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Delay to a 7:45 start. Please come! The bands are ready to do a great show and we want you here. If you get here and it’s still raining, wait in your car. You can also grab some of the food and wait in your car. But please come!
This was the message ticket-holders for Steve and Kay Ellis’ Barn Concert Series received Thursday night while a thunderstorm passed through Lowndes County. I’m glad I followed their advice; the line of weather left in its wake a cool and perfect night for live music.
For the past four years – first sporadically due to COVID and now regularly – the Ellis’ have hosted a lineup of largely blues, country and independent musicians. The concerts are held at a barn next to the couple’s house on Mac Davis Road. A pavilion in the middle of the barn serves as the stage and a covered seating area, though both times I’ve been, the audience has spilled onto the lawn. String lights and multi-colored paper globes intimately light the stage while tiki torches provide ambient lighting for the audience in the grass. It all makes for a magical setting for live music. It’s easy to forget you’re in Columbus when you’re out there.
Steve’s history of exposing the Golden Triangle to great musicians stretches back further than the start of the Barn Concert Series, though. In 1994, Ellis helped start 91.1 WMSV, Mississippi State’s radio station. He served as station manager for more than two decades, before retiring in 2015. While much of the on-air talent has been student driven Steve was certainly the guiding force.
When I was a freshman at State in 1997, he approached me about being a news reporter for the station. I had been the announcer for Columbus High School’s Front Line performance group, and presumably Steve saw some promise in my voice at one of those shows.
Each day I’d get a digest of interesting developments on campus or news from the Associated Press, and I’d put together short news segments. The station had a huge binder of campus experts for me to use as sources. I remember walking into the station one day and Steve telling me that George Wallace, the former segregationist governor of Alabama, had died. He encouraged me to do more than the quick snippets I was used to. I peeled open the binder and started calling history and social rights sources around campus. It was my first experience in putting together a full news story.
Despite coaching by Steve, I struggled to break out of my naturally monotone voice. It’s probably best I ended up in print media.
WMSV continues to be a great place to hear music you won’t find on Top 40 stations.
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A perennial performer at Steve and Kay’s Barn Concert Series is Tupelo-raised musician and artist Paul Thorn. Thorn’s concerts are peppered with … colorful … and hilarious stories from his life. The Dispatch customer service department would be flooded with complaints if I repeated any of them here, but let’s just say that taking daughter Helen to one of Thorn’s concerts at The W’s Cromwell Auditorium last year saved me from having at least one or two “birds and the bees” conversations with her. It was a great concert and stories from that evening have become part of our family’s lore.
Thorn – who was the subject of a Spring 2013 Catfish Alley magazine cover story – and his band will be performing in October as part of the Barn Concert Series. In September, two-time grammy winning Jim Lauderdale and his special guest Jaimee Harris will perform.
Those two performances will round out this season, and both will be examples of how Steve and Kay continue to enrich our arts community.
Peter Imes is editor and publisher of The Dispatch. You can email him at [email protected].
Peter Imes is publisher of The Dispatch. You can email him at [email protected].
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