” is a phrase you often hear when the subject of Memphis music arises. It resonates because the beats, bards, and blues springing from this city for over a century have a mysterious power matched only by the majesty of the Big Muddy itself, our sounds evolving over time like a river in its banks, their shape-shifting flows connecting north and south, east and west, old and new alike. Setting a music festival on the Mississippi’s banks was the stroke of genius that defined the Beale Street Music Festival (BSMF) for decades. Now a new player is keeping it there, and it’s called RiverBeat.

Spring: A Time for Music

A kind of imperative informed the founding of RiverBeat Music Festival in its infancy — the feeling that, regardless of the promoters or the festival’s name, when spring comes to Memphis, some kind of music must be made at the water’s edge. So when Kevin Grothe, vice president of sponsorships for the nonprofit Memphis in May, announced last October in an email to media outlets that “the Board of Directors has made the very difficult decision to suspend the Beale Street Music Festival in 2024,” many felt a powerful sense of loss.

There was even some bitterness evident in the announcement, as James L. Holt, Memphis in May president and CEO, noted that, as well as losing nearly three and a half million dollars due to low attendance in 2023, BSMF was being sued for $1.4 million in property damages by the Memphis River Parks Partnership. “With a pending lawsuit and the event now unwelcomed in the new Tom Lee Park, future Beale Street Music Festivals will face fundamental challenges,” he wrote.

But the Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP) clearly wasn’t opposed to music by the river in principle. Within days, MRPP president Carol Coletta had announced that Forward Momentum, the private company behind the Mempho Music Festival and Mempho Presents, would be taking the reins. “With its successful track record and deep financial strength, Forward Momentum was a great fit for a signature music event in Memphis,” she said.

Indeed, as Mempho Presents spokesman Jeff Bransford says today, the MRPP actively sought out the company, which by then had a presumably successful track record with the Mempho Music Festival every October since 2017, as well as growing success in promoting one-off shows through the year. “We were approached to fill the gap in springtime and we jumped at the opportunity to do it,” he notes.

And “jumped” is the right word, as the Mempho team had only a few scant months to book the open weekend in May. “We’ve been dealing with a very compressed timetable to get year one off the ground,” Bransford says, but he is clearly proud of what they accomplished. The lineup has “a little wider demo[graphic] compared to what we’ve traditionally done at Mempho. That means more urban, more pop, and more country types of things that typically we have not done as much of.”

Now, with headliners like Odesza, the Fugees, and Jelly Roll topping the bill at Tom Lee Park each night, May 3rd through May 5th, it seems Mempho Presents has pulled off the impossible in a very short time, with the momentum of over four decades’ worth of gatherings by the river maintained and only growing.

Take Us to the River, Boo

One noticeable difference between RiverBeat and the BSMF is the lack of focus on the blues. The Blues Tent, once a fixture in the older festival due to its roots on Beale Street, is no more. And yet, as if to compensate, the city’s legacy of R&B and soul music is more present than ever. As Grammy-winning producer/engineer Boo Mitchell notes, that can be summed up in just five words: “Take Me to the River.”

That’s the title of the 1974 Al Green hit produced by Boo’s dad, Willie Mitchell, of course, but since 2014 it’s also served as a catch-all title for projects in film, music production, and education that are deeply connected to Memphis music history. It started as the brainchild of North Mississippi Allstar Cody Dickinson and director Martin Shore, who wanted to connect the legendary blues and soul musicians of Memphis with younger artists. The resulting film documented the in-studio creative collaborations between Mavis Staples, Snoop Dogg, Al Kapone, Frayser Boy, Yo Gotti, Lil’ P-Nut, Otis Clay, Bobby Rush, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Charles “Skip” Pitts, and William Bell, all underpinned by the Hi Rhythm Section, who had played on the original Hi Records hit from which the film took its title.

Take Me to the River, the film, then grew into a franchise of sorts, leading to years of touring, a similar film pairing classic New Orleans players with younger artists, and an educational curriculum developed with the Berklee College of Music. Now a third film, Take Me to the River: London, is in the works. Yet for Boo Mitchell, nothing can top the initial epiphany he had when the original film was made. “That movie changed my life,” he says. “I started working on the film around 2011, about a year after Pop [Willie] had passed away, and I didn’t really have any of my own [production] credits up until that point. And then my whole my career changed. The film gave me a chance to show people what I was, what I could do.”

Now, 10 years on, Mitchell is especially proud to bring the Take Me to the River Live band to the RiverBeat stage, tying together multiple threads of Memphis music history. While technically not the headliners, their performance on Friday is arguably the heart and soul of the entire festival.

In part, that’s because of artists who died since the film was made, singers Otis Clay and Bobby Bland and guitarists Skip Pitts and Teenie Hodges. The latter, brother to fellow Hi Rhythm players Charles and Leroy “Flic” Hodges, was critical to their unique sound and left some big shoes to fill. Yet Mitchell feels they’ve bounced back by adding someone from the younger generation.

“Now,” says Mitchell, “Hi Rhythm features Lina Beach, who is officially filling in the Teenie Hodges guitar spot. The band has adopted her as their sister. She’s the official guitarist and she’s also an artist. So she’ll be opening with Hi Rhythm because she’s working on an album at Royal [Studios] that I’m producing.”

That alone keeps the current touring band true to the film’s original mission of connecting generations, yet Take Me to the River Live will feature more legends than just Hi Rhythm (which also includes Archie “Hubbie” Turner and Steve Potts). “We’ll also have local hero Jerome Chism, who sings three nights a week at B.B. King’s Blues Club and is a really incredible performer,” Mitchell says. “Then next, Eric Gales. And then Carla Thomas, and lastly, the great William Bell.”

Hearing these virtuosos, including Gales’ stunning guitar work, plus originals by Beach and the classic hits associated with Thomas and Bell, just as dusk settles in on the Mississippi River, will surely be a charmed moment in Memphis musical history that may never be repeated.

The Memphis Flex

Yet Mitchell is excited about far more than just his own band’s performance. Because of his deep absorption in local music history, he can see Memphis refracted through most of the acts featured at RiverBeat. He rattles off the many acts who developed in Memphis only to achieve national recognition: The Band Camino, 8Ball & MJG, Al Kapone, Talibah Safiya, Lawrence Matthews, Marcella Simien, the Lucky 7 Brass Band, Qemist, Mark Edgar Stuart, Salo Pallini, Bailey Bigger, Dirty Streets, and Southern Avenue. The latter, Mitchell notes, are the latest in a long history of Memphis success stories who have worked at Royal Studios. “They were in the studio the day before yesterday,” he says. “I recorded and mixed their new album. I mean, this is going to be a next-level record. And they’ve got a crazy tour coming up, opening for Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson.” Festivals like RiverBeat, Mitchell notes, are the perfect training grounds for local bands like Southern Avenue to level up. “Putting local artists on big stages is so huge.”

That’s always been in Mempho’s brief, and RiverBeat will be no different. The curated acts reach across generations and state lines alike, from the world-touring Don Bryant, who once wrote songs for Hi Records, then found success later in life fronting classic soul aficionados The Bo-Keys, to Rodd Bland’s tribute to his father, Bobby “Blue” Bland, to Mississippi acts who’ve long been associated with Memphis like Charlie Musselwhite, Kenny Brown, The Wilkins Sisters (who once backed up the late Rev. John Wilkins), and Jimbo Mathus. Looking at it this way, putting all this regional talent in front of thousands of music fans this weekend might be considered quite a flex for Memphis and the Mid-South. And no other festival compares to it in that sense.

Surprising Connections, and Making Memphis Proud

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that some of the other major names on the bill have deep Memphis connections. Mitchell vividly recalls his first encounter with Sacred Steel virtuoso Robert Randolph a decade ago. “I cut a record with him under the band name The Word, which is when Robert Randolph, the North Mississippi Allstars, and John Medeski got together. My aunt cooked for them during the sessions and they ended up naming the album Soul Food,” Mitchell laughs.

Another local tie-in, and perhaps the most consequential, is with festival headliners the Fugees. When the Memphis Flyer recently profiled producer Kid Maestro, who’s been a standout member of the Unapologetic collective for years, he revealed his enviable side gig as playback engineer for Ms. Lauryn Hill. Hill, of course, first gained prominence as the cofounder of the Fugees, with Wyclef Jean and Pras. When their second album, The Score, blew up in 1996, she became the first woman to win a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, then went on as a solo artist to craft one of the best-selling albums in history, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Hill has resumed performing in recent years, including extensive touring last year to celebrate Miseducation’s 25th anniversary. Along for the ride has been Kid Maestro, who, as playback engineer just offstage, is essentially a member of the band. Not often acknowledged, playback engineers are critical players in hip-hop performances.

“Ms. Hill’s needs are very unique in terms of playback engineering,” he says. “You’ve got to be super fast, paying attention, and when she puts her hand up to mute, you’ve got to be ready to stop with the band. Otherwise, if the band stops but there’s a beat playing in the background, it just doesn’t have that impact.”

He even interacted with hip-hop history on a very deep level with Hill, preparing him for his upcoming role in the Fugees’ RiverBeat show. “Right before this particular tour started,” he recalls, “they found the DAT tapes for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill album. So we got to really break down the original stems in the live show. It was really cool.”

Now he’s living the dream of working with one of the most influential and creative hip-hop groups of all time. “My first time meeting the rest of the Fugees,” he says, “it just became immediately clear why they worked. They were so intensely creative and powerful. Their energy, simply being in the same space working on the same thing, was palpable. And it was inspiring to see how different they are as people.”

Other Memphis artists will be thrilling to the Fugees as well, albeit from the audience, or possibly backstage. Talibah Safiya makes it clear that they had a profound impact on her life and her art. “I grew up listening to them. Lauryn Hill has been a huge influence, as somebody who could both rap and sing so well. I don’t think we’d had anybody able to do both of those things at her level. And to be able to stand next to these men who are such incredible lyricists and rappers, the combination of them really has guided my understanding of blending genres, for sure. To be able to be on the same stage as the Fugees, I’m incredibly honored.”

As Boo Mitchell noted, sharing the stage with such stellar talent is a boon to any artist and will only help foster the local scene all the more. It’s part of what makes RiverBeat unique, and don’t be surprised if the city’s up-and-coming artists rise to the occasion and blow your socks off. “This RiverBeat festival is going to be something that Memphians are going to be proud of,” says Mitchell. “There’s never been anything like this in Memphis. There’s even going to be a Ferris wheel at the top of the hill! It’s going to be next-level.”