Performance

Jack Magee

A passionate old-time fiddler, Jack Magee draws on family tradition and also modern conveniences such as CDs to form his repertoire and style. There have been Magees in his hometown of Magee since before it was settled, when a Phil Magee arrived around 1820. But the family musical tradition comes through Jack’s father’s mother, born […]

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Lil Poochie

Vocalist and guitarist Robert Lee “Lil Poochie” Watson was born in Natchez on March 29, 1951 but spent his first fourteen years in the rural community of Church Hill in Jefferson County north of Natchez. [He prefers to be called by his nickname and explains that it derives from his being small and that people

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Thallis Lewis

Thallis Lewis recently retired after working for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians for 43 years, finishing as Director of the Cultural Affairs Program. In 2003, she received the Governor’s Award for Leadership in Mississippi Heritage. Mrs. Lewis was born a sharecropper’s daughter in Bogue Chitto (about 20 miles east of her current home in

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Guelel Kumba

Guelel Kumba is a guitarist, singer, and songwriter of Fulani heritage who is currently based in Oxford. He grew up in the Futa Toro region in the Senegal River valley, which encompasses areas of northern Senegal and southern Mauritania. His father was of Senegalese nationality, his mother of Mauritanian nationality. Kumba’s paternal grandfather was a

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Debbie Kreiser

Debbie Kreiser has always loved music, and needs to be around it—otherwise, she gets what she calls “grumpy.” But it took a while for her to find the right environment for her personality within the larger world of music. Her parents, both originally from New York, had moved from Virginia to Jackson, Mississippi in 1971;

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