Most people know Amy LaVere as a world-traveling, bass-thumping chanteuse of memorable songs and glorious voice. But today she is a Sun Studio tour guide (or as she says, a "history of rock and roll ambassador"). Although Elvis Week is well underway, Monday is a quiet one for visiting fans, a sort of pause in the action before it picks up steam on Tuesday ...
Guitars at half mast, please. Billy Lee Riley, the Sun Studio rockabilly artist who recorded atomic age classics as "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll" and "Red Hot" is dead. It was recently reported that Riley, who had been in poor health since taking a bad fall in 2005, was suffering from the final stages of terminal cancer ... We'll have more to say about this influential and under-sung Memphis artist, in the meantime here's a clip from a live performance in 2003 ... On August 30 there will be a
Levitt Shell concert series returns with its sophomore season ... by Andria Lisle ... Cowboy" Jack Clement was 5 years old in 1936, the year the Works Progress Administration allocated $11,000 to the city of Memphis to build a band shell in Overton Park. By the 1940s, the Whitehaven-born songwriter was a regular visitor at the Shell, then called the Memphis Open Air Theater. This Thursday, Clement, a Sun Studio alumnus who moved east to forge his path as a venerated producer on Nashville's Music
Sun Studio tour guide by day, enterprising musician by night, Jason Freeman, 36, is determined to bring Memphis’ longstanding musical traditions into the 21st century. He cut his teeth in the jug band-inspired roots project Bluff City Backsliders and currently plays guitar in Amy LaVere’s backing band, the Tramps ...