The King Center Sessions — a new series that aims to explore music in the American South through in-depth interviews and intimate concerts — will kick off on July 13 with a sold-out show by the Amy Ray Band at Mercer Music at Capricorn in downtown Macon.
Amy Ray, one half of the Grammy-winning Indigo Girls, is the first artist to participate in the King Center Sessions, supported by Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies. Her show is also presented by the Georgia Music Foundation.
Dr. Doug Thompson, professor of history and director of the King Center, will interview Ray in Capricorn Sound Studios Historic Studio A before the concert, which will be held in Phil Walden Memorial Studio B. The interview will be later shared on YouTube.
The next King Center Session is planned for Oct. 16 with folk and country singer-songwriter Caroline Herring.
An activist in the LGBTQ+ community, Ray’s music wrestles with the idea of being deeply connected to a place and people while trying to find her own way in the world, Dr. Thompson said. Her sound draws from country, blues, pop, rock and even New Orleans jazz.
“She’s always playing in the exact same thing musically that I think the lyrics are doing, which is saying, ‘I am shaped by these things, by these people, by these places, by these experiences, and I want to make meaning out of them,’” Dr. Thompson said. “She does that in a way that is both comforting and challenging.”
Capricorn and Southern music
The decision to hold the King Center Sessions at Capricorn Sound Studios was intentional. While the recording studio is known for bringing Southern rock to the masses during the 1960s and 1970s, its artists carried a variety of influences, Dr. Thompson said.
Take for instance the Allman Brothers Band, the flagship of Capricorn Records, co-founded by Mercer 1962 graduate Phil Walden. Drummer Jaimoe was known for his jazz-influenced style, which, coupled with drummer Butch Trucks’ more conventional beat, developed the band’s powerful rhythmic sound.
“They fused that together really well,” Dr. Thompson said. “And in fact, it’s R&B doing improvisation, which is a jazz form. Capricorn captured that. It has all kinds of music.”
Capricorn band Sea Level also touched on different musical styles.
“What they created with Sea Level was jazz,” he said. “It’s also an early version of a weird thing that was coming — punk. It exists in their music. Not in the form that we’re going to call punk, but they’re playing with it. … They were also using electronic stuff. In the ’70s, they were in all kinds of experimental space.”
Walden, who got his start booking R&B bands for fraternity parties, recognized the importance of various musical influences, Dr. Thompson said.
“I think Phil heard all of that meshing and what he was trying to do was figure out how to capture it, and that’s why Capricorn matters,” he said.
Southern music’s evolution
The King Center Sessions are a culmination of years of work delving into “what we mean when we say Southern music,” Dr. Thompson said.
In 2022, the King Center hosted an evening with Grammy-award winning multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons, featuring a lecture and performance. In addition to being a musician, he is a historian and scholar who works to preserve America’s musical past.
The next year, the center welcomed Georgia blues musician Jontavious Willis as an artist in residence. As part of his residency, Willis participated in panels about blues and music in the South and performed at Capricorn.
In October, Capricorn hosted North Carolina group Nest of Singing Birds, which performed an Appalachian ballad swap. During a ballad swap, musicians share — or swap — traditional songs that have been passed down for generations.
“We have a pretty broad understanding of the American South, so we are looking for artists that come from the Mississippi Delta, the hollers of Eastern Kentucky or West Virigina or Virigina or North Georgia,” Dr. Thompson said.
“What I want to do in the interviews is capture how the artists sense their tradition from this past, what they tap into, what they bring forward and then the ways in which they recognize they might be changing the genre by the influences they bring with them.”
