Event

What It Is! featuring Mavis Staples, Booker T., and JJ Grey

Tuesday, March 30, 2010, at 7:30pm | Colwell Playhouse

She’s a Lifetime Grammy Award winner, a National Heritage Fellowship honoree, and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. She’s played for Presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton. She’s marched with Dr. King as the musical voice of the civil rights movement. But even with such bountiful greatness in her past, Mavis Staples keeps looking forward as the “geyser of ferocity and depth” she remains after all these years (Pitchforkmedia.com).

Like Mavis, Booker T. has never relented in his quest for fresh inspiration over his epic 50-year career. He paid his dues in the backing band at Stax Records before stepping out into soul immortality with Booker T. and the MG’s. The band took its thumping, bluesy soul with an overlay of Booker T.’s organ alchemy to the top of the pop charts and was named one of Rolling Stone’s “Immortals.” Decades of hits and blockbuster producing credits later, Booker T.’s taut playing takes center stage once again on Potato Hole, his brawny and seductive 2009 collaboration with Drive-By Truckers and the rupturing riffs of Neil Young.

With these giants saunters in newcomer JJ Grey, who evokes a Florida backwater juke joint with his gritty, funk-fueled guitar and your grandma’s front porch with his artfully simple melodies. Cheered as “glorious” and “undeniably soulful” by Billboard and “quietly intoxicating” by the Boston Globe, his CD Country Ghetto led to gigs with the Allman Brothers, earned regular radio play on over 100 stations, and launched Grey’s own roots music festival, The Blackwater Sol Revue.

Be prepared for a historic evening, when we’ll head down to the swamp, off to the clubs, and out in the streets with music that resides at the depths of our souls.



Corporate Silver Sponsors:
Ward & Associates, Realtors®, Inc., Debora M. Auble
WBCP 1580 AM

Patron Co-sponsors:
Jill and James Quisenberry

Corporate Bronze Sponsor:
The Great Impasta