Thacker Mountain Radio wraps up its spring season this Thursday with stories of redemption and renewal. One of our authors chronicles the road back from job loss, while the other immerses us in the mystery of a small town murder. In between, we’ll have blues and swing music to take us on home.

Join host Jim Dees and the Thacker Mountain house band, the Yalobushwhackers, at Off Square Books this Thursday, April 29 at 6PM for our final live show until September. If you can’t make it in person, tune in to Rebel Radio, 92.1FM in Oxford. Don’t forget you can hear Thacker Mountain Radio every Saturday night throughout the spring and summer at 7PM on Mississippi Public Broadcasting (90.3FM in Oxford) immediately following A Prairie Home Companion. This summer will feature encore performances of our spring season as well as special “best of” compilation broadcasts.

SPECIAL THANKS: To all those who came out and supported last week’s fundraising show at the Lyric, and especially to Ace Atkins and the Thacker cast and crew for a dynamic performance.

Bill Steber’s online photo exhibit of the Mississippi blues scene is entitled “Stones in my Pathway.” The project combines hundreds of pictures and portraits with interviews and text he produced during years traversing the state. His explorations have taken him to juke joints and cotton farms, to funerals and penitentiaries, to churches, tent revivals and religious folk rituals. Steber captures not only the faces (Junior Kimbrough, Son Thomas, Otha Turner, Lonnie Pitchford, et al) and locales (Chulahoma, Clarksdale, Gravel Springs, etc.) but also the personal histories and the songs that have given Mississippi its defining place in American music.

Steber has been a staff photographer for the Nashville Tennessean since 1989. He is also a musician who has played in various blues bands in Nashville including the Jake Leg Stompers.

The Okratones feature Cecil Abels on vocals, guitar, and mandolin; Wendell Haag (founding member of Thacker's first houseband) on guitar and vocals; and Kevin Guyer on bass and vocals. The Okratones’ winning sound converges on the common ground that includes classic bluegrass and honky tonk, soulful '70s country, high-harmony gospel, western swing, rockabilly, and R&B, with many songs either by or about the numerous musical heroes of Mississippi.

Patrick Thomas Casey is the author of Our Burden’s Light (Thomas Dunne Books), his debut novel. As the book opens in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, developer Robert Shelley tries to hold his family together after his teenage son, Grant, is found murdered in the woods, possibly at the hands of two classmates, one, the boy’s former girlfriend. As Robert digs deeper into the mystery, he begins to realize his late son may not quite be the innocent victim. The novel is told in short story-like chapters that explore loss and grief. Interspersed throughout the main storyline are sections titled “Children of God” which are moving vignettes of other lives affected by and tied to Shenandoah. The characters in these stories have also lost their innocence in various ways, such as the loss of a brother in the military, the broken home of a single mom, or the inability to face a dying parent.

Author Ron Rash (Serena) said, “From the opening paragraph I knew I was reading a writer of extraordinary talent. Patrick Thomas Casey is an exciting new voice in American fiction.”

Patrick Thomas Casey was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in New Orleans.