Jackson Hendrix, Gabrielle Duffie, Nakita Spencer, Lawrence Matthews
You could call them “RiverBeatniks.” They were the more than 30,000 people who attended the inaugural RiverBeat Music Festival May 3rd, 4th, and 5th in Tom Lee Park.
Matthew Burdine and Daniel Bonds Russ Thompson and Katherine TerryEmily and Will Carter
They braved periodic raindrops and often warm temps to see and hear performers, including Stax great Carla Thomas, Al Kapone, the Wilkins Sisters, Southern Avenue, Killer Mike, and Lawrence Matthews. All some music lovers needed was a blanket and a comfortable spot to kick off their shoes and experience 50 performers on five stages.
“We scanned in over 30,000 over three days,” says RiverBeat producer Jeff Bransford. “Ten-thousand a night.”
Kristin Leach and Haggard CollinsAriyanna Beecher and Miles Robinson
How did he think RiverBeat went? “Spectacular. We couldn’t be happier. The feedback we got from both patrons and artists has been overwhelming.”
And will RiverBeat return next year? “One-hundred percent,” Bransford says. No doubt about it. “We’re already planning.”
The Fugees at the inaugural RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
After it was discovered that the RiverBeat Music Festival‘s social media accounts posted a clumsily-Photoshopped image that inflated the apparent crowd size (which the festival organizers copped to, blaming the photographer and removing the image), many in the online-iverse ramped up their complaints about the festival, dissing the lineup, the attendance, and even the lack of chain link fencing along the river shore (believe it or not).
Yet, as a musician, a music fan, and journalist embedded in the actual RiverBeat experience, I witnessed throngs of happy listeners and had more than a few magical encounters myself. In the end, that’s what will stay with us. Here, then, are a few personal, highly subjective moments that make a celebration of music on this scale worth the while, complemented by the Memphis Flyer‘s own mixtape.
Charlie Musselwhite The magic began before I even entered the festival gates. Walking along the perimeter toward the entrance, I heard the sound of pure liquid gold ringing out over the river. It was the blues harp of Charlie Musselwhite, known as “Memphis Charlie” in his youth, his family having moved here from Mississippi when he was a toddler, though he was based in Chicago as his career accelerated in the ’60s. To this day, he’s criminally under-booked in Memphis venues, making this moment a rare one indeed. This octogenarian and the melodic flow of his harp are national treasures.
Charlie Musselwhite at RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
Lucky 7 Brass Band Seeing this group in the charged setting of the festival brought home what a tremendous font of creativity and groove the Lucky 7 can be. As I walked into Tom Lee Park, I heard the familiar strains of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but far groovier and brassier than the original. It was quickly followed by Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name,” Victor Sawyer’s singing full of the original’s fury, but layered over the forward momentum of a second line groove. An utter revelation.
DJ’s at Whateverland The Memphis gem Qemist took DJing to new artistic heights, weaving together disparate tracks into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s about to get real Black real fast!” he announced at one point. The crowd gathered in the shade of the fanciful tent shimmied and swayed along with him…even the staff walking past. “I see you, Security! Get your strut on!” he exclaimed. On Saturday, WYXR’s Jared Boyd, aka Jay B, aka Bizzle Bluebland kept up a similar vibe with some fine disco-tinged vibes, puffing on a jumbo cigar as he manned the wheels of steel.
Durand Jones & the Indications I’d never heard this old school soul and R&B vocalist live, but certainly will again after the scorching set he delivered last Friday afternoon. The very on-point band formed over a decade ago at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, but a distinctly more Southern flavor of soul springs from Jones’ roots in Hillaryville, Louisiana. “I feel like I’m an ambassador of the rural South,” he quipped at one point. “I’m just a boy from a town of about 500 people, and our land is being taken away from us. It’s about time we saw what is going down.” Midway through their cover of Irma Thomas’ “Ruler of My Heart,” Jones spoke wistfully about a young man who came to Memphis “with just a guitar” and made Thomas’ song his own, bringing the house down with Otis Redding’s version, “Pain in My Heart.”
Talibah Safiya We just profiled this neo-soul/hip hop auteur, and, armed with fresh new tracks from her new album and a tight live band featuring MadameFraankie on guitar, she held the Stringbend Stage last Friday with aplomb. Even in the group’s tight execution of beats there was a playful looseness, exemplified when, seeing a few sprinkles in the air, they launched into an impromptu take on “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” That soon gave way to more of Safiya’s originals. “Look to your right,” the singer called out to the audience, pointing to the Mississippi River. “Let’s honor that body of water,” she said, and then launched into perhaps her most popular track, “Healing Creek.”
Carla Thomas at the RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
Take Me to the River Having written about the group assembled by Boo Mitchell in last week’s cover story, I knew this would be a special moment, but it exceeded all expectations. Lina Beach, the young guitarist for Hi Rhythm, rocked her originals with verve, Jerome Chism delivered soul standards like “Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You” with passion, and Eric Gales delivered some scorching guitar work that was both virtuosic and soulful on “I’ll Play the Blues for You.”
While Mitchell is naturally grounded in Royal Studios and Hi Records, that latter song’s provenance in the Stax catalog confirmed that Hi Rhythm was the perfect vehicle for all stripes of Memphis soul. That was especially clear when Carla Thomas took the stage, cradling a crutch in her right hand but looking spry as she exhorted the crowd to do some classic straight-eighth note “soul clapping” while the band vamped on the intro to “B-A-B-Y.” She followed that up with the song her father Rufus put on the charts, “Walking the Dog,” whereupon Chism appeared with a small pup wearing ear protectors. That in turn was followed by the inimitable William Bell delivering stone classics like “I Forgot to Be Your Lover,” making the Take Me to the River set a festival highlight.
No Blues Tent, Plenty of Blues As if to make up for the lack of a blues tent, always a fixture at Beale Street Music Festivals, the blues seemed to crop up everywhere at RiverBeat. Kenny Brown brought the Hill Country Sound on day one, laconic and completely at ease as he unleashed guitar licks with his trio. On Sunday, the Wilkins Sisters brought their unique gospel-blues straight out of Como, Mississippi, just as their late father, Rev. John Wilkins, and their grandfather, Rev. Robert Wilkins, did before them. As lead singer Tangela Longstreet said, “We lost our daddy in 2020. But I can still hear him telling me, ‘Don’t stop singing, baby!'”
And there was more of that sanctified blend from Robert Randolph & the Family Band, as the master of sacred steel guitar delivered a sermon from the church of good times. In his hands, the pedal steel guitar became an engine of squeaks, squalls, and heavily distorted riffs. Indeed, their finale of “It Don’t Matter” was the weekend’s personal highlight of unfettered abandon, and, judging from the way Boo Mitchell and Lina Beach were dancing, they felt the same. Such high energy blues were also apparent in Southern Avenue‘s fiery set, wherein the humble acoustic guitar played by Ori Naftaly on most of the tunes presented country blues riffs amped into overdrive, adding a new grit to their sound.
Yet there were blues in more unexpected niches. Lawrence Matthews‘ latest work draws heavily on sampled blues in the Fat Possum Records catalog, and his anti-hype attitude, sitting calmly on a stool as he delivered his rhymes was only underscored by the bare-bones country blues guitar underpinning much of his work. Al Kapone has also taken to blending his hip hop vision with the blues, and that was on full display in his Saturday set, especially on the dread-laden “Til Ya Dead and Gone (Keep Movin’).”
Al Kapone and Mayor Paul Young at RiverBeat Music Festival. (Photo: Chris McCoy)
And finally, bringing it back full circle to classic soul revivalism , there was plenty of blues in a groovy set by Rodd Bland and the Members Only Band, the horn section’s evocation of his father Bobby “Blue” Bland’s classic take on the minor-key “St. James Infirmary” giving this listener chills. Some of those same great horn players appeared with the Bo-Keys as they backed up singers Emma Wilson and John Németh in a stomping soul set. Are players like Jim Spake, Marc Franklin, Kirk Smothers, Tom Clary, and Tom Link becoming the new de facto Memphis horns? Their presence on the RiverBeat stages, and so many records cut here, suggests as much.
Memphis is a Star Perhaps the most striking pattern of the weekend was the way that the biggest stars of the event expressed their gratitude for playing our city. Of course, that was to be expected of Memphis-based mega stars like 8Ball & MJG, who made their set ultra-topical when they announced, “We’re going to dedicate this to the mayor!” then launched into their hit, “Mr. Big” in honor of Mayor Paul Young. Fellow hip hop star Killer Mike also got very specific in his love of the Bluff City, paying homage to both Gangsta Boo and Jerry Lawler in one breath.
There were plenty more tips of the hat to our city. Black Pumas singer Eric Burton called out the city many times, but his greatest tribute was perhaps through his vocal style, which one friend described as “Al Green without the horns.” Their psychedelic soul fit the riverfront crowd like a glove.
The Fugees‘ electrifying set also embraced our city in very musical ways. The crowd went mad as Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean (sans Pras) performed “Zealots,” with its distinctive sample of The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You,” but no one could have expected them to shift that beat into a shuffle for a lengthy bridge, wherein their crack ensemble sounded like nothing so much as a consummate Beale Street blues band. Aside from the mere fact of their appearance at the festival, quite a coup for RiverBeat’s organizers, they showed their love of Memphis in myriad small ways, as when Hill sang “killing me softly in Memphis,” or turned the line “embarrassed by the crowd” into “embarrassed by Memphis’ crowd.” Naturally, the crowd ate it up.
Jelly Roll at the RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
And yet, fittingly, the most involved embrace of the Bluff City came from Tennessee native Jelly Roll, who closed out the weekend just before Sunday’s second downpour descended. As the set was still warming up, the Antioch, Tennessee native shouted, “It feels so good to be back in my home state!” Later, he quipped “Since we’re in one of the birthplaces of rock and roll, I figured we’d play a little rock and roll,” before launching into “Dead ManWalking.”
But then he got more personal. “When I was growing up, my family would drive down to for Memphis in May, to be right here in front of this river,” he said. “I feel like this is God’s exact fingerprint on the bible belt, right here.” He noted his disbelief at now being on the festival stage where his musical heroes once played, then added, “I cant express how honored I am that you people are out there standing in the fucking rain for this!”
Then he began to reminisce: “When I was 13, we were all listening to rap. I’d go up to my brother’s room, looking for whatever smelled like skunk. And someone gave me a mixtape from Memphis, Tennessee labelled Three 6 Mafia.” As the night wore on, he displayed his formidable rapping chops, even calling out his old friend in attendance, Memphis rapper Lil Wyte. It peaked when he described his influences as “somewhere between Hank [Williams] and Three 6 [Mafia],” then launched into his mega-hit, “Dirty South.” The multiracial crowd went wild in the drizzle, celebrating the hybrid confluence of the many musical styles that typify Tennessee, Memphis, and the RiverBeat Festival itself.
A viral photo of the RiverBeat Musical Festival’s crowd has been confirmed to have been edited, event organizers say.
In a statement from Forward Momentum, which organized the event, a spokeswoman said it was brought to their attention that the photographer had altered the image of the crowd at the weekend’s festival.
The photo, now deleted, was posted to the event’s social media page featuring elements users speculated to be “altered with AI.”
“The entire crowd along the inside of the fence appears to be altered with AI (weird body shapes, missing arms, blurs, etc.,” Jerred Price said on a Facebook post sharing the image with the festival’s watermark.
The spokeswoman, Michele Anderson, went on to say they had been “transparent about their numbers,” and the event had 30,000 people in attendance.
“We had no knowledge that this photographer altered the image until it was brought to our attention,” she said in a statement. “We will not be working with him going forward, and the image has been removed from all our social media channels.”
Despite this, the festival organizers said they are still “excited about the potential and early success of RiverBeat.”
“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.”
Odesza (Photo: Courtesy Mempho Presents)
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.
Boo Mitchell (Photo: Ronnie Booze)
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.”
Original Hi Rhythm members Leroy and Rev. Charles Hodges, Archie Turner (Photo: Ronnie Booze)
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.
Lina Beach (Photo: Caleb suggs)
“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.”
Eric Gales (Photo: Courtesy Mempho Presents)
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.
Kid Maestro with Lauryn Hill (Photo: DJ Rampage)
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.”
The much-anticipated lineup for the upcoming Riverbeat Music Festival went live today, and it’s clear that Memphians won’t have any lack of quality music this May 3rd to 5th. And naturally, given that the festival is produced by the good folks at Mempho Presents, the curated artists are a good fit for the diverse tastes of the Mid South.
For starters, how can you go wrong with The Fugees? The unified forces of Wyclef Jean, Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill are touring as one again, despite some of last fall’s reunion shows being postponed when Hill was beset with health concerns. Wyclef Jean confirmed just last month that more touring was on the books for 2024, and now their Riverbeat appearance is proof positive that Hill’s health has bounced back.
That will be especially meaningful to Unapologetic’s Kid Maestro. One of his regular gigs is functioning as Hill’s playback engineer when she’s touring with her solo band. He’s at the ready should he be recruited for the Riverbeat show. “Miss Hill’s needs are very unique in terms of playback engineering,” he recently told the Memphis Flyer. “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 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.”
Kid Maestro’s experience is just one of the myriad ways Riverbeat reflects its rootedness in Memphis. Another will be an especially unique all-star event, when two-time Grammy-winning producer/engineer Boo Mitchell will direct and play with a hand-picked band of artists called Take Me to the River: Memphis, echoing the generation-spanning Take Me to the River films and education initiatives he’s played a hand in. “I believe this is a unique lineup,” he says of the group, which will include William Bell, Eric Gales, Carla Thomas, Jerome Chism, Lina Beach, and the Hi Rhythm Section. “I’m really impressed by the caliber of talent that signed up for our first year. I can’t wait to get back out there on stage and enjoy this event with all of Memphis.”
Other artists on the bill with a Memphis connection include 8Ball and MJG, Charlie Musselwhite, Southern Avenue, Al Kapone & the B.W.A. Band, Don Bryant & the Bo-Keys, Kenny Brown, Talibah Safiya, Marcella Simien, Lawrence Matthews, Jimbo Mathus, Lucky 7 Brass Band, Bailey Bigger, Dirty Streets, Mark Edgar Stuart, the Wilkins Sisters, Rodd Bland and the Members Only Band, and Salo Pallini.
On the other hand, Riverbeat is also bringing such big tent attractions as Odesza, Jelly Roll, Mt. Joy, Black Pumas, Big Boi, Tobe Nwigwe, The Band Camino, Killer Mike, Matt and Kim, Yung Gravy, Jessie Murph, and over two dozen other artists. All of which put the Riverbeat fest on track to uphold that fine Memphis tradition of music by the river in springtime.
“We are so excited to host the RiverBeat Festival along the Mississippi River at Tom Lee Park,” Jeff Bransford, spokesman for Mempho Presents, said in a statement. “Memphians know us for Mempho Music Festival, and now we’re introducing another signature event in downtown Memphis, which we believe will be a big draw for international and local visitors alike. RiverBeat was conceived as an inclusive event featuring a wide range of genres that will attract music lovers from all walks of life. Through music, we will bring our community together, support our local businesses, and attract new visitors to our city. We believe this is what Memphis is all about.”
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