Saturday, June 26 – The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour takes a bittersweet look back to our 2016 visit to the Mississippi Book Festival and our last interview with author Julia Reed. Julia passed away from cancer on Aug. 28, 2020 at age 59. A truly untimely death. Ironically (or cosmically) our music that night reflected Julia’s two favorite locales: New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. Our musical guests are Mississippi’s blues ambassador Jesse Robinson, and New Orleans French Cajun rock band, Sweet Crude.
Hosts: Jim Dees and our house band, the Yalobushwhackers
Air times – On line and on air:
Saturday, June 26 – 7pm (CT) Mississippi Public Broadcasting
9pm (CT) Alabama Public Radio
3pm (ET) University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Thursdays 6pm (CT) WUMS – University of Mississippi
Fridays 9am (CT) WYXR Memphis Community Radio
Mississippi native Jesse Robinson has been playing blues and jazz for over four decades. In 2016 he had the high honor of being chosen to be the front man for the B.B. King Blues Band which had recently resumed touring.
Robinson’s CDs include Blues Child and 2013’s Stray Star. Called the “bedrock of Jackson, Mississippi blues,” Robinson is noted on five different Mississippi Blues Trail Markers.
New Orleans indie-rockers, Sweet Crude, make bouncy poly-rhythms with lyrics that embrace their region’s Cajun-French language tradition. The band uses no guitars, just bass, keyboards, strings and drums, which, one critic noted, gives their sound a “slight Afro-pop tinge.” Their CDs include Sweet Crude, Hornet’s Nest, One in the Hand and Super Vilaine.
Before her death in 2020, Julia Reed was a contributing editor at Elle Décor and Garden & Gun, where she wrote a regular column, “The High & The Low.” She also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and Newsweek and was a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC.
Read her remarkable New York Times obituary.
A native of the Mississippi Delta, she was the author of eight books including a collection of her G&G columns, South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land.
