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Jimbo Mathus headlines DCC's annual Mother's Best Music Fest on June 6
June 1, 2009
HELENA-WEST HELENA --Jimbo Mathus headlines DCC’s annual Mother’s Best Music Fest on Saturday, June 6
HELENA-WEST HELENA – Jimbo Mathus, considered among today’s most exciting voices in independent music, will headline the Fourth Annual Mother’s Best Music Fest on Saturday, June 6, at the Cherry Street Pavilion in historic downtown Helena-West Helena, Arkansas.
Events are slated from noon to 9:30 p.m. Admission to the festival, presented by the Delta Cultural Center, is free; the public is welcome and warmly encouraged to attend.
Also performing will be Dave Riley & Sam Carr, Steve Cheseborough, C.W. Gatlin, Essie "Blues Lady" Neal, Sterling Billingsley, The Robert Hill Band, Vince Cheney, Donna Herula, and the crowd-pleasing Live Wire Band.
“We are excited with the great variety of talent we’re able to present,” said DCC Assistant Director Terry Buckalew, who heads up the festival’s organization. “We hope music fans, local residents, and area families come out for this free day of festivities at the pavilion.”
The DCC is a museum of the Department of Arkansas Heritage.
Mother's Best Music Fest’s offers an eclectic take on the variety of music produced throughout the Delta, from its blues to its rockabilly, country, and Americana sounds. The festival takes its name from a 1940s radio show on Helena station KFFA 1360-AM that featured musical innovators from throughout the Delta region, including Doctor Isaiah Ross. Mother’s Best provides a free event for blues, rock and country music fans during the first half of the calendar year.
“This is still a young festival,” Buckalew said. “We believe it will grow as music fans become aware of the variety of performances we bring to the stage.”
Mathus of Clarksdale, Mississippi, is a man of many hats; singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer are a few of his titles. He has released a variety of solo discs including 1997’s “Jas. Mathus and His Knock-Down Society Play Songs For Rosetta,” a collection of pioneer bluesman Charley Patton’s songs benefiting Patton’s daughter; 2001’s swamp rock “National Antiseptic”; 2003’s electric “Stop and Let the Devil Ride”; and two projects in 2006, “Old Scool Hot Wings” and “Jimmy the Kid.”
Mathus is also a guitarist and founding member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, the band with the hot jazz sound which rose to prominence in the early 1990s with its surprise hits, “Hell” and “Put a Lid On It.” The band took a break following its 2000 album, “Bedlam Ballroom,” but began playing shows along the East Coast in 2007, reuniting original members Mathis, Katherine Whalen, Chris Phillips, Je Widenhouse, and Stuart Cole.
Drummer Sam Carr, a founding member of the Jelly Roll Kings with Frank Frost and Big Jack Johnson, is a legendary instrumentalist among blues musicians and fans, playing and recording with luminaries including Buddy Guy, Lonnie Shields, Paul “Wine” Jones, Willie Lomax, T-Model Ford, Cedell Davis, Robert “Bilbo” Walker, Eric Andersen, and Jimmy Duck Holmes. His performance at Mother’s Best pairs him again with blues vocalist and guitarist Dave Riley, with whom Carr cut 2001’s “Whiskey, Money & Women” on the Fedora label.
Riley, a native of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, began playing guitar at age 9, often playing in a gospel setting with his family. Moving to Chicago during his youth, he became aware of the blues and fellow Mississippi-born transplants like Howlin’ Wolf. Riley’s musical plans were put on hold, though, during his military service in Vietnam. After his return, he began developing his professional skills as a bluesman, but turned away from the career in 1973 to raise his son, working the next 25 years as a guard at Joiliet State Penitentiary. It was a time Riley describes as plagued by addictions to drink and drugs; but Riley also notes proudly he has maintained his sobriety since 1989.
Shortly after re-starting his blues career in 1996 – utilizing his son, Dave “Yahni” Riley Jr. as his bassist – Riley broke his neck in an auto accident with a drunken driver. For nine months, he was unable to play guitar, but gradually worked his way to recovery. His albums also include the autobiographical “Living on Borrowed Time” and “Blues Across America.” In 2008, his album with harmonica man Bob Corritore, “Travelin’ the Dirt Road,” received a Blues Award nomination for Acoustic Album of the Year.
North Little Rock native Robert Hill played in numerous Arkansas groups, including party band The Blue Mambas, before moving to New York many years ago. There, he honed his skills with NYC band The Bluesicians before forming the first incarnation of the Robert Hill Band in the 1990s and releasing the band’s self-titled debut CD to good reviews. Eventually, Hill moved to a stripped-down acoustic power-duo with drummer Jerry Krenach which played around the NYC metro area for a number of years, eventually welcoming in Mark Murphy on upright bass. Recently, the band has been joined by Art Labriola on keyboards, accordian and pedal steel, and Joanne Lediger on vocals. Hill describes the band as a “musical volcano.”
“Think Mount St. Helens, but a lot more fun,” he says, crediting much of that sound to his Arkansas roots – an area which he says “possesses a unique gumbo of musical styles: urban and deep Delta blues, bluegrass, oldtime country, zydeco, ragtime, cowpunk, gospel, even a polka or two in spots. When you mix it all together, they just call it rock and roll.”
The band has opened for Levon Helm, John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Chris Smither, Kim Simmonds of Savoy Brown, The Tony Trischka Band, Rick Danko, Rory Block, Debbie Davies, and many others.
Hill’s song, "Long Rain," was used in a Smirnoff Ice commercial that aired during the 2002 Super Bowl. His instrumental "Slide On Rye" was used in an episode of the TV series, “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.” Hill also composed the soundtrack for an award-winning PBS film documentary, "Burley," the story of a North Carolina tobacco farmer.
Chicago-born singer and guitarist Donna Herula plays traditional, classic, country and Delta blues. She plays fingerstyle as well as bottleneck blues slide guitar on a 1930s Dobro, National Steel Triolian, and National Steel Tricone resonator guitars. Performing songs of early blues women, including Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie, she also salutes such other blues musicians as Robert Johnson, Furry Lewis, Blind Blake, Muddy Waters and Sippie Wallace. Herula’s repertoire includes “Good Old Wagon,” “I Got to Make a Change,” “Daddy Goodbye Blues,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” “Police Dog Blues,” “Can’t Be Satisfied,” and “Trouble Everywhere I Go.”
Essie Neal performs throughout the year at festivals across the state, well-known nightspots in her base of Little Rock, and at educational venues as part of the Arkansas Arts Council’s Artists on Tour project and the Blues in the Schools programming at West Memphis and Jonesboro. Her school performances, Neal says, are her way of doing her part “in keeping the blues alive.”
Born into a musical family in the small Grant County town of Prattsville, Neal became interested in the guitar around age 12 or 13. Soon playing outside her home, Neal attracted the attention of audiences who had never seen a young girl coaxing such sounds from an instrument.
“Initially, the majority of people were in total disbelief when I shouldered my guitar and began to play the blues,” Neal says, explaining that the initial shock was often replaced by appreciation and encouragement. “I was well-received by most – and told that I did not look like a guitar player, but rather a school teacher or even a Sunday school teacher.”
Billingsley, born in Louisiana and raised in Helena, has been playing guitar since he was 13; by 14, he was performing in clubs, beginning a career that is now in its fourth decade. He remembers purchasing his first guitar, a Telestar, for $30 at the West-Gibson’s department store.
Billingsley is one of the founders of the Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival (formerly the King Biscuit Blues Festival), as well as a founding member of the Sonny Boy Blues Society, based at Helena-West Helena.
Acoustic blues musician Steve Cheseborough’s albums include “Outstanding Blues” (1997), “Ham Hocks & Gravy” (2003), and “Fetch It” (2009). He brings to life the acoustic country blues and hokum of the 1920s and '30s in the tradition of Blind Boy Fuller, Memphis Minnie, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Bo Carter – by re-creating the music and recounting the lives, legends and lore of the fascinating men and women who created the blues, and the land they came from.
Cheseborough is also the author of the hugely popular travel guidebook, “Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues.” He is a contributor to Living Blues, Acoustic Guitar, and South magazine and has written extensively for other magazines and newspapers. He is featured in the documentary “Last of the Mississippi Jukes” and is the host and musical director of Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s “Blues Breaks.”
“Sure, Ken Burns is good at research. But can he play guitar? Burns has made documentaries about jazz, but can he sing? Steve Cheseborough can, and does, in one-man shows that bring the Delta blues to life,” wrote Niki Price, editor at Oregon Coast Today.
Like his childhood friend Levon Helm, Phillips County native Gatlin was bit by the music bug as a teen in the late 1950s, inspired by the sounds around him. Befriended by legendary bluesmen Robert Nighthawk and Houston Stackhouse, young Gatlin received a varied and informal introduction and education in the music business. Nighthawk also taught Gatlin his technique for playing slide guitar. Another key musical figure in Gatlin’s development was Helena rockabilly man Mack Self, a Sun Records artist with whom Gatlin began performing.
“To me, rockabilly and blues are really the same thing,” Gatlin once told an interviewer. Today, he performs throughout the region; his shows offer few musical boundaries. Respected by aficionados and his musical peers, Gatlin has created his own spot in the roll of rockabilly survivors. In addition to entertaining under his own name, he has appeared with Self, Johnny Cash’s long-time drummer W.S. Holland, and Carl Perkins’ son, Stan Perkins, as the Rockabilly Masters.
Mississippi blues vocalist and guitarist Vince Cheney of Tupelo is a popular festival entertainer. A native of Amory, Mississippi, Cheney also performs at many of the clubs and juke joints around the Delta. He has released one self-produced album and is also noted for his research contributions to a better understanding of blues history.
Helena-West Helena’s Live Wire Band, performing together over the past eight years, has built a strong regional reputation for its performances at nightclubs and festivals, tackling more than 100 dates annually.
Gallery hours at the DCC Visitors Center at 141 Cherry Street and the nearby DCC Depot at 95 Missouri Street are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. “King Biscuit Time,” the nation’s longest-running blues radio program, is hosted each weekday at the DCC Visitor’s Center by “Sunshine” Sonny Payne, from 12:15 to 12:45 p.m. “Delta Sounds,” hosted by Buckalew and Payne, is broadcast each Friday from 1 to 1:30 p.m.
In addition to the DCC’s “Helena: Main Street of the Blues” and “Delta Sounds” exhibits, the visitors center is also exhibiting “Imaging Blackness” featuring move than 40 vintage movie posters from the early days of cinema to today, tracing the evolution of the depiction of African-Americans in the movies.
For more information, interested persons can call the Delta Cultural Center at (870)-338-4350 or toll free at (800)-358-0972 or visit the DCC online at www.deltaculturalcenter.com.
The Delta Cultural Center shares the vision of all seven agencies of the Department of Arkansas Heritage – to preserve and promote Arkansas heritage as a source of pride and satisfaction. Other agencies within the department are the Historic Arkansas Museum, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, the Old State House Museum, the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, the Arkansas Arts Council, and the Natural Heritage Commission.
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