Ernie Vincent is a master arranger, writer, and musicologist of the highest order — and maybe the funkiest man in New Orleans.

Over the years, he has arranged and written songs for Ernie K-Doe and Eddie Bo, and backed such esteemed performers as Joe Tex, Solomon Burke, the Wild Magnolias and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux’s Golden Eagles. Vincent is a staple at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Vincent developed a signature sound decades ago with his hand-picked band, the Top Notes, churning out smash hits such as “Things are Better” and 1972’s “Dap Walk.”

“Dap Walk,” is an unhinged masterpiece of wah-wah guitar, multiple drum breakdowns, and positive ghetto messages, that remains a global cult classic.

His latest album, recorded in Mississippi with Jimbo Mathus, Bronson Tew and Matt Patton, is Original Dap King (Corenlius Chapel Records).

Vincent is a member of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

In The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning (University Press of Miss.) Ellen Ann Fentress tells how one woman reckons with both a region’s history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic, Fentress casts a penetrating light on what it means to be a white southern woman today.

Ellen Ann Fentress is a journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster. She produced and directed Eyes on Mississippi, a 2016 documentary on civil rights journalist Wilson F. Minor. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Postr, Oxford American, as well as well as MPB where she was a reporter.

“From her perspective as a white Mississippian, journalist and filmmaker Fentress writes candidly about her growing consciousness of race, responsibility, and community. . . . A forthright reflection on the effects of segregation.” – Kirkus Reviews

Country-blues artist Davis Coen’s latest album is These Things Shall Pass. The disc fulfills his long-standing goal of recording an entirely spiritual-based project with songs such as “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” and “Old Rugged Cross,” and the title cut, Stuart Hamblen’s “These Things Shall Pass,” famously covered by country music legends Hank Snow and Johnny Cash.

Coen’s previous albums include Hard Luck Café, Crying the Blues and Get Back In.