Live show and TV taping! Thursday, April 2, 2026 – 6 pm – Powerhouse Arts Center, 413 S. 14th Street, Oxford, MS
FREE Admission! Public invited! Come early – stay for book signing!
NOTE: This show will be filmed by Mississippi Public Broadcasting Television for telecast later this year.
Doors: 5:30 pm – Frosty Refreshments
Show: 6 pm
Book signing: 7 pm
Guests:
Author: Nancy Lemann – The Ritz of the Bayou – “Unchecked eccentricity” during Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards’ 1985 racketeering trial – Plus a new novel The Oyster Diaries and a reissue of her classic novel, Lives of the Saints
Music: – UM World Percussion – Rhythms of the world!
Music: Parchman Prison Blues Band – Return of the prison band!
Hosts: Jim Dees with Paul Tate and the Yalobushwhackers
Airtimes:
Thursday, April 2 – 6 pm (CT) WUMS 92.1 University of Mississippi
Wednesday, April 8 – 10 pm (ET) WUTC 88.1 FM Chattanooga, TN
Thursday, April 9 – 8 am (CT) WYXR 91.7 FM Memphis, TN.
Saturday, April 11
5 pm (CT) Mississippi Public Broadcasting
9 pm (CT) Alabama Public Radio
Sunday, April 12
3 pm (ET) WUOT | 91.9 FM, Knoxville
2 pm (MT) KNCE 93.5 | Taos, New Mexico
6 pm (CT) Mississippi Public Broadcasting
Archived here: Thacker Mountain Radio Hour – WYXR | 91.7 FM | MEMPHIS
In 1985, New Orleans-born novelist Nancy Lemann was given an assignment by renowned editor Tina Brown to cover Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards’s two spectacular corruption trials for Vanity Fair.
The result became the 1987 non-fiction book, The Ritz on the Bayou. This week the book is the subject of a 40th anniversary reissue by South Carolina-based Hub City Press.
Lemann enthralls a new generation of readers with a seat at the banquet, a smorgasbord of racketeering, fraud and bribery. Hazy, atmospheric scenes of cigar smoke-laden bars, heaping plates of oysters, and unchecked eccentricity and chaos.
New Orleans’ “tropic zone” of slick ‘n shady politicians comes to life as well as the voters who choose charismatic leaders over ethical ones.
This spring finds Lemann with three newly published books, reissues of two of her classics, her novel, Lives of the Saints as well as the non-fiction The Ritz of the Bayou, along with a new novel, The Oyster Diaries (New York Review of Books).
Lemann’s other previous novels include, Sportsman’s Paradise, The Fiery Pantheon and Malaise.
She has written for the Paris Review, Harper’s, the Oxford American, Lapham’s Quarterly, and others.
The Parchman Band is a historic group led by inmates at the Mississippi State Penitentiary whose existence dates back to the 1930s. The initial group dissipated in the 1990s, but it was revived in 2023 under Superintendent Marc McClure.
The band members have performed in several local prisons since 2023, working their way up to the group’s first public audience in April 2025 at the B.B. King Museum in Indianola.
The group is working on an album with producer Jimbo Mathus, the Music Maker Foundation and the Parchman Community and Culture Foundation.
The UM World Percussion Ensemble is under the direction of Professor Ricky Burkhead, who has been on the Ole Miss faculty since 1994. He formed the popular University of Mississippi Steel Drum Band in 1995.
Buckhead has performed as drummer for the Thacker house band, the Yalobushwhackers, since 2016.
