Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears & Cedric Burnside at Duling Hall Thursday, September 15

meet Black joe lewis & The honeybears

Black Joe Lewis is the realest motherfucker there is. When Covid sidelined his touring this past year, he started laying concrete to help support his baby mama and his kid. That’s fuckin’ real. When Joe and his band, the Honeybears, popped onto the national stage over a decade ago, many critics embraced him but still, there were some that maintained that they hadn’t paid their dues. Joe’s still here. Still going. Still cashing checks and snapping necks.

The dues of hard work; the delirious heights of the industry as well as the disappointments and low hanging fruit. Through this all, Joe’s only honed his mastery over gut bucket blues guitar and his true voice. It’s a vital and distinctly American voice that never anticipated the attention he wound up receiving, never went looking for it either. It just started happening.

Like the title of his last album says, “the difference between me and you” is Joe defining for himself that there’s the belabored wannabes and then there’s dudes that actually “HAVE the blues”…whatever the hell THAT is! Joe’s concrete pouring boss is gonna miss him.

meet CEDRIC BURNSIDE

 42-year-old Burnside was born in the blues as much as he was in funk, rock, soul, and hip-hop. These latter sensibilities are reflected across his work, as he drives Hill Country blues into grooves that lend themselves readily to an urgent, modern moment. But he is also keenly his grandfather’s grandson, who he studied so carefully over a decade playing with him that he came to know him better than his own self.

The elder Burnside blues man, the hill country blues luminary RL Burnside, and his wife Alice Mae wrapped their Holly Springs land and family in warmth, joy, and music. RL Burnside, alongside collaborators and contemporaries from David “Junior” Kimbrough to Jessie Mae Hemphill and Otha Turner, cultivated the sound and feeling of Black North Mississippi life and offered it up to the world. Cedric observed and absorbed this art world intently and with wonder as a child, declaring to himself, this is the music I want to play and I want to do that for the rest of my life.

Moreover, this was the offering he, too, wanted to make, and the life of service to the spirit through blues that he wanted to live. By age 13, he was on the road with his “Big Daddy” Burnside, playing drums, being raised up by the music and the road, and developing the next, electric generation of the Hill Country calling and sound.

Doors – 6:30pm | Show – 7:30pm

Listen to Cedric Burnside’s newest album I Be Trying (2021) and watch Black Joe Lewis’s recent Audiotree performance to get a sneak peek at the show you’ll be seeing at Duling Hall on September 15th.

Our friends at Saltine Restaurant serve a food menu from doors to showtime and provide a full bar with signature cocktails throughout the entire event.

Duling Hall is an Independent Venue that welcomes all music lovers.