Blues Off Broadway is a weekly blues concert every Thursday evening in the month of May in West Memphis, Arkansas, usually held on a portable stage just outside the Eugene Woods Civic Center near the downtown area. Each week generally features two performers separated by an intermission. On this particular week, the performers were a West Memphis female blues singer named Iyuana Patrice, and Memphis blues guitarist Jonathan Ellison.
2025 will go down in cultural history as the year that Black Country came into its own as an aesthetic, although the trend has been building for several years. Songs like “Mississippi Boy” and “Cowboy Boogie” were hinting at where things were headed, but now with songs like “Boots on the Ground,” the trend is in full force. Boots, cowboy hats and, for women, ornate fans, are all part of the image, and line dancing is the rage. Even city folks are heading into the countryside to go to trail rides. Urban nostalgia for the rural South has always been a lyrical theme in Black music, at least as far back as “Midnight Train to Georgia” if not before. It often presents “down home” as an alternative to the complexity, confusion and violence of the city. As cities seem to be having an ever-growing crime problem, perhaps country nostalgia is a cultural marker for those that would go back to the older values of rural Black communities and extended families. Certainly Southern Soul events such as Blues Off Broadway offer an opportunity for good fun without the drama that often affects music programmed to younger audiences.
Iyuana Patrice is a new Southern Soul artist from West Memphis, and as such, her entourage, family members and fans showed up in large numbers. She has a good band, and she is a talented singer, performing mostly cover tunes but also at least one original. Her friends were the best line dancers at the event, and they continued to enjoy themselves and have a good time even after her set was over. With the weather not as doubtful as the previous week, there was a much bigger crowd at this week’s show, and Mayor Marco McClendon was on hand during the intermission to thank the sponsors and announce to the audience the good news that tech company Google was coming to West Memphis to build a plant…