Season Finale! Join us Thursday, Nov. 17 at 6 pm at the Lyric Oxford (1006 Van Buren Ave, Oxford, MS 38655) for our final live performance of 2016. FREE admission. Doors: 5:30 pm. Drink service available.
Guests: Thacker host Jim Dees reads from his new book, The Statue and the Fury; author Geoff Dyer (White Sands), Memphis root-rockers Southern Avenue and roots-bluesman Watermelon Slim.
Hosts: Jim Dees and our house band, The Yalobushwhackers.
Radio: WUMS 92.1 FM (Oxford)
Online: http://myrebelradio.com
Jim Dees is the author of The Statue and the Fury – A Year of Art, Race, Music and Cocktails (Nautilus Publishing), a humorous and heartfelt chronicle of the controversial year 1997 in Oxford. The book covers the furor over creation of the William Faulkner statue, protests over tree cuttings and development in town and the discontinued use of the Confederate flag and other Old South symbols by the University of Mississippi. It includes interviews with Shelby Foote, Willie Morris and Willie Nelson, among others.
Dees has been the host of The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour since 2000.
Geoff Dyer is a novelist, essayist, critic and author. His latest book is White Sands: Experiences From the Outside World (Pantheon). In the book, Dyer writes about his pilgrimages across the world from Norway to Tahiti. One piece is a meditation on massive outdoor art installations in New Mexico and Utah. In another, he writes lovingly about jazz and, in a surprisingly humorous essay, details how his life changed after suffering a stroke.
Dyer is the author of four novels, two collections of essays and six genre-defying titles, including But Beautiful, a book about jazz. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His 2011 collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Dyer is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and London.
Southern Avenue is a Memphis-based, high-energy soul-roots band that is deeply rooted in the blues and reached the finals at this year’s International Blues Challenge over 250 acts. The band’s infectious rhythms, soulful guitar sounds, and masterful musicianship, caused the Memphis Flyer to write, “Southern Avenue is simply the best band in Memphis right now… The coolest music to come out of Memphis in years.”
The band’s debut album will be released by legendary Stax Records in spring 2017.
Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans has built an international following with his raw, impassioned intensity. HARP Magazine wrote, “From sizzling slide guitar…to nitty-gritty harp blowing…to a gruff, resonating Okie twang, Slim delivers acutely personal workingman blues with both hands on the wheel of life, a bottle of hooch in his pocket, and the Bible on the passenger seat.”
His latest release is Bull Goose Rooster. Homans lives in Clarksdale.
