The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, the weekly public radio show highlighting southern literature and music, is coming to New Albany on Friday, April 17 at 6 pm.
The long-running program, based in Oxford, MS and now in its 29th year, will record an episode at the Union County Historical Society and Heritage Museum.
Admission is free and the public is invited.
Doors: 5:00 pm – Refreshments/beer/wine
Show: 6 pm.
This event is planned as an outdoor show (weather permitting) to be held in the back gardens on the museum grounds. Lawn chairs and blankets are encouraged!
In the event of inclement weather, the show will move inside the museum.
The museum is located at 114 Cleveland Street, New Albany, Mississippi 38652. (Phone: 662-538-0014).
Performers for the show will include:
Mississippi author Exodus Oktavia Brownlow (When It Gets Cold In The South) and
“Swamp ‘n Rollers,” Bear Ryan and the Delta Snakes (Low and Slow) plus…
North Mississippi bluesman Cameron Kimbrough!
The show is hosted by Jim Dees with Thacker house band, Paul Tate (New Albany resident) and the Yalobushwhackers.
This show will not be broadcast live but will be recorded for air later this summer.
Our New Albany show joins previous road shows to Holly Springs and Columbus as “Lit Trips,” presented by the Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area Alliance and the America 250 – Mississippi campaign.
From the porch to the airwaves:
Each of the three shows (with a visit to Eudora Welty‘s home set for June) highlights a small town local whose voice resonated nationally, if not globally: Holly Springs (Ida B. Wells and Kate Freeman Clark), Columbus (Tennessee Williams) and New Albany (William Faulkner).
We’re proud to celebrate the America 250 series where literature, music, civil rights, and Native American history weave together a uniquely American tapestry.
“I immediately connected with Nancy Carpenter (Executive Director, America250 Mississippi) through our love for southern writers and their homes,” said Lucy Gaines, Thacker Mountain Radio Hour’s executive director.
“We designed this series to extend that connection of writer’s homes to all Mississippians who can take pride in our creative roots which are still very much thriving today.” Gaines added.
Please join us as we celebrate Mississippi – live from Faulkner country!
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow’s short story collection, When It Gets Cold In The South, will be published in January 2027 by Screen Door Press, The University of Kentucky Press.
Set in the imagined town of Honey, Mississippi, the women and girls in Brownlow’s stories move through generations of shared history where people can be tender, sticky, and biting all at once.
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a writer, editor, fashion designer and sewist native to Blackhawk, MS.
Brownlow received a Pushcart Prize nomination for her flash fiction story, “When It Gets Cold in The South, The Youngest Baby Dies.”
She is an associate editor at Fractured Lit and is the Editor-in-Chief of The Loveliest Review.
Cameron Kimbrough is an accomplished drummer, slide guitarist and vocalist originally from Potts Camp, MS.
His releases include the single, “Still Standing;” the EPs, Breakfast for Dinner (2013) and Head for the Hills (2016).
Kimbrough is the grandson of North Mississippi Hill Country blues legend Junior Kimbrough and the son of blues drummer, Kent Kimbrough and blues singer Joyce “She Wolf” Jones.
Cam credits his Uncle David Kimbrough with showing him his first guitar chords and his grandfather’s juke joint, Junior’s, (where he was babysat from age 4-7) with invaluable life lessons.
Bear Ryan, a Texas-native, now of Clarksdale, MS, calls her band, the Delta Snakes and her music, “swamp n roll.”
Her latest album is Low and Slow, recorded at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, MS. It features the single, “Bad Old Man” with harmonica legend, Charlie Musselwhite and Thacker Yalobushwhacker drummer, Ricky Burkhead.
Ryan is a left-handed guitarist who plays home-made cigar box guitars crafted by her partner and accompanist Ryan Robertson.
His custom guitar shop is in Clarksdale, MS: https://www.deltaavenueguitars.com/.
Ryan’s previous releases include the singles Dead Man’s Shoes, I Am the Weather and Mississippi Mornings.
