Traveling with artists to shows is an essential, especially when your goal is to bring Roots music to audiences around the country and the world. Along the way I have often faced challenges similar to those most travelers deal with, except I’m traveling with elderly musicians who sometimes have never left their home state. While […]

Listen: Don’t Take Your Love From Me Mr. Q’s Cocktail Boogie is an album we had a debate about in the office yesterday. Aaron claimed we didn’t have it, I said we did, but we didn’t have new art for it. I was right! But the fact that even we, MMRF Staffers, were not totally […]

The Life and Times of Jerry “Boogie” McCain: The Real Thing by Grover Brown is a tribute to Boogie, who passed last year. Boogie asked Brown to write his life’s story, and the two spent many hours with their heads together putting it together. Sadly, Boogie did not live to see the book’s publication. Boogie’s […]

“You listen to my CD in your ear, wear my tee shirt on your chest, and you’ll feel good about yourself in the morning.” This was Guitar Gabriel’s mantra between tunes at every one of the hundred bar gigs and festival sets I watched him play in the last 4 years of his career. He […]

Soul food and Roots music share a common birthplace among the poor, rural communities in the American South. As I recently read on NPR.com, “…soul food was survival food in the black South. Dishes were inspired by a need to make do with what slaves could access.” Music had a place in survival too. As […]