2026 Artists
Southern Avenue
Southern Avenue, the Blues Music Award-winning, GRAMMY-nominated Memphis-based family band, plays original Memphis blues, modern soul, and gospel-infused roots music that is uplifting and timeless. They are known worldwide for their inclusive, message-driven songs fueled by hard-hitting grooves and electrifying guitar. The band’s new album, Family, makes it clear that Southern Avenue creates musical storytelling magic. The band features lead vocalist/songwriter Tierinii Jackson, her husband, guitarist/songwriter Ori Naftaly, and her sisters, drummer/vocalist/songwriter Tikyra “T.K.” Jackson and percussionist/violinist/vocalist Ava Jackson.
Southern Avenue’s fourth album Family, received a 2026 GRAMMY Nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album, and was recorded in Memphis at the famous Royal Studios (Al Green, Ann Peebles, Bruno Mars). It was produced by GRAMMY winner John Burk (Ray Charles, George Benson, Melissa Etheridge) and recorded and mixed by multi-GRAMMY-winning producer and engineer Boo Mitchell (Snoop Dogg, Bobby Rush, Cedric Burnside).
Raised in a tight-knit and religious family in Memphis, Tierinii, Tikyra and Ava sang and listened to nothing but gospel music growing up. Conversely, Naftaly grew up in Israel, listening to almost nothing but American soul, roots and blues, learning to play guitar and create his own version of the music he loved. In 2013 he headed to Memphis with his Israeli band to represent his country in the International Blues Challenge. According to Naftaly, his journey to Memphis wasn’t just a move, “it was destiny in the making.” After building a following and touring coast to coast with his band, Naftaly wanted to change direction. He was looking for someone to help bring his musical vision to life. When friends pointed him to Tierinii Jackson, the city’s premiere vocal powerhouse (who did not begin singing secular music until she was in her teens), he didn’t hesitate, saying, “The first time I saw her perform, I saw my entire future flash in front of me.” That future came into sharper focus when Tierinii’s sister Tikyra joined on drums, locking in the group’s unmistakable chemistry, and Southern Avenue was born. “We’ve been a family ever since,” Tierinii declares.
Southern Avenue is named after the famous street that runs through the center of Memphis, leading right past the original Stax Records. But it was still a surprise when they became the first Memphis band signed to the newly reformed Stax label, which released their self-titled debut album in 2017. Praise came fast from the media as the band’s fanbase swelled. In 2018 Southern Avenue received the coveted Blues Music Award for Best Emerging Artist. Their 2019 release, Keep On, received a GRAMMY nomination. Their third album, 2021’s Be The Love You Want (BMG/Renew Records), was produced by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) with a song co-written by Jason Mraz.
Constant touring has brought Southern Avenue to destinations across North America, Europe and Australia, and earned them non-stop adulation from fans, press and fellow musicians. They’ve been nominated for the Blues Music Award for Band Of The Year in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and have toured with The Tedeschi Trucks Band, Sheryl Crow, Los Lobos, Galactic and The Revivalists, among many others. In 2024, the band performed across the country, including headlining the Chicago Blues Festival. They joined the Outlaw Music Festival tour for several weeks, performing alongside Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Bob Dylan.
“Through our music,” says Naftaly, “we expand our family to include our fans and whomever is moved by our songs.”
“Southern Avenue showcases the soul of Memphis…they continue to evolve and inspire. They take listeners into a world filled with stories that resonate long after the last note fades….unforgettable music [and] electric performances.” – Rolling Stone
The Steel Wheels
20 years is a long time to spend doing anything at all. It’s an age for any group of people to sustain a collective effort. For a band on the road, 20 years can be more than a lifetime. Yet, after 2 decades of making music together in living rooms, listening rooms, clubs, theaters, and festival stages, The Steel Wheels are still growing, still pushing, still at it, and they’re marking the occasion with the release of their 9th studio album, “The Steel Wheels”.
Following the release of “Sideways” in 2024, their 3rd record with producer Sam Kassirer at his Great North Sound Society studio in interior Maine, the band felt it was time for a change of scene. As the group began to select songs for a new album, they also had to find an answer to the question of where they would get down to the work of record-making. They didn’t know that answer was going to knock on their back door.
At the band’s 2024 Red Wing Roots festival, held each summer near the group’s home base of Harrisonburg, VA, banjo player and songwriter Trent Wagler spied producer and engineer D. James Goodwin (Goose, Bonny Light Horseman, I’m With Her) in the crowd and later reached out to learn what he was doing so far from his home turf of New York. It happened that Goodwin, who mixed the band’s 2019 album “Over The Trees”, had just pulled up stakes for the Shenandoah Valley and was setting up a new studio on the band’s doorstep. Several months and one video call later, Wagler, fiiddler Eric Brubaker, multi-instrumentalist Jay Lapp, drummer/percussionist Kevin Garcia, and bass player Jeremy Darrow gathered in the new space, The Isokon, snug against the snowy Virginia winter, to begin recording their next album.
The process that Goodwin cultivated was fluid and swift. Demo listening in the morning flowed into tracking the whole band live in one room. The session was punctuated by peals of laughter and occasional tears as the group kept themselves in the moment, leaning in to every emotion and embracing that vulnerability. As they worked, the music took shape in the moment, right in front of the microphones, each participant listening and responding as the songs flickered to life. By dinner time the songs of the day were complete and talk moved to the next day’s work.
The album that resulted from this process captures the multifaceted band in full-flight, pivoting effortlessly between the folk rock band they’ve grown into over 20 years, and the harmony-centric acoustic ensemble that they’ve been since the beginning. The band puts their impressive range on display throughout “The Steel Wheels”; energy, insight, and humor, balance with tender, highly personal moments of masterful restraint and expression as the album unfolds. As ever, the band challenges themselves to find new ways through the music, using space and, at moments, reinventing their approach to the string band format.
As usual, Wagler’s keen lyrics provide insight by posing big questions. At first blush “Easy” sounds like the song of the summer, but a deeper listen asks the audience to consider whether it’s worth the cost to have the world waiting for us on the other side of our screens. “Everything is easy”, but is it really? Beyond our glowing devices “Go Back” studies the complexity of our relationships and the time we spend with those close to us. It’s easy to say that we must take the bad with the good, it’s a challenge to seek to understand how our joy and sadness are entwined; that they are not opposing feelings, but sibling emotions.
“Keep On Dancing” offers the listener a greater challenge; to take a step back from distraction and our self-imposed tasks, to look beyond the static of the day, and to see the beauty all around us. The song gently implores us to take a breath and be still so that we can glimpse the things that are actually important.
The Steel Wheels have kept their stride for longer than most bands survive. After 20 years hard at work “The Steel Wheels” is an album of creative maturity with a restless sense of adventure. Here’s to 20 more.
Blair Crimmins and The Hookers
Blair Crimmins began his current music career in Atlanta, Georgia, with a drive to bring Ragtime and 1920’s style Dixieland Jazz to new audiences. While playing small rock clubs around the Southeast he developed a sound that is at once modern while being deeply rooted in the past. He has toured the U.S and Italy playing festivals and has opened for acts such as Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Old Crow Medicine show.
A multi-instrumentalist on guitar, banjo and piano, Crimmins writes songs and arrangements for a classic New Orleans style horn section consisting of trumpet, clarinet and trombone. His debut release “The Musical Stylings Of” became a college radio sensation on WRAS Atlanta making him the most requested band on the air. In 2012, Crimmins showed his musical diversity by writing and recording the full score for the independent short film “Old Man Cabbage”. The following year, Crimmins was the critics pick for Best Song Writer of 2013 in Creative Loafing’s Best of ATL issue. His next album entitled “Sing-a-longs!” earned him a nomination at The Georgia Music Awards for Best Jazz Artist. After years of relentlessly touring the country and abroad, Blair Crimmins released his 4th album of original ragtime music, “You Gotta Sell Something” (2017), as well as a children’s album, “All Aboard” (2019) and a 5th full-length record featuring swinging covers of his favorite artists ranging from Louis Armstrong to David Bowie entitled “Okay Boom!” in 2021.
Charlie Parr
In the music of Charlie Parr, there is a sincere conviction and earnest drive to create. The Minnesota-born guitarist, songwriter, and interpreter of traditional music has released 19 albums over two decades and has been known to perform up to 275 shows a year. Parr is a folk troubadour in the truest sense: taking to the road between shows, writing and rewriting songs as he plays, fueled by a belief that music is eternal and cannot be claimed or adequately explained. The bluesman poet pulls closely from the sights and sounds around him, his lyrical craftsmanship built by his influences. The sounds from his working-class upbringing—including Folkways legends such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie—imbue Parr’s music with stylistic echoes of blues and folk icons of decades past. Parr sees himself merely as a continuer of a folk tradition: “I feel like I stand on a lot of big shoulders,” he said in an interview. “I hope that I’ve brought a little bit of myself to the music.”
With a discography simultaneously transcendental in nature and grounded in roots music, Charlie Parr is the humble master of the 21st century folk tradition. Parr started recording in Duluth in 2002, where he lives today. Life in the port town on Lake Superior has a way of bleeding into his work the same way his childhood in Austin, Minnesota does. Parr self-released his debut album, Criminals and Sinners, and did the same for his sophomore album 1922 (2002). With growing popularity abroad, Parr signed with Red House Records in 2015, where he recorded break-out albums Stumpjumper (2015) and Dog (2017).
Parr’s music has an overwhelming sense of being present and mindful, and his sound is timeless.
Parr’s mastery of his craft is only more apparent when contextualized within the history of folk tradition of which Parr has dedicated his practice. The land and lives around and intersecting with Parr have always influenced him, from the hills and valleys of Hollandale, Minnesota to the Depression-era stories from his father. Parr strives to listen to everything: “I don’t see that I’d ever be capable of creating anything if it weren’t for these inspirations and influences, books and music as well as the weather and random interactions with strangers and animals. So, the well never runs dry as long as my eyes and ears are open,” Parr said in a 2020 interview.
Before he was even 10 years old Parr was rummaging through his father’s record collection—sometimes drawing dinosaurs on the vinyl sleeves—and listening to country, folk, and blues legends, many of whom are staples in the Folkways catalog. When Parr sings and plays his resonator or 12-string, you can hear influences like Mance Lipscomb, Charley Patton, Spinder John Koerner, Rev. Gary Davis, and Dock Boggs. This is especially true in his playing, when, after a diagnosis of focal dystonia, Parr turned to greats like Davis, Doc Watson, and Booker White for two-finger picking inspiration. Gifted a 1965 Gibson B-45 12-string by his father, Parr has never had a formal lesson and learned by to listening records and watching musicians he admired.
Parr’s first album with Smithsonian Folkways, Last of Better Days Ahead (2021), foregrounded his lyrical craftsmanship and sophisticated bluesman confidence, with spare production highlighting Parr’s mastery of guitar and elevating his poetry. Last of Better Days Ahead is a portrait of how Parr saw the world in that moment, reflecting on time and memories that have passed while holding an enduring desire to be present. In his 2024 release, Little Sun, Parr weaves together stories celebrating music, community, and communing with nature. Putting forth an ambitious and raw album that exemplifies the best of Parr’s sound: a blend of the blues and folk traditions he continues to carry with him and the steadfast originality of a poet.
The Fretliners
The Fretliners are a band defined by their songwriting—stories carried by powerful harmonies, dynamic arrangements, and a sound that feels both timeless and new. Their music leans into the tradition of acoustic string instruments but reaches well beyond genre, resonating with listeners through honesty and craft.
In 2023, they swept both the Telluride Bluegrass and RockyGrass band competitions—an achievement matched only once before. That fall, their debut self-titled album earned widespread acclaim, praised for its originality and heartfelt lyricism.
With songs that balance tradition and innovation, The Fretliners continue to chart a bold path forward, creating music that connects as deeply on record as it does on stage.
Felix Y Los Gatos
Felix Y Los Gatos is a New Mexico band that seamlessly merges blues and Cumbia influences. Led by Felix Gato Peralta, who impressively handles vocals, harmonica, guitar, and the button accordion, the band explores their Chicano and Native American roots.
The two core members are Felix and D.B. Gomez (button accordion). Felix Y Los Gatos create an enthralling sound with rhythms ranging from South America to New Orleans, including elements of Zydeco.
They skillfully mix their sound into a flavorful musical gumbo, infused with the spice of New Mexico’s green chile. Live, they deliver powerful performances that pay homage to their New Mexico heritage.
Blue Moon Marquee
Winners of the 2024 JUNO Award for Blues Album of the Year, Blue Moon Marquee writes and performs original compositions influenced by anything that swings, jumps or grooves. Core members A.W. Cardinal (vocals/guitar) and Jasmine Colette a.k.a. Badlands Jass (vocals/bass/drums) have played for a vast gamut of crowds at jazz clubs, lindy hop dance halls, folk venues, blues haunts, hospitals, prisons, markets, motorcycle joints, dive bars, and prestigious festival stages.
Carving a path through blues, jazz, jump jive, folk, country, swing, and Indigenous soul with an authentic spirit, their sound does not idle easily in one certain category. It stomps and struts through the wilds, conjuring a blend where Howlin Wolf tangos with Django, Earnest Tubb shoots firecrackers with Louis Prima … & Memphis Minnie throws dice with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
Their gift is they bring all these elements together without anything sounding out of step. They collect the roots and smoothly braid them with lyrics that often touch on the underbelly of society, woven with elements of Indigenous storytelling and poetic cadence. After picking up the 2024 Juno for Blues album
of the Year and a nomination in 2025 for the same category, they are on the road with a full band to deliver a stylish & spellbinding sound that freely reaches back into tradition but is entirely unique.
“Blue Moon Marquee has harnessed the best of vintage music that’s practically a century old and brought it into modern times. It’s part haunting, part joyous, and sneakily infectious.”
—Jim Hynes, Elmore Magazine
Abby Posner Trio
Abby Posner has been a working musician in Los Angeles for the past 18 + years. She is best known for her ability to play nearly any instrument that she can get her hands on, twisting genres, and pushing the boundaries of folk, roots, electronic, and pop music making her “Genre Fluid.” If you have seen Abby perform live, you know she can play a fierce lead-blues guitar solo, or throw down a complex Earl Scruggs banjo riff. You also may have spotted her playing drums, mandolin, or bass while using her looping pedal. In addition to her versatility, she puts passion and soul into everything she does. Posner’s live shows are simply mesmerizing. Her energy is comparable to Chris Thile of Nickel Creek, and The Lumineers. Posner’s songs range from intimate haunting folk songs, to upbeat festival/dance your pants off hits.
This CalArts music graduate has composed & produced music for commercials/TV, films, and radio shows all over the globe (including Hulu’s Maggie, The Fosters, This American Life, The Art of More, and Last Tango in Halifax, custom songs for Facebook, Viacom-CBS, and CW’s Kung Fu). She also has music placed in commercials and TV shows all over China, Sweden, The UK, and Australia. Posner appeared in two episodes of GLEE on season four playing banjo and guitar, and the Freeform show Famous In Love playing banjo, as well as performing live several times on KCAL 9 news and Good Day LA.
Abby has also scored the music for multiple films (Across Land Across Sea, Through Their Eyes, award winning short animation Elizabeth Sees, and recently scored the Award-winning Documentary Lady Buds) while playing and touring all over the US. In 2019 Posner played banjo and sang Wagon Wheel as a featured principal role in Bank Of America’s ad campaign for the Ken Burn’s PBS Country Music Documentary alongside Dom Flemons and Amythyst Kiah.
After signing with Gary Calamar’s licensing company Laurel Canon in 2016, Abby Posner has gained major recognition in the LA music scene. Opening for such iconic acts as PHRANC, Sierra Hull, and Dustbowl Revival. She has released multiple albums under her name, and Abby & The Myth, and recently released her first full length album under Blackbird Record Label in 2023 titled Second Chances.
Abby Posner teamed up with Ships Have Sailed to write hit song “Get Loud” in 2023. “Get Loud” continues to Chart the Alternative Rock/indie Radio charts, and won the grand prize in the USA Songwriter Competition in 2023.
In 2020 Abby Posner won the Carl Gage “Give me Shelter in Place” Songwriting Award through the Topanga Folk Festival for her original song “Blind Spots”, and she received the runner up for her song “Emergency Use Only” for the 18th Annual International Acoustic Music Awards. She was honored to land Official Showcases at Folk Alliance International in 2022 and 2024 after signing with her booking agency Baker Booking (now Rockwood Booking.)
Posner was an official Showcase Artist at Americana Fest 2023, and her music video “Quiet On Sunset” was recently featured on CMT.
Cousin Curtiss
Cousin Curtiss is a powerhouse duo delivering a high-voltage blend of roots rock, blues, and Americana that hits like Mumford & Sons meets AC/DC. Together, Cousin Curtiss, wielding rapid-fire acoustic guitar, incendiary harmonica, and a cannon of a kick drum, and guitarist Harrison B, whose tone channels David Gilmour’s atmosphere and Gary Clark Jr.’s grit, create a two-man wall of sound that’s raw, soulful, and relentlessly energetic.
Curtiss O’Rorke Stedman and Jordan Harrison Baron began life in very different places — but their paths converged on a shared love of raw, emotional music that demands to be felt as much as heard.
Curtiss grew up in Northern Michigan, moving through places as varied as St. Lucia, Alaska, and now Colorado. A former teacher in Alaska until 2015, he made the leap to full-time musician with nothing to lose and everything to gain. The long road, the endless highway, the strangers with stories — they all shaped his voice and his songwriting. His playing is aggressive, precise finger-picking; his harmonica solos rip; his kick drum give heartbeat and weight to songs born in solitude, love, family, and adventure.
Jordan Harrison Baron — performing as Harrison B — was raised in Lascassas, Tennessee, steeped in the wide soundscape of the South: blues, country, folk, traditional roots. On his grandfather’s knee, he first heard guitar; in his father’s truck, Southern rock and James Brown. Pop, hip-hop, and rhythm found a way in along the journey too. But as Jordan grew, he felt boxed in by tradition. So he packed up and went north, thousands of miles, seeking the space to breathe, to discover a sound that was truly his. Alaska welcomed him. The wild places along the way, the West Coast, the open skies — those shaped his tone and attitude.
Together, Curtiss O’Rorke Stedman and Jordan Harrison Baron are Cousin Curtiss, a powerhouse duo whose live show fills rooms far beyond what two people usually do. Curtiss brings propulsive acoustic fury, searing harmonica, and a thunderous kick—Harrison B brings electric guitar tone that rides the line between spacious atmospherics and gritty soul. Their chemistry is plain: when Curtiss’s rapid-fire acoustic and road-scarred songwriting meets Harrison B’s electric edge, every song becomes a small eruption — roots, rock, and blues crashing together in wild harmony.
The music they make has been called “blues at bluegrass speeds” or “rock Americana with a soulful drip” — and that’s deserved. They don’t just play the notes; they’re storytellers, adventurers, people who’ve lived many seasons, many miles. The show is built on raw honesty: Curtiss’s voice that can fill an auditorium while still reaching into the hush of someone’s heart; Harrison’s leads that stretch and soar; the rhythm that’s fierce and precise; the energy that never lets go.
If you come to a Cousin Curtiss show, expect to be pulled in. Expect gritty, soulful vocals. Expect fast acoustic guitar, incendiary harmonica, and electrified solos that echo long after the strings are still. Expect heart and sweat, roots and roar. They are two, but you’ll hear an entire band.
TAE and The Neighborly
Hailing from Green Bay, Wisconsin, TAE & The Neighborly seamlessly blends the best of soul, R&B, pop, and rock through vibrant instrumentation and TAE’s unforgettable vocals.
The band released their debut full-length record, Self Help, in 2024, showcasing lyrics and soul-inspired arrangements that shed the malaise of a world that grows ever more grim for the places of joy that are never more than a mindset away. New listeners invariably latch on to the depth of TAE’s singular voice, demonstrating a remarkable breadth of emotional highs and lows from the smoky speakeasy allure of “Carry On” to the gut-punching climactic peak of “Let It Rain”.
Having toured continuously since the release of Self Help, the band has already in 2025 graced stages from the beloved “Shitty Barn” in rural Wisconsin to the revered halls of the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington DC. Highlights yet to come for this year include performances at the Rochester Jazz Festival, Rhythm & Roots, People Fest, Mile of Music, Sisters Folk Festival, NPR Mountain Stage, and more!
If you are looking for a slice from the layer cake of self lovin’, soul searchin’, and world changin’, meet them where the music is made to be shared.
Boss Mama and the Jebberhooch
Boss Mama takes listeners on an emotional ride from smooth country heartbreak to foot-stomping Americana blues and beyond. Her songwriting ranges from honest emotion and earthly imagery to the raucousness of horses, strippers, and whiskey. Her voice is authentic, her stories are relatable, and her musicianship impeccable. Myhre is a true American singer/songwriter grounded in her passion of soulful and heartfelt music.
Written by her and her husband and recorded in the living room of their rural Northern Minnesota landscape, her first album Rivers Run Dry, is a testament to the hard work and dues she has paid performing in local honky-tonks and taverns.
In 2011, Myhre released Ride of My Life. “Part Lucinda Williams and part Charlie Parr, Colleen Myhre’s gritty songwriting is as rawhide tough as it is genuine. On stage, her rustic personality can entertain both a honky tonk’s hard-boiled regulars and tranquil coffeehouse crowds alike. Colleen Myhre has a low, full voice that is similar in timbre to Lucinda Williams.” – Duluth News Tribune
Colleen’s 2019 album Boss Mama hit the airwaves all around the northland, Twin Cities, and surrounding states. With a full 2020 summer of music festivals, concerts, and street shows planned; Covid-19 threw a curveball into everyone’s life. Colleen became more dedicated in following her passion. The “Boss Mama” solicited the skills and talents of many other musicians. She affectionately named the collaboration, ‘The Jebberhooch’, who continue to play in diverse and openhearted venues.
Boss Mama’s 4th album, Greetings from the Barnyard Lounge, is a bluesy, loungey experience like none you’ve experienced. Even the “Lonesome Rooster Blues” make an appearance. With her Guild shallow hollow body electric guitar and her raw voice she pulls you from inside saying “Come to Mama”, it’s an album that keeps you captured through its entirety. “Soul, rhythm, and grit,” says Colleen, “I once saw those words on a sign in Memphis when I went down there to visit Sun & Stax Records, and thought to myself that that just about sums up my sound. I sing with a lot of soul, I’m a heavy rhythm guitar player, and my songs are gritty.”
Boss Mama incessantly refines her performances as she forges new musical relationships in laboring to the creation of music for her herself, and her fans. Music is already in the tank for her 5th album. For Colleen, music heals, embodies love, and brings people together.
Myhre possesses the ability to hypnotize listeners by creating sympathy between her voice and guitar that resonates a true American and local spirit. She not only hopes that you appreciate her music, but that you strive to learn about her life, her passion and love of music.
Danny Frank & The Smoky Gold
Danny Frank & The Smoky Gold’s unique sound blends soulful lead vocals with rich harmonies and virtuosic instrumentalism. Steeped in musical traditions of folk, bluegrass, country, classic rock, and blues, Danny Frank & The Smoky Gold offers a genre-blending Americana sound that is captivating, invigorating, and sure to get your toe tapping.
Based in Duluth, MN, the band is comprised of songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist Danny Frank, banjo player Harrison Olk (Tin Can Gin, Cascade Crescendo, Kind Country Band), bassist Joe Scarpellino (Smokin’ Joe, Dead Larry), and fiddle savant Erin Aldridge (Concert Master – Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra).
