Episode Overview
This one was BIG fun. Charles Davis fronts the Macon Music Revue, a band of true killers keeping Macon’s musical inheritance alive in the spirit of Preservation Hall Jazz Band in New Orleans. The episode traces his somewhat unlikely path to the stage and his embrace by Macon music legends as he interprets their music.
Our Crossroads
Our crossroads meet “back where it all begins”—Macon, Georgia. We share a deep love, knowledge, and appreciation of Macon and its rich musical heritage and of the Allman Brothers extended family of musicians and fellow travelers. We’re historians of Macon’s music history not as nostalgia, but as a living argument about what Macon gave the world—and hasn’t stopped giving. Long live the ABB indeed!
The Conversation
Macon Music Revue. Charles is front man for the Macon Music Revue, which cut its teeth at Macon’s Grant’s Lounge for three and a half years on the same stage where the Marshall Tucker Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd auditioned for Capricorn Records. Davis tells the story of the band that is helping Macon reclaim its place in the pantheon of the South’s most important music cities.
Repertoire. I asked Charles about the choice of songs on the Macon Music Revue’s debut, recorded at Capricorn. The record opens with a ripping take on “Greenwood, Mississippi” off Little Richard’s later period Muscle Shoals record, The Rill Thing. “Sonically, it’s 180 from what you’d expect,” Charles said—nasty guitar solos, driving drums, Little Richard wailing over a bed of Southern rock. Davis said Richard was a man proving a point. “I am just as good, if not better, than I was back in those days.”
Arrangements. Song arrangements fascinate me. They are the way a cover can become truly original.1 Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” is a prime example. The Macon Music Revue’s take on “Losing My Religion” is another. The group turned the song upside-down, setting the happy-sounding ballad with devastatingly sad lyrics to a southern soul arrangement.
