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Playing in the Family Band
Brothers and sisters gonna work it out in the Queen City
By Jared NeumarkPage 4 of 5
Their sound is a mix of rock, pop and soul with a trace of a Southern sensibility. "The way I sing, some songs have a little hint of a drawl to them. It's not a country twang, it's just a little bit of a drawl," says Elesha.
The prevalence of family bands in Charlotte may be more than just coincidence. In the South, a special relationship exists between family and music. During the antebellum period, string music thrived in the Piedmont. Music was the central means of entertainment, and rural families incorporated it into their lives on farms. Frolics were organized around tobacco curings and corn shuckings, where music was a tool to alleviate boredom. Medicine shows predated concerts in the South. The best musicians in the area would play at those festivals, and most of the townspeople and farm families would attend them.
From those jams arose the early country music advanced by pioneers such as the Carter Family, the Stanley Brothers, the Louvin Brothers and other pickin' families. By the late 1960s, just after the first wave of rock & roll, Southern rock blossomed across the region. The Allman Brothers, pioneers of the new sound, brought with them a renewed emphasis on kinship. The Allmans viewed their entire act, from the musicians down to the managers and groupies, as part of a collective family.
Groups like the Marshall Tucker Band, the Charlie Daniels Band, Wet Willie and Lynyrd Skynyrd followed, and although lacking actual blood relation, they picked up on the familial vibe. Following in the footsteps of Charlie Pool and the North Carolina ramblers, the Allmans challenged racial attitudes of their time, playing mixed-race music and traveling across the segregated South as a mixed-race family of musicians.
Scott Avett of rock-influenced string band the Avett Brothers thinks race was a factor in creating Southern rock's solidarity. "All those guys getting in a big car and touring around like we do now, in a little bit more of a primitive way, I imagine a lot more trouble went down," says Avett. "There were probably more boundaries that needed to be crossed. That made them closer. It comes across in the music."
There is a special warmth, Avett says, among Southerners. "The South probably does produce some of that vibe, whether they're an actual family or not," he says. "Maybe it's because there's more empty country, more space, I'm not really sure why."
To the Avetts' third member, nonbrother Bob Crawford, playing at the big, family-like bluegrass and Americana event Merlefest, held each year in the Carolina mountain town of Wilkesboro, was a life-changing, inspirational event. "Everyone was real friendly," Crawford says. "The whole vibe of the day was just awesome."
The Reverend don Degrate knows about awesome, life-changing, inspirational phenomena. He's made more than 80 albums of music in his career, although none have hit the pop charts. Degrate is a gospel artist who is recognized on the streets of Charlotte almost every day. And yet, to the mainstream music world, he's most famous for his offspring, Devante and Dalvin Degrate -- one-half of the early-1990s R&B outfit Jodeci.
One of the biggest acts ever to come out of the Queen City, Jodeci exploded onto the music scene with their 1991 debut, Forever My Lady. The album shot to No. 1 on Billboard's R&B/hip-hop chart and No. 18 on the regular pop chart, and it produced three No. 1 singles, including the sexy romantic ballad "Come and Talk to Me." The Degrate brothers, along with brothers Cedric "K-Ci" and Joel "JoJo" Hailey, were instantly at the forefront of pop music. Today the group is cemented in the public zeitgeist as a raunchier version of Boyz II Men.
Considering the religious upbringing of the two pairs of brothers, Jodeci's leap of lasciviousness was shocking. When the band was still based in Charlotte, the Rev. Degrate remembers girls waiting outside his sons' house for hours if they weren't home. They would make lewd comments, even though some of the girls knew Degrate was a minister.
"When I was young, a girl made you beg for it, no matter what," the reverend says. "These girls would do it anyway you wanted. Up. Down. Front. Back. In. Out."
"People called them the black Beatles," says brother Derek Degrate, who never strayed from Christian music and is in the process of making a contemporary Christian album entitled The Other Brother. The other brother has been asked a million times if he would have joined Jodeci had he been offered the chance. He says no. "God put me here to be a light for them," says Derek. Whenever his brothers have a spiritual question, they go to him for the answer. And his presence at parties tempers their wild behavior, he says.
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Calendar
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Wine & Paint @ Blackfinn Ameripub- Ballantyne
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Queen Charlotte Fair @ Route 29 Pavilion
- Through April 22, 4-11 p.m.
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NEW WINDOW GALLERY-Pat Rhea-ACRYLIC PAINTINGS-April 05-30 2024 VALDESE, NC 28690 @ New Window Gallery/Play It Again Records
- Through April 30, 12 p.m.
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TheDiscountCodes
- Mondays-Sundays. Continues through Dec. 31
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Face to Face Foundation Gala @ The Revelry North End
- Fri., April 19, 6-10 p.m.
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Esports in Charlotte Takes Off: A Guide to Virtual Competitions and Betting
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Canuck in the Queen City 7
A Canadian transplant looks back at her first year as a Charlotte resident
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Homer's night on the town 41
If you drank a shot with the Knights mascot on Sept. 20, you were basically harboring a fugitive
