VOCAL POWERHOUSE BETTE SMITH TRACES BED-STUY ROOTS BACK TO DEEP SOUTH SOUL & GOSPEL HEADWATERS ON JIMBO MATHUS-PRODUCED DEBUT LP ‘JETLAGGER,’ OUT 9/29 VIA BIG LEGAL MESS

STREAM LEAD VIDEO "MAN CHILD" VIA BILLBOARD HERE: http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7874090/bette-smith-jetlagger-debut-interview

Brooklyn soul dynamo Bette Smith will release her debut album, ‘Jetlagger,’ September 29 via Fat Possum subsidiary Big Legal Mess. Recorded in Mississippi with producer Jimbo Mathus—who’s played on records by everyone from Valerie June to Elvis Costello—the album finds Smith reconnecting with the Deep South roots of the gospel, soul, and blues music she grew up singing in New York’s rough and tumble Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The record also fulfills a deathbed promise Smith made to her late brother, Junior, that she’d keep on singing no matter what.

“He told me, ‘I want you to sing; don’t give up,’” remembers Smith, who wears yellow onstage to honor his memory. “It’s all for Junior, now.”

In a premiere and feature, Billboard's Elias Leight writes, "A rugged, chugging southern soul record... Like Betty Davis or Betty Wright before her, she's imbues tracks with shingly, sawtoothed texture, capable of breaking off a high note with a throaty cry or scraping so low and wide that she threatens to put her bass player out of work."

‘Jetlagger’s ten tracks bring together obscure deep cuts, vintage classics, and originals written specifically for Smith, who counted late icon Ray Charles among the fans of her raspy and riveting voice. From a simmering take on Isaac Hayes’ “Do Your Thing” to a feverish rendition of the Staple Singers’ “City In The Sky,” the album showcases Smith’s fiery, mesmerizing delivery, rich with emotion and bruising in its honesty. Mathus dug deep into the Mississippi and Memphis soul bags for material, unearthing hidden gems like the moving “Flying Sweet Angel of Joy” by Famous L. Renfroe, while originals like the raucous soul-rocker “Man Child,” spare and funky “Shackles & Chains,” and Blaxsploitation soundtrack-esque “Durty Hustlin’” draw on Smith’s defiant and wild personality, as well as the hard-won perspective she gained growing up poor in Bed-Stuy. The deeply soulful title cut “I Will Feed You” and the rollicking title track were chosen from over a hundred songs that Smith wrote. First-call Memphis horn players Marc Franklin (Robert Cray, Lucero and Kirk Smothers (Don Bryant, Melissa Etheridge, Cyndi Lauper, Buddy Guy) were summoned to complete the album’s sound.

“Everything was recorded live,” recalls Smith, who cites her church choir director father and gospel-loving grandmother among her earliest influences. “I do well when I’m performing like that. There’s New York aggressiveness and passion. I get to a fever pitch. I’m gone. I’m not even there anymore. Something else takes over.”

‘Jetlagger’ follows Smith’s 2016 EP, which earned her international tour dates and rave reviews. Bitch Magazine compared her to Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu, praising her “stunning voice,” while Soul Tracks hailed her music as “steaming,” and No Depression exalted her as “a woman with the blues power of both Big Mama Thornton and Bessie Smith, the smooth classiness of jazz/blues singer Joe Williams, the dynamics of Koko Taylor, and the energy of Janis Joplin all wrapped up tight in a relevant Billie Holiday look.”

Smith will perform in NYC’s Riverside Park on Sunday, Sept 10 as part of the West Side County Fair presented by the Parks Department’s Summer On The Hudson series. Stay tuned for additional tour dates and details to be announced.

GRACE ASKEW SHARES NEW MISSISSIPPI DELTA-FILMED VIDEO FOR “ONLY HUMAN,” CONTINUES HEADLINING TOUR

Grace Askew has shared the Mississippi Delta-filmed music video for “Only Human,” from her August album ‘Scaredy Cat.'

Jon Mark Nail directed the vivid clip in the Mississippi Delta amidst blooming cotton fields, just a few miles south of Askew’s native Memphis. The video came about accidentally as the editor of Delta Magazine had arranged a photo shoot to accompany a feature and suggested that Nail join the crew with a 16mm camera.

Askew says, “The video was shot in a dilapidated civil war-era cemetery along the back dirt roads of Victoria, Mississippi under massive Magnolia trees overlooking the cotton fields in their peak season…bursting with their beautiful white flower, a true vision of South in all its haunted grandeur.”

Askew, who recently surpassed 16,000 Facebook likes and has earned raves from SPIN, Rolling Stone, Yahoo! Music, Nashville Scene, LA Magazine, and Relix, will continue her headlining tour this fall:

Oct 28 - The Alibi Pub -Laramie, WY
Oct 30 - Lion's Lair - Denver, CO
Oct 31 - Lost Love Saloon - Red River, NM
Nov 01 – Sabroso – Arroyo Seco, NM
Nov 05 - The Cowgirl BBQ - Santa Fe, NM
Nov 07 - Pecos Flavors Winery - Roswell, NM
Nov 08 - The Blue Light - Lubbock, TX
Nov 13 - Minglewood Hall - Memphis, TN (with The Dirty Guv'nahs)
Nov 15 – Red Dirt Brewhouse – Ardmore, OK
Nov 17 – Saxon Pub – Austin, TX
Nov 18 - Mucky Duck - Houston, TX
Nov 20 – Shipping & Receiving Bar – Fort Worth, TX
Nov 22 - The Continental Club Austin - Austin, TX
Nov 24 – The Deli – Norman, OK
Nov 30 - The Frog Pond - Silverhill, AL

HANK COCHRAN PROVIDES ROAD MAP FOR MISSISSIPPIAN EDEN BRENT TO DECAMP TO NASHVILLE FOR NEW ALBUM 'JIGSAW HEART,' RECORDED AT FAMED RCA VICTOR NASHVILLE SOUND STUDIOS

The seeds of Eden Brent's 'Jigsaw Heart' were planted decades ago. Country music great Hank Cochran, who grew up in neighboring Isola, MS had fans in the Mississippi Delta of his home, including her parents. Brent says, "In the mid-sixties, Daddy and Mama went to Nashville to record a demo, and Hank met with them and listened to a couple of Mama's songs."

The themes of Cochran's music provided a roadmap for Brent's own music. Of his hit "I Fall To Pieces" and her original song "Jigsaw Heart,' she says, "'The two songs share a common theme so it was natural for me to record the album in Nashville. I liked the title 'Jigsaw Heart' because the two words are contradictory and when thrown together evoke a very visual image, exactly the kind of image that country music and the Nashville sound express so perfectly." Brent recorded her new Americana masterpiece 'Jigsaw Heart' at Ben Fold's Ben's Studio, which was originally constructed in 1964 as RCA Victor Nashville Sound Studios. The studio has also hosted recording sessions by Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Tony Bennett, George Strait, and The Beach Boys, among many others.

Fellow Mississippian Tommy Polk contributed the slow-burning "Tendin' To A Broken Heart" and he has written for country and blues starts alike, from Martina McBride and Crystal Gayle to Irma Thomas and Bobby "Blue" Bland. Brent sees a connection between the genres, saying, "I've always loved the honesty that blues music and country music share, that pure raw emotion that both so easily communicate. Everyone understands the message. It's music for everybody no matter what side of town they live on or what kind of job they have or where they did or didn't go to school. That kind of music came from my home in Mississippi, and Nashville made it famous."

"IRRESISTIBLY FRESH" (NPR.ORG) MISSISSIPPI PIANO POWERHOUSE BRINGS HER RENOWNED SKILLS AND A SET OF SOUL-BARING NEW SONGS TO NASHVILLE, WITH COLIN LINDEN PRODUCING

EDEN BRENT PICKS UP THE PIECES OF HER JIGSAW HEART ON HER THIRD
YELLOW DOG RECORDS RELEASE, OUT MAY 6

Take Eden Brent to a Nashville studio and you’ll still hear the sound of the Mississippi Delta. There’s no way around that. Say you’ve decided to drive from New Orleans to Nashville. Whichever way you go—straight up 55 or heading northeast on 59—you’re gonna cut across Eden’s home state of Mississippi. And that’s precisely the route Eden’s recording career just took, as her last album—Ain’t Got No Troubles (recorded in New Orleans in 2010)—gives way to her deepest, most personal album yet: Jigsaw Heart, recorded in Nashville but shot through with Eden’s Mississippi roots, out May 6.

To hear "Everybody Already Knows" and "The Last Time", please click here.

She chose to record this soulful slice of Americana at Ben’s Studio (Ben Folds), formerly the historic RCA Studio A, laying down the tracks live and with minimal isolation. True to life, Eden had to journey through Mississippi to get from New Orleans (the location of her last recording) to Nashville (the site of her new one), stirring up the echoes of her past and reaching out to her stable of longtime friends, including producer and guitarist extraordinaire Colin Linden (most recently of Bob Dylan's band as well as production work for a host of luminaries from Lucinda Williams to Lindi Ortega) to create this riveting, reflective new work.

Jigsaw Heart connects an array of American music styles they sure love down South—blues, gospel, soul, country and R&B—coming together in an immensely satisfying melting pot of sound. Her cherished piano-bench partner Boogaloo Ames would be proud of the three-time Blues Music Award winner and her masterful piano work on the disc, which begins with the blues and flowers outward from there. Notoriously eclectic himself when it came to song choices, Boogaloo would be thrilled by the breadth of styles and songs on her new album, starting with track one, Better This Way. This Brent original—with its achingly slow tempo and seductive fusion of blues, gospel and Nashville Sound strings—would surely have started Ray Charles to rocking left and right.

Better This Way is not the album’s only heartbroken concession to lost love. Jigsaw Heart—the album’s title track and emotional fulcrum—is a stunning original about picking up the pieces of broken love, with tears streaming and hope rising throughout Eden’s lyrics and the sublime pedal-steel playing of Dan Dugmore. Jigsaw Heart is one of a few songs here with chord changes and soulful piano passages that could have come from Randy Newman, or even Sir Elton. Another dreamy look back is The Last Time, a wistful tune with an intoxicating melody that again might earn Eden comparisons to Norah Jones.

Jigsaw Heart is no downbeat trip, though. Track two, Everybody Already Knows, sounds like a rockin’ classic everybody already knows, a roadhouse boogie-woogie and a joyful embrace of unconcealed passion. Locomotive speeds down the tracks with a train-track beat and some crafty wordplay about a woman’s loco motives. And Opportunity is a funky, gritty electric-piano tribute to one of Eden’s musical heroes, Joan Armatrading. She also takes the time to honor Nina Simone (I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free) and Texas-swing songstress Toni Price (Get the Hell Out of Dodge). It all leads up to the starkly beautiful romantic confession of the final track, Valentine, penned by Linden with Tom Hambridge (Buddy Guy).

"I tried to go in a slightly different direction," she said of her new album. "Nothing in particular made me take a new direction. I still love the blues. I would have to leave the Delta if I didn't. I just needed to stretch my legs."

She hasn’t left the Delta on Jigsaw Heart. She’s just out on a good, long walk, making new discoveries and sharing them with us.

John Murry 'The Graceless Age' bio

The way to beat fundamentalism is to find yourself interred at a fundamentalist drug rehabilitation facility for eighteen months as a teenager. “I was only on pills for half as long,” says John Murry about the pharmaceutical speed he was given as a “slow” student at his Mississippi high school. “They gave me the pills and then they locked me up when I took them. I trafficked in righteous indignation when they let me out, but god damn it, it turned out they were right.” Years later, dead from heroin, San Francisco’s first responders showed him how Lazarus felt. A few times. Not born again, but not dead either.

The way to Catholicism if you’re John Murry is through Graham Greene and Walker Percy. Literature goes a long way for some people – the people who read it without prejudice and don’t parade their reading list around in place of personal substance. It’s in John Murry’s blood. He’s William Faulkner’s grandson. Or nephew. “I got all the way to being his son, once.” It depends whom you ask or who’s doing the talking. But John Murry can tell you which of his cousins or uncles came to find himself transmogrified into fictional characters in Faulkner’s novels. There’s no separation of fiction and reality in John Murry’s lineage. It’s all reality, just like Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. When asked what he liked to read, Faulkner always answered, “I read Don Quixote and The Bible every year.” The quote is different if you read it in the biographies. But that’s how it’s told in the Murry family and that’s how John Murry remembers it and John Murry doesn’t ever forget anything.

Tupelo, Mississippi is John Murry’s hometown. He immigrated to Oakland, California seven years ago for the Mexican Coca-Cola. “If you eat the rust off the bottleneck, it keeps you healthy. I learned that in England.” England because that’s where he goes to perform the death ballads he writes and records with Bob Frank. Rolling Stone’s Senior Editor David Fricke wrote of their World Without End “all bullets, blades and guilt without end…. With his low, hanging-judge drawl, Murry sounds as severe and modern as Leonard Cohen.... production here [Tim Mooney and John Murry] is as antique as a sepia print — but also as immediate as the anguish made elsewhere by the two.” Allan Jones of UNCUT Magazine called it a “dazzling collection of blasted country folk and grimly haunting murder ballads, shot through with harrowing images of death, damnation and eternal suffering...” People like to talk about what Jim Dickinson said. About John Murry’s records with Bob Frank, Jim Dickinson said, “The lost cry out in song. Cold as an assassin's blade. Burning with the heat of a pistol's breath. Dark and deep as the grave. This recording is timeless as death. It will haunt your dreams and follow you down the shadow-filled street just out of sight."

John Murry began recording The Graceless Age (produced by Murry, Tim Mooney, and Kevin Cubbins) four years ago in San Francisco. From there, he brought the tapes to Memphis and back again, adding layers of sound as thick as, what? San Francisco fog? Mississippi mud? No. That’s fucking ridiculous. As John Murry says, “No matter how many fuzz pedals I use, no matter how many synths, they’re always going to say ‘Mississippi’ and ‘southern rock.’” Of course territory figures into the songs of The Graceless Age, but good luck pigeonholing.

It’s a big sound at times – backup singers, panoramic guitar noise, sweet piano melodies, an orchestra of strings, bells, horns… – but no matter how ethereal or expansive, at the heart of each song is something simple maybe written on an acoustic guitar or upright piano about loss and solitude and bad fucking-up, not always with a guilty conscience. Listen to “California” with its mechanical loops over a constant, hypnotic guitar line. It’s pretty. It’s also easy to imagine riding alone over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, generally disgusted with the scenery, as though it’s the scenery’s fault. Listen to “Little Colored Balloons” – sparse with piano, cello, mournful backup singing, and John Murry’s hoarse voice protesting too much. Drugs, bad choices, melody and countermelody.

John Murry knows what it sounds like to be Elvis, alone in Memphis, bloated with pills and mistakes, about to hit the floor. There’s a gospel choir and backwards guitar.

--Creston Lea, Author of "Wild Punch"
Burlington, Vermont, October 2010

SONGWRITER KEVIN GORDON BRINGS AFRICAN-AMERICAN QUILTER TO LIFE WITH "PECOLIA'S STAR" FROM FORTHCOMING ALBUM 'GLORYLAND' (FEB 14 / CROWVILLE MEDIA)

GORDON ALSO CURATES THE GORDON GALLERY IN NASHVILLE, TN

When master songwriter Kevin Gordon read folklorist and University of North Carolina professor William Ferris' book "Local Color," he was particularly struck by the oral history of Yazoo City, MS quilter Pecolia Warner. "Things she says in there about creativity, art and the spirit, really got to me," he says.

Warner was born in 1901 in Rose Hill, MS, only some 250 miles from Gordon's birthplace in northern Louisiana.

Gordon chose to tell her story in the first person in his song "Pecolia's Star," named for her favorite quilting design, in some cases using her words and phrases for his lyrics. He draws out the metaphors of a quilt in creating community, tying together kinship bonds, and the comfort of faith for a woman who faced economic struggles as a sharecropper.

"I was raised up in the fields, hard work
Was just like breathing
Knowing nothing else
Wanting nothing more
Like morning brings the day, summer sun
Brought the cool of the evening
I’d watch the women sew and sing
Behind an old screen door…
Yes, I’ve been on that hill, a long time
I don’t never want for nothing, or nowhere
Stay right here with my people
Just give me Mississippi
You can have all the rest
As long as I can see, I’ll be
Trying to thread that needle
With my mind on the Maker
Working to do my best"

"Pecolia's Star" isn't Gordon's only interaction with folk art. He also curates the Gordon Gallery in Nashville, TN, focusing on folk and outsider artists. Gordon says, "I found this work, with its immediacy, inventiveness, and singular power, being made outside of an academy or career track, to be a source of renewal and revelation after two years of graduate study in poetry at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop."

The Bug Music artist – the southern rock and roll songwriter who has been covered by Keith Richards, Levon Helm, and Irma Thomas and who has recorded a duet with Lucinda Williams – will release 'Gloryland' (February 14 / Crowville Media), his first new album in 7 years.

Of Gordon's music, Buddy Miller said, "It reminds me of why I love music. I get transported to a beautiful, strange, familiar place. It's where the best music comes from. Deep and soulful." No Depression has called Gordon's music “dirty and beautiful." All Music Guide said, "Kevin Gordon has earned the reputation as a storytelling leader." Entertainment Weekly said, "He evokes the scorching guitar intensity of Springsteen."