Friday, April 11, 2025 – 6 pm – Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, MS – We’re taking it to the streets! An outdoor show – with a killer line-up! – at the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, MS!
Where: Red Panther Brewing Co. 121 Delta Ave., Clarksdale, MS 38614 – Phone: (662) 483-0001
When: 6 pm
Music: Grammy-winning harmonica/vocalist Charlie Musselwhite with Hill Country guitarist Kenny Brown
Author: New York Times Bestselling crime novelist Ace Atkins – Don’t Let The Devil Ride and Crossroads Blues
Music: Dewayne Burnside – Globe-trotting guitarist from the prolific North Mississippi blues family
Hosts: Jim Dees with Paul Tate and the Yalobushwhackers
No live broadcast. This show will be recorded for air this summer. See ya on the street!
On his Alligator Records release, Mississippi Son, Charlie Musselwhite plays his famous harmonica but also features his rarely heard guitar work.
Musselwhite has been featured on recordings by Tom Waits, Eddie Vedder, Ben Harper, John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, The Blind Boys of Alabama, INXS, Cyndi Lauper, and his 2020 collaboration with Elvin Bishop, 100 Years of Blues.
He is an inductee into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame (2010) and has been nominated for twelve Grammy Awards (winning one) and has won numerous Living Blues and Blues Music Awards.
North Mississippi blues guitarist Kenny Brown will accompany Charlie Musselwhite for their Thacker appearance at the 2025 Juke Joint Festival.
Brown recorded, toured and developed a close relationship with the late blues great, R. L. Burnside.
In the early 1970s they began performing as a duo and continued for 30 years, sometimes joined by the late Calvin Jackson on drums.
Cedric Burnside joined their tours in the mid-90s as R.L.’s reputation surged throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Brown has recorded with dozens of blues acts including R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, but he and his soulful slide guitar have also collaborated with Hank Williams, Jr. The Black Keys, Dale Hawkins, and even Cyndi Lauper.
Kenny, along with his wife Sara, are the key founders of one of the South’s best (and funkiest) blues festivals, the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic.
Brown continues to perform locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally and currently lives in the North Mississippi Hill Country.
Photo: Deke Rivers
In his latest thriller, Don’t Let the Devil Ride, New York Times bestselling author Ace Atkins makes the city of Memphis – its bars, music, BBQ and sweaty soulfulness – a character in the story.
A Memphis woman hires a PI, Porter Hayes, (a clever nod to Stax songwriters David Porter and Issac Hayes) to find her missing husband.
Soon all are thrown into a dangerous web of international intrigue.
Also available is a new 25th anniversary edition of Crossroad Blues Atkins’s debut novel, now back in print.
A modern, Southern re-invention of The Maltese Falcon, Crossroad Blues is a noir ride down Highway 61. We meet Nick Travers, an ex-New Orleans Saint turned Tulane University blues historian. Nick searches for the lost recordings of 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson—and a missing colleague—and finds trouble at every turn.
Ace Atkins has written 30 books.
His accolades include the 2025 Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award (Past winners: Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Shelby Foote, Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, Natasha Trethewey and John Grisham, among others).
On March 7, Ace was inducted into the Alabama Writer’s Hall of Fame (past inductees: Harper Lee, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Winston Groom, Brad Watson, among others).
Ace lives outside Oxford, MS with his wife and family.
Duwayne Burnside is a Grammy-nominated blues musician. He grew up playing with his father, the legendary Hill Country blues musician R. L. Burnside.
Duwayne Burnside was a member of The North Mississippi Allstars from 2001 through 2004.
He has also played with musicians such as Mojo Buford, Junior Kimbrough, Little Jimmy King, Preston Shannon and Dave Matthews.
