_In 1947, the Queen Mother of Rock and Roll and Arkansas Delta native, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, arrived in Macon, Georgia, to play a show. Fourteen-year-old Richard Penniman was selling Cokes at the theater that night. Several accounts of their meeting exist. Some say that Sister Rosetta Tharpe heard Richard singing backstage. Others recall the young boy boldly serenading Tharpe with her own song, “Two Little Fishes, Five Loaves of Bread.”

Whether by chance or gumption or a little of both, the meeting helped propel Richard toward his musical destiny. (He would become Little Richard, Macon’s own “architect of rock and roll.”) Taken with his talent, Tharpe invited him to open her show. “She put him on stage that night,” said Chris Kent, executive director of the Argenta Downtown Council in North Little Rock. “She gave him thirty-five dollars at the end of the night. He was making ten cents for a rack of Cokes that he sold. She gave him thirty-five dollars and inspired him to become a professional musician.”

The legacy of that meeting of musical genius, of Arkansas- and Macon-born sound, was on full display on April 28 at Macon Road Show, a concert and dining experience hosted by the Oxford American, in partnership with Argenta Downtown Council, Visit Macon, and North Little Rock Tourism. The event featured Arkansas-based musician Rev. Greg Spradlin, joined by the Delta Soul Singers, and Macon Music Revue, who played to a standing crowd at Four Quarter Bar in North Little Rock. During the show, guests selected from a painstakingly prepared menu (as in the chef began cooking around midnight the night before) of Mississippi pot roast and mashed potatoes, fried pork shanks with homemade barbecue sauce and gouda rice grits, and a vegetarian dish of black-eyed peas, potlikker greens, and cornbread.

_Spradlin grew up in Pangburn, Arkansas, enamored of local musical heroes like Tharpe, Louis Jordan, Levon Helm, and Johnny Cash. These influences on his own sound—part blues, part rockabilly, every bit his own—inspire his music preservation efforts, which have included the relocation of Helm’s home to downtown Marvell, Arkansas, where it now functions as a museum. He also helped introduce legislation to designate several Delta highways as memorials to the blues, rock, gospel, country, and rockabilly artists that captured the region’s sound and gifted it to the world. Of all the legends he reveres, though, Spradlin said that Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s sound most transcends space and time. “She’s the connective tissue. There is no rock and roll without Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”

Joined by Jason Weinheimer on Bass, Chris Parker on keys, and Jacob Brumley on drums, Spradlin opened the night with an upbeat set featuring the Delta Soul Singers in a fusion of rock, Southern soul, and R&B. Kendria Robinson, Crystal Hayes, and Michael Dotson of the Delta Soul Singers showcased their powerhouse vocals with hits like Al Green’s “Love and Happiness,” rousing the crowd for the following act, and special guests, Macon Music Revue.

_The Oxford American first met Macon Music Revue, a self-described preservation band, in 2023 at Grant’s Lounge, in Macon, Georgia, where the group plays each Wednesday night. Fronted by Charles Davis, whose gospel-soaked vocals recall those of fellow Macon-ite Otis Redding, the band pays tribute to the artists who originated their sounds in Macon—think Redding, Little Richard, James Brown, R.E.M., and the Allman Brothers—as well as those who recorded major hits with the city’s primary label, Capricorn Records. Invited by the Oxford American to bring the music of their city to North Little Rock, Macon Music Revue arrived with a setlist that kept the Monday-night audience on their feet. Davis’s soul- and sweat-drenched version of James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” might have been the high point, but it’s hard to choose among an evening of many.

Asked about the relationship between Macon’s musical roots and the music of Arkansas and the Delta, Davis said that it was no surprise to him that both regions are anchored by waterways. “When you live by a river, you get all of these different sounds traveling down said river. Especially during the times of early blues, you had all of these African Americans that were traveling up and down these waters and leaving little pieces of music.” This sharing of sounds was, in a way, also a sharing of place, of the many similar and disparate parts that compose the South. The artists who performed at Macon Road Show honored them all.

Editor’s Note: Visit Macon, a presenter of the concert, is an advertising sponsor of the Oxford American. Advertisers play no role in guiding editorial content, unless explicitly stated in an Advertorial section.