Host Post: Friday Night Live!

by Jim Dees – This Friday, The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour looks forward to presenting our usual eclectic line-up to kick off what is shaping up to be a killer Double Decker Festival. (Friday weather looks good and Saturday looks like Destin without the surf).

Friday night is a mini-festival that starts at 6 pm with Memphis soul singer Liz Brasher, followed by our radio show at 7 and concluding with a set from 8-9 pm by California rockers, the Delta Saints. Both bands will join author Aminatta Forna for our radio broadcast. Admission is free and lawn chairs are encouraged. Coolers, not so much.

The radio show, from 6-7 pm, will be broadcast locally on WUMS 92.1 FM and online: http://myrebelradio.com/.

May I put in a plug for arriving in time to catch Liz Brasher at 6 pm? Brasher (rhymes with “Frazier”) writes songs and belts them out with a down home gusto owing to her beginnings as a church singer.

Here she gives “Elijah Rock” a workout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8pTDKA3YoQ

Brasher’s latest album, the six-song EP Outcast, will be released by Oxford’s Fat Possum Records on Friday, just hours before her Double Decker set. The album was produced in Memphis by Brasher, Bruce Watson and Scott Bomar (The Bo-Keys). Brasher is Domincan-Italian and her upbringing includes singing in her native Spanish in the Baptist church services of her North Carolina youth. A review on National Public Radio said the record “synthesizes the sounds of ‘60s garage, girl group sounds, dirty blues, holy roller church music and Bob Dylan, into something completely her own.”

Check out her single, “Body of Mine” from the Outcast EP: https://www.npr.org/2018/03/01/587956638/the-austin-100-liz-brasher

Brasher’s Thacker appearance will kick off a 44-city tour – 44 cities! We hope to send her off with Oxford cheers in her ears.

Aminatta Forna’s latest novel is Happiness (Atlantic Monthly Press). The novel’s main plot involves a search for a missing child in contemporary London. However, Forna casts a wider net to include war zones such as Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Iraq where one of the book’s main characters works as a trauma specialist and hostage negotiator. Well-written and insightful, the novel also includes fascinating real-life details about the lives of urban foxes (the field of study for the book’s other main character). Along the way, Forna deftly chronicles love and grief, cruelty and kindness, hope and friendship.

Forna will sign copies of Happiness on Friday at Square Books at 5 pm. Her previous books, including the novel, The Memory of Love and memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, have been translated into eighteen languagees.

The Delta Saints are a California band, now based in Nashville, who craft “raw and visceral rock music with psychedelic flares, fuzzed-out guitar riffs, arresting drum patterns and blues tendencies.” Their latest full-length LP is Monte Vista. The band will embark on a major European tour this summer.

War zones, urban foxes, Spanish Baptists, blues tendencies plus our swingin’ house band, the Yalobushwhackers – sounds like a Thacker show to me. See y’all Friday!

For more Double Decker info visit: http://doubledeckerfestival.com/.