The first Monday of springtime, the first Monday after Spring Break, you want to be at our fantastic new music venue Mean Mel’s, just off the southbound lane of Highway 111, just north of Cookeville. Co-presented by Tennessee Tech’s UNCLE club (that stands for Underrepresented New Creative Live Experiences, since the 2010s), you don’t want to miss this triple threat of “southern gothic” music that will make your mind spin, your heart throb, your body thrum, and your spirit soar.
On Monday, March 23, doors will open promptly at 6:30pm for a 7pm show. Colin Cutler kicks off at the top, followed by Adeem the Artist at 8pm, with One Eye Jack closing the night from 9-10pm.
The “southern gothic” genre in literature percolated from the swampy reality of our shared trauma, refusing to subdue the tragicomic and spooky aspects of everyday life in the American south. Rather than run from our Bible-belt roots, these stories and poems are “Christ-haunted,” to amplify the Flannery O’Conner term for a world where the essence of Christ has been drained from Christianity, and we look with a keen and honest poetic lens at the “the grotesque, the violent, and the freaks,” often as unlikely ambassadors of the divine, as Karen Swallow Prior reiterates.
When poet and Flannery O’Connor fan Ashley Massey introduced me to Colin Cutler of North Carolina, I knew that I needed to look deep and linger for a while on the front porch of his songcraft. Ashley and Colin, my friends and fellow Flannery fans, share my obsession with the “southern gothic” trope in Americana music. It gets under you and inside you. It comes over for BBQ and stays with you: it’s dip touching your lip, gas in your truck tank, kindling on your backyard burn.
Cutler’s 2023 album Tarwater is a lush and unapologetic sonic gothic tribute to the short stories of O’Connor. No Depression puts it simply like this: “What happens when you take an English major and turn him into a musician?” Inspired by Flannery’s inspiration on Bruce Springsteen in the creation of Nebraska, Cutler collapses his Pentecostal and military background into song-stories that sizzle.
Another contemporary southern singer who truly sizzles is Adeem The Artist (they/them), currently of Knoxville, Tennessee. To say that Deemie’s dark and delicious songs are raw and direct, would be one way to put it. But because of the intense humor of a wild mind and the religious murmurings of an ex-worship pastor, they challenge as often as they enchant, giving laughter and levity one moment, then kicking you with heartbreak and longing.
When Rolling Stone magazine named Adeem’s breakout White Trash Revelry as the #7 Country Album of 2022, the magazine described the song “Middle of the Heart” like this: “a masterclass in economic folk storytelling that shows why their latest LP is the most thrilling introduction in roots music this year.”
The gritty and gregarious young upstart from Sparta, Tennessee, Jack Ray Judd, is probably going to mess up my thesis with a handle of something strong. Young and on fire, the trio One Eye Jack boils down my highfalutin potion to its common denominator as a music for the people: “We sound like the gritty blues ya papa used to play and the rock your parents still listen to.” Let’s just say that if you don’t leave early, we will push the chairs to the side and start to shake our butts like Saturday night, with an overall evening that will slip in some sacred and slippery Sunday morning themes.
I hope to see you there. I will be sho’nuff shouting hallelujah.
I hope to see you there. I will be sho’nuff shouting hallelujah.
-Andrew William Smith, Sunfrog, Teacher On The Radio
www.teacherotheradio.com
This show is an all ages event. I.D. required. $12 in advance. $15 at the door.
Mean Mel’s is at 5760 highway 111 N. Ste A, Cookeville, TN
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