Saturday’s show: A consummate storyteller, acoustic tunes and a special appearance by blues legend, Charlie Musselwhite!

7 pm - Mississippi Public Broadcasting; 9 pm - Alabama Public Radio

April 4, 2020 at 7 pm (MPB) and 9 pm (APR)

We miss our live audience but hope all of our listeners are safe at home!

Due to ongoing health concerns, all of our April shows will be performed in the studio – the Thacker Shack! – without an audience and using recorded performances sent in by our previously scheduled guests, when possible. We’ll also dip into the Thacker archive for the occasional chestnut from the vault.

Every Saturday, on air and online. Check local radio listings or click the links. Next show:

Air date: Mississippi: Saturday, April 4 at 7 pm: Mississippi Public Broadcasting

Alabama: Saturday, April 4 at 9 pm: Alabama Public Radio

This week’s guests:

Author: Leesa Cross-Smith (“So We Can Glow”)

Music: Songwriter Josh Okeefe (“Bloomin'”), acoustic duo, Me & Leah (“Most of Your Life”) and a special archival appearance by blues legend, Charlie Musselwhite!

Hosts: Jim Dees and our house band, the Yalobushwhackers

Enjoy the show and stay safe, everyone!

Featuring

Music

Charlie Musselwhite

Blues harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite is a 13-time Grammy nominee who won in 2014 for his album, Get Up with Ben Harper.

This appearance on Thacker took place on October 14, 2010 at Off Square Books. Musselwhite sings an original, “The Well,” about how he beat his addiction to alcohol. Backing him up are our own Yalobushwhackers (circa 2010) including Slade Lewis, Mark Yacovone, Wallace Lester and the late Duff Dorrough.

Since his childhood in Kosciusko, MS and honing his craft on the south side of Chicago in the early 1960s with Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf followed by 50 years of nonstop touring, performing and recording, Charlie Musselwhite is living proof that great music only gets better with age.

We are indeed proud to present this archival performance from one of the giants of American music.

Author

Leesa Cross-Smith

So We Can Glow (Grand Central Publishing) by Leesa Cross-Smith, is a lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning author Roxane Gay calls “a consummate storyteller.”

Leesa Cross-Smith’s sensuous stories — some long, some just a paragraph, some simply text messages and emails — expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad decisions, brokenness and more.

Teenage girls sneak out on a summer night. Members of a cult extol their passion for the same man. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store. A laundress’s life is consumed by obsession for a famous baseball player.

“Leesa Cross-Smith is such a beguiling writer and her skills are on full display in So We Can Glow.” – Roxanne Gay

Leesa Cross-Smith’s novel Whiskey & Ribbons was longlisted for the 2018 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was one of O Magazine’s “Best Books of Summer.” A new novel, This Close to Okay, is forthcoming.

Music

Josh Okeefe

Josh Okeefe is a singer-songwriter originally from Derby, England now based in Nashville. His latest album, Bloomin’, is now available. His previous albums include, Josh Okeefe, and Live at Muscle Shoals.

Rolling Stone: “A rebel artist, protest singer, the heir to Bob Dylan, or – when he’s doing one of his lighter satirical numbers – a harmonica-tootin’ Mr. Bean… with raw, topical storytelling and a voice that crackles with authentic folk tradition, Okeefe is all of these and more.”

Me and Leah

Folk-pop duo Me and Leah call their music, “Bubble gum jazz.” “Me,” is guitarist/ songwriter Jeff Hulett and Leah, is vocalist/banjoist, Leah Keys. Their latest album is Most of Your Life, just released this month. Their 9-song, self-titled debut came out in 2017. Their music strives to be, “your after-dinner drink, your breakfast in bed, your spontaneous road trip.”

Hulett is formerly from the band, Snowglobe, and Keys is the founder of Spillit Memphis, a story-telling collective.