The Memphis Acoustic Music Association
presents
William Lee Ellis
Friday, June 29, 2011
8 pm
Otherlands Coffee Bar
641 S. Cooper St.
Tickets: $12 at Otherlands and Davis-Kidd
We have a happy-sad occasion here: Bill Ellis and his family will shortly be leaving our sultry southern city for the cooler temperatures of Vermont where , brand new Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in hand, he'll teach at St. Michael's College near Burlington, Vermont. And you'd better bet that he'll be moonlighting as a highly sought after performer up there too. So before he goes, MAMA is giving him one last shot at the Memphis audience he wrote for and played for innumerable times in the fifteen years he lived here.
Bill was the best music critic the Commercial Appeal ever had. His commentary improved the general quality of performance around here, because he could outplay any musicians he reviewed. They all knew it and it kept them on their toes. He's a songwriter's songwriter and a preservationist's preservationist,and there is simply nothing he can't do with a guitar in any American style, from backing up his own dad's genius banjo playing, to playing any of the South's most demanding regional Blues styles.
We wish him and his family the very best. This will be your final chance to see him, to hear him, to be flabbergasted by his fluency and exalted by his command of language and style. Look for some local musical greats to sit in for a few songs in this farewell show. This is your last chance to say, 'I knew him when'.
The London Times
Here is a new artist with a pedigree as rich as any ... He has recently released The Full Catastrophe, a beguiling and compelling album that mixes country, blues and gospel, evoking everyone from Lonnie Johnson to Tarheel Slim.
Sun Records legend Sam Phillips
William Lee Ellis in Conqueroo has captured the best of this great musical genre that I've heard in a decade or more...Intuitive music making at its best. An outstanding CD.
Minor 7th
With one foot in the 21st century, the other in the timeless magic haze of the Mississippi Delta, William Lee Ellis leads us into a world steeped in life’s
La Hora del Blues
Powerful passionate acoustic blues full of chromatic beauty... a very gratifying piece of work.
