Tag: Americana

Tony Manard’s Big Ole Band Captures A Big Small Town Called Memphis

Post author By Alex Greene
Post date August 28, 2019

“Getting by in Memphis…Getting high in Memphis…Getting fired in Memphis.” So end the first three verses of Tony Manard’s “Fool From Memphis.” On the way, he name checks Wild Bill’s, Joe’s Liquor Store, and Raiford’s, and remembers how “downtown smelled like Wonder Bread.” Then comes the chorus, like the recurring story of a neighborhood drunk: “I saw Jerry Lawler wrestle Junkyard Dog at the intermission of a monster truck show, Mid South Colieseum.”

It’s all narrated in such a casual, offhand way that you really will feel Memphis around you as you listen, and that captures one of the hallmarks of Thanks Y’all!, Manard’s newly self-released album: its fine-grained sense of place. The city is a recurring character through many of the songs here, all written by Manard, and he savors his lyrical images of the city like photos of an old friend. And it’s all set to an Americana-esque blend of folk, bluegrass and country rock with a mildly funky vibe.

The lineup gives one a sense of the overall sound:
Tony Manard – Guitar, Vocals
Cecil Yancy – Guitar, Vocals
Alice Hasen – Fiddle, Vocals
Carlos Gonzalez – Mandolin, Vocals
Brian Mulhearn – Electric Guitar, Vocals
Jimmy Stephens jr, – Bass
Vinnie Manard – Keys
Stephen Chopek – Drums
Evan Farris – Dobro, Lap Steel, Vocals

Tony Manard

The arrangements sound remarkably uncluttered for such a big ol’ band, with some standout solos by Alice Hasen on fiddle and Carlos Gonzalez on mandolin.

It should be noted that Manard’s local cred goes beyond shouting out place names. The ongoing saga summed up by the punchline,”Man, the sun’s goin’ down and I feel pretty good/Made a pontoon boat from a Cadillac hood” is a perfect portrait of the D.I.Y. spirit that’s alive and well in this city. Manard relishes every detail of building the “Party Barge” in a song reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s “One Piece At a Time,” destined to accompany the sound of pneumatic tools in garages for years to come.

Finally, the sense of place is palpable in more ways than one on the album’s closer, “Ain’t No Freedom.” The music video was shot live at Clayborn Temple this February and released on April 8, the anniversary of a 40,000-strong march in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., just days after his assassination. And the tune, a call for a more just society, is entirely appropriate to his legacy. As Manard writes in the press materials:

This is a staple of our live shows, but I had no intention of recording it in the studio. We got the opportunity to record it live, and make a video at historic Clayborn Temple. This was the rally point of the 1968 sanitation worker’s strike and the place the iconic “I am a man” signs were made an distributed. Tony Barnshaw Dickerson, a fantastic writer, singer and choir leader, came to our rehearsal to work with us on the phrasing and added his beautiful voice. We also recruited our friends Annie Freres and Kathleen Quinlen to sing with us. We invited a bunch of our friends to join the chorus and be in the video. Everyone there felt the energy of the location. We couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. Walt Busby handled the live recording. Jared Callan shot and Christian Walker directed.

Check the video out below. Thanks Y’all! is available at local record shops and at Tony Manard shows, which may either be solo or feature the Big Ole Band.

Tony Manard’s Big Ole Band Captures A Big Small Town Called Memphis

Tony Manard appears at the Halloran Centre, Sunday, Sept. 15, at 4:00 pm.

Tags Americana, Clayborn Temple, Memphis Music, Tony Manard

Music Music Blog

Robert Earl Keen’s Countdown to Christmas Comes to GPAC in December

Post author By Alex Greene
Post date August 2, 2019

As August appears and the kids brace themselves for the return to school, one thing looms large in their minds: Christmas vacation. Yes, they’ll have many hours of homework, homeroom, and home games in store before then, but we know that it’s the dream of a holiday break that keeps them going. And what applies to kids applies to parents and single folks too. In Amurica, it’s never too early to dust off those Christmas decorations and start dreaming tinsel dreams.

The Germantown Performing Arts Center realizes this too, so today they’ve announced the holiday concert that keeps things real: Robert Earl Keen’s Countdown to Christmas. Keen, of course, is the artist behind the all-too-real Christmas song of the not-quite dysfunctional American family, “Merry Christmas from the Family.” It’s worth a listen even if your stockings are yet hung with care, simply as a chronicle of what it means to be a modern extended family with, uh, issues.

With its good-natured evocation of everyday alcoholism, bland racial bias, and running out of tampons, it achieves, in the end, a kind of unsentimental sentimentality to which anyone who’s had to listen to brother Ken’s new wife Kay, who “talks all about AA,” can relate. In fact, the song has resonated with audiences to such a degree since its release in 1994 that it’s even spawned a sequel song and a book of the same name. It’s in such demand that Keen has had to draw the line on when he’ll perform it. “We get requests for it all year round,” he’s told NPR. “So, I had to create this rule, I call it the ‘Linen Rule’, where we don’t play the song as long as you can wear linen. So it saves it and makes it fresh for the holiday season. So we start playing it around Labor Day and we play it on through the holidays. It’s the big number particularly in December that we close with.”

Robert Earl Keen’s Countdown to Christmas Comes to GPAC in December

Of course, there’s much more to Keen than this song. Having cut his teeth in the late-70s scene around Austin, Texas, he now has 18 albums worth of songs chronicling the foibles of everyday lives, much in the vein of Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, and other masters of Americana. While they may not all be kid-friendly, they do resonate with the struggles and joys of everyday adults going through life with open eyes. It’s a refreshing way to digest the holidays at GPAC, a couple days after the gifts are all unwrapped, but before we must face the onset of New Year’s Day and the inevitable return to jobs and school that follows.

Countdown to Christmas, with Robert Earl Keen and opening act Shinyribs, Saturday, December 28, 8:00 PM, Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC)

Tickets on sale to general public at 10 AM on Friday, August 9. See website for information on artist pre-sales and GPAC subscriber pre-sales.

Tags Americana, Christmas, Germantown Performing Arts Center, Memphis Music, Robert Earl Keen

Music Music Features

DittyTV: A Global Music Network on South Main

Post author By Alex Greene
Post date February 14, 2019

I want my MTV! The sentiment may seem dated, but many of us feel the same tug: to regain that sense of discovery we had when new music cascaded out of the screen, all day. Yet the network’s concept, which seemed so revolutionary at lift-off in the 1980s, had difficulty profiting from its innovation, and phased out most of its music-only content more than a decade ago. And honestly, by then we were tired of all the hair metal anyway.

Still, the desire for that viewing-as-discovery experience has remained, and that’s what the Memphis-based DittyTV network is targeting. Since 2014, the storefront studio on South Main has been plying the web-waves with new music, slowly amassing a global reach that most Memphians are oblivious to. And to top it all off, there’s not a trace of hair metal.

Cameraman Jake Hopkins films Liz Brasher and Steve Selvidge for DittyTV

I first met Ronnie and Amy Wright soon after they relocated here from Washington, D.C., in 2010, looking for something beyond the Beltway life. Within a couple of years, they had fashioned the studio space that’s still their headquarters, and were shooting professional live performance videos of bands. And they let bands keep the footage and the multitrack audio masters to use however they saw fit. It seemed too good to be true.

But their labor of love, DittyTV, had legs, especially when they refined their operation with a stronger identity. Being roots music buffs, framing DittyTV as an Americana network was a natural fit. For one thing, the term is increasingly inclusive. “Americana is a wide net, but you’re not going to extremes like EDM or metal,” Ronnie says. “It’s not really a genre, it’s a collection of genres that people seem to love from their 20s into their 60s and 70s. And our viewership bears that out. People write in and say, ‘I put it on for hours and hours.’ That’s what I did in the MTV days. You just let it roll and use it as a soundtrack.”

A major turning point was being invited to broadcast the last Folk Alliance conference held in Memphis before that organization’s move to Kansas City. Ronnie recalls, “The first Folk Alliance we did was in 2012. We slowly grew, and now we’re up to more than five million viewers every month.”

“One of the things we’re trying to do is expand onto other platforms,” Amy adds. “Like streaming apps with their own channel lineups, or ‘skinny bundles.’ We’re at an advantage, because we’re already a digital network. A lot of the traditional channels have to convert their signal to a digital stream, and that’s caused problems. But we’re already digital.”

And they’ve smoothed out the wrinkles of their operation into 12 programs of music videos, ranging from the earthy R&B of Soul Side to the solo songwriters of Campfire. Their 12-hour cycle is further peppered with music news and interviews, and at the heart of it are the live in-studio concerts that DittyTV started with. The live coverage of music festivals has only grown, now including Nashville’s Americana Fest and Memphis’ own Ameripolitan Music Awards, coming up next week.

Soon they’ll be opening the space next door as a retail shop, Vibe and Dime, featuring LPs, musical instruments, and Ditty bling. “We’ll have live music on the weekends,” says Ronnie. “It’s sort of a Swiss Army Knife. We can shoot interviews in the window.” The Wrights hope the shop raises their local profile, which has not matched their exponential growth in other markets.

“Thirty percent of our audience watches from outside the United States. The network definitely has an international feel to it, but most people love the fact that it’s in Memphis, including artists that aren’t from here.” And DittyTV has emulated the same independent spirit that animated other Memphis operations like Sun or Stax. “We can change and adapt,” says Ronnie.” Our programming is more fresh and organic. We’re open to anybody that wants to submit a video.”

Tags Americana, Amy Wright, DittyTV, Liz Brasher, Ronnie Wright, Steve Selvidge, Vibe and Dime

Music Music Blog

McKenna Bray Celebrates New Album

Post author By Alex Greene
Post date June 19, 2018

McKenna Bray

Yes, there are many Americana singers in Tennessee. It almost seems unfair to put an artist in that box. In the case of Memphis native McKenna Bray, it almost does her a disservice. Sure, there are touches of folk all over her new album, Once in a Blue Moon (Madjack Records), and even a banjo on a couple of tracks. But there are so many surprises in the songwriting, it defies any label that might suggest the Carter Family or simple folk strumming.

As you may have read, Bray’s voice evokes classic Linda Ronstadt, and that’s a better point of reference. It almost sounds as if Ronstadt released a tribute album of Richard Thompson songs. The lyrics are simple and direct, perhaps lacking some of the darker allusions that Thompson is prone to, yet still with plenty of shadows. There are elements of classic pop here, mingled with earthy instrumentation and atmospheric touches, presumably courtesy of Susan Marshall, Bray’s producer and manager.

The band is a veritable Bluff City Wrecking Crew, featuring the core personnel of David Cousar on guitar, Ken Coomer on drums, Dave Smith on bass, and Richard Alan Ford on pedal steel and/or banjo. Other talents are sprinkled throughout, including Marshall on vocal harmonies. Al Gamble, Peewee Jackson, Jeff Powell, Matt Ross-Spang, Mark Edgar Stuart also make appearances. And Will Tucker sings a lovely duet with Bray on the ambivalent relationship song “Dive,” adding some of his trademark blues guitar for good measure.

The playing is tasteful and restrained, but what really sets the album apart is Bray’s voice. It is no small feat to evoke the rich alto of Ronstadt, with the same unaffected, straightforward delivery that can enliven lyrics with a disarming edge. It’s understandable that she auditioned for American Idol. But really, she was too good for them. She avoids all the clichés of that game. And their loss is our gain.

McKenna Bray’s Once in a Blue Moon comes out on June 29. Check out her album release party tonight, June 19, at Lafayette’s Music Room, 8:00 pm.

Tags Americana, McKenna Bray, Pop, Sam Phillips Recording Service

Music Music Blog

Band Geeks: A Live Tribute to The Last Waltz

Post author By Jesse Davis
Post date November 17, 2017

CREDIT: Blake Billings

Blake Billings

Manley, Pulley, and Whalen

On Thanksgiving Day of 1976, one of the seminal groups of the ’60s and ’70s, the Band, held their farewell concert at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, two musicians who had been previously backed by the Band, were brought on board as special guest performers, and from there, the guest list swelled, growing to include Neil Young, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, the Staples Singers, and others. Robbie Robertson, the Band’s guitarist, recruited Martin Scorsese to film the event. The show included poetry readings, ballroom dancing, and even turkey dinners, which were served before the concert. The whole thing was called The Last Waltz, and it’s been regularly popping up on lists of the greatest concert films of all time ever since the its release in 1978.

Some fans of the Band might contend that the film focuses too much on Robertson, that the group’s break-up seems contrived, and that the performers and filmmakers were out of their minds on cocaine, but even the detractors would have to admit it’s a damn good concert film. And on Saturday, November 25th, Memphis-based space-rockers Glorious Abhor have assembled a group of musicians that includes HEELS and Chinese Connection Dub Embassy to pay homage to the Band with their second annual Memphis’ Last Waltz concert at the Hi-Tone.

“I booked the stage a year in advance,” Josh Stevens Glorious Abhor’s guitarist and vocalist says of 2016’s inaugural Memphis’ Last Waltz concert. Stevens had been toying with the idea of an homage show, tackling an entire album by a band, when he fell down a deep hole of Band music and lore. He immediately contacted the Hi-Tone and booked the venue, opting for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, rather than holding the show on the holiday of gratitude and gravy itself.

Stevens’ plunge into the music of the Band was precipitated by an encounter with the Band’s former drummer, Levon Helm, who continued to tour and record until his death in April 2012. “I met him at Bonnaroo. I almost knocked him off the stage,” Stevens says. He was working sound production at the middle Tennessee music festival, and despite nearly ending the set before it began by causing an untimely tumble from the stage of the lead performer, Stevens says he was transfixed by Helm’s set, which sent him down the path of discovery that lead him to the Band.

Though Stevens is a somewhat late-in-life — if fervent — convert to the Church of the Band, not all his bandmates were as late to the show. “Jason [Pulley] is a wealth of music knowledge,” Stevens says of GA’s keyboard player and vocalist — and confirmed lifelong fan of the Band.

“I’ve grown up with the music of the Band and The Last Waltz since I was a child,” Pulley says. “The songs are a part of my DNA at this point, and Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson have had a big impact on my playing style.” That lifelong familiarity with the songs of the group has come in handy as Pulley, Stevens, drummer Taylor Moore, and bassist Mitchell Manley arrange the songs of The Last Waltz to be performed by a rotating cast of Memphis musicians that includes members of all three headlining groups, as well as some special guests. And Stevens says “we’ve almost doubled the set [from 2016].”

Blake Billings

Whalen and Stevens

Stevens wants to keep the set list under wraps until the show, but he says that at one point “in true Last Waltz fashion, we’re all going to be on stage at the same time.” And when it came time to pick the other performers, both in 2016 and for this year’s show, Stevens didn’t have to struggle with his deliberations.
“HEELS was a no-brainer,” Stevens says of the band led by vocalist/guitarist Brennan Whalen and drummer/vocalist/comedian Josh McLane. “I loved Glorious Abhor’s performance from start to finish,” Whalen says of last year’s show. But when it comes to highlights, the singer quickly mentions playing with an expanded band. “Josh and I hadn’t played as a full band for a while last year, so it was really fun playing with a couple guitars and harmonicas going.”

The Band’s use of different instrumentation and musical styles throughout their catalogue was one of their defining characteristics, and in Memphis’ Last Waltz, the audience can expect guitars, harmonicas, mandolins, and other instruments to change hands as the performers on stage adapt to try to conjure, for a night, the magic of that Thanksgiving in 1976.

“The songs don’t need anything,” Whalen says. “They just need to be played.”

Memphis’ Last Waltz featuring Glorious Abhor, HEELS, Chinese Connection Dub Embassy, Saturday, November 25th, at the Hi-Tone, 8 p.m. $10.

Tags Americana, Memphis Music, The Band

Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Caleb Sweazy World Premiere

Post author By Chris McCoy
Post date June 29, 2015

Does this Monday morning feel like a punch in the face? Music Video Monday is here to help!

We’ve got the world premiere of the new video “Lucky or Strong”, the title track from Caleb Sweazy’s new album on Memphis’ Blue Barrel Records imprint. The folk rocker directed this video, which was shot in Downtown Memphis at Envision Gym. Sweazy appears as a boxer having a bad day opposite Jerome Hardaway. Brian Krueger and Envision’s Mark Akin appear as the fighters’ trainers. Caleb’s wife Melissa Anderson Sweazy produced the video, which features cinematography by John Paul Clark and Laura Jean Hocking editing.

Music Video Monday: Caleb Sweazy World Premiere

If you would like to see your video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Tags Americana, Blue Barrel Records, boxing, Caleb Sweazy, Envision Gym, folk, Jerome Hardaway. Brian Krueger, John Paul Clark, Laura Jean Hocking, Lucky or Strong, Mark Akin, Melissa Anderson Sweazy, music video, rock