Join us for this LIVE performance of the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour at Duling Hall in beautiful Jackson, MS. This will be a seated event. Tickets are $25/advance | $30/door – get your tickets here). No live broadcast, this show will air on Mississippi Public Broadcasting Saturday, May 16, 2015. This edition of the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour will feature a reading by Chef John Currence (Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey) and music by the Gulf Coast Americana group Willie Sugarcapps and former Jackson resident, songwriter Beth McKee, plus an in-show watercolor by painter Wyatt Waters. The show is hosted by Jim Dees and our house band, The Yalobushwhackers fronted by Memphis rockabilly guitarist, John Paul Keith.
Renowned Oxford, Miss. chef, John Currence, is the author of the cookbook, Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey: Recipes from My Three Favorite Food Groups and Then Some (Andrews McMeel Publishing). The book takes readers from his grandparent’s New Orleans garden, through towboat kitchens, Western European restaurants, North Carolina smokehouses, back to New Orleans. After settling in Oxford, Currence opened City Grocery in 1992. The City Grocery Restaurant Group now includes five. In 2009, Currence received the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef South and was a winner of the Charleston Food and Wine Festival’s Iron Chef Challenge. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Garden and Gun magazine.
Copies of Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey will be for sale and Currence will sign copies before and after the show.
Willie Sugarcapps’ music has been called “Zen country,” performed by a “twangy, rootsy, harmony-fueled band.” The band is a gathering of established Americana solo artists: Grayson Capps, Will Kimbrough, Corky Hughes and the duo Sugarcane Jane – Savana Lee and Anthony Crawford. Loose, informal jam sessions led to the birth of this very collaborative band. Each takes turns singing lead as they switch up between fiddle, banjo, mandolin, lap steel, bass and even ukulele. Their CD, Willie Sugarcapps, won Americana Album of the Year in 2013.
Audiences know multi-instrumentalist Kimbrough from his work with Jimmy Buffett, Rodney Crowell and Todd Snider. His latest solo CD is Sideshow Love. Capps is a Mobile, Ala native whose five CDs reflect the Gulf Coast including his latest, The Lost Cause Minstrels on which Hughes plays guitar. Also from Mobile, Corky Hughes has played guitar for such bands as Black Oak Arkansas, Jimmy Hall, Wet Willie, and Bo Diddley. Also from Alabama’s Gulf Coast is the married duo, Savana Lee and Anthony Crawford, who created their band, Sugarcane Jane in 2009. Their latest album, Dirt Road’s End, was released last month.
Former Jackson resident, Beth McKee’s newest CD, Sugarcane Revival will be released May 16 but advance copies will available at Duling Hall. Like her previous CD, the excellent, Next to Nowhere, her new album features McKee’s original tunes and her percolating accordion and swamp boogie shuffles with touches of gospel, jazz, and reggae. The album also features guitarist Tommy Malone, formerly of the subdudes. McKee’s upcoming CD release party in Florida will raise funds for The Fresh Bus (http://www.thefreshstopbus.com/), a mobile produce market serving food-challenged neighborhoods. McKee, formerly of south Jackson, now lives in Orlando, Fla.
Wyatt Waters is a painter and gallery owner from Clinton, Miss. He has illustrated 13 books including three with author/chef Robert St. John, Southern Seasons, A Southern Palette and An Italian Palette. Waters will produce a still life watercolor of the Thacker Mountain show as it is performed.
