Melissa Weber considers herself cursed. With a near-encyclopedic knowledge of 15,000 records scrounged from a lifetime as a “crate digger,” the world-renowned DJ artist known as DJ Soul Sister has been sharing that curse with New Orleans for over 30 years, working a turntable as a savant beholden to the long-lost art of mixing and beat matching straight from vinyl records.
A young omnivore for funk and disco tracks, Weber spent much of her childhood “borrowing” her father’s record cutouts, sequestering them into her room where she would play them repeatedly on her nearly indestructible Fisher Price record player. Considered musically gifted by her teachers, Weber never practiced and frankly didn’t have to as she absorbed the melodies that were bumping across the bass lines of Kool & The Gang, Brass Construction, or Funkadelic records, reshaping and radicalizing her synapses into a network of references upon which her artistry would one day be built.
“I was born in 1975, but I felt like I was born a decade too late,” Weber said. “I always felt like I should have been born in 1965 and partying at the discotheque instead of being stuck at home with a babysitter.”…