Double Decker Arts Festival is Oxford‘s annual celebration of food, music, and arts. The festival is going into is 22nd year and, as is tradition, is bringing you a diverse music lineup. This year’s festival has a lineup of featured musicians for the weekend, including James McMurtry, Luther Dickinson, Dr. John & the Nite Trippers and Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats.

Friday Music Schedule

Jimmy “Duck” Holmes – 6 pm
Jimmy “Duck” Holmes has lived a life steeped in blues. Today he is the last living practitioner of the celebrated style of Bentonia blues made famous by Skip James and Jack Owens. In addition, Holmes operates what is arguably the oldest juke joint left in Mississippi and is the organizer of one of the longest-running festivals in the state – the Bentonia Blues Festival.

Thacker Mountain Radio – 7 pm
This staple of Oxford celebrating all literature and music this state has to offer continues with a special Double Decker event.

Click here for Official Website

Muddy Magnolias – 8 pm
With Broken People, Muddy Magnolias take us on an 11-song journey with its origins in two widely divergent backgrounds that came together in a friendship and creative partnership with world-changing resonance.

The music of Muddy Magnolias, live and on record, comes from a place where the Mississippi meets the A-Train by way of Nashville. Whether yours is the back porch or the front stoop, Spanish moss or window box garden, dusty country lane or crowded subway car, rural honky-tonk or uptown club, this is music that beckons. Muddy Magnolias are collaboration without boundaries, musical healing in a landscape of the heart, and all of us who treasure creative energy, honest art and the possibilities of love and unity, are better for their arrival.

Saturday Music Schedule

The Mississippians Jazz Ensemble – 10:15 am
The Mississippians Jazz Ensemble is the premier student jazz group at the University of Mississippi and plays a wide range of swing music from Count Basie and Duke Ellington to contemporary jazz composers. With a lineage that goes back to the 1890s, The Mississippians is one of the oldest college jazz bands anywhere. The band has performed at the Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival and the Jazz Education Network’s national convention. Guest artists have included Branford Marsalis, Jeff Coffin, Roy Wooten, members of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the US Army Jazz Ambassadors and the US Air Force Airmen of Note.

Amelia Eisenhauer and the Peruvian Farm Girls – 11:30 am
Amelia made her national debut on the final season of American Idol where she wowed the judges with her voice they described as “soulful potency”. Just one year later she’s back with her own band and her first original album titled Fortune Cookie released Jan. 2017. The album is available in iTunes.

Robert Finley – 1 pm
Put me last on the bill,” Robert Finley says, “because the party’s going to go as high as it’s going to go when I’m playing.”

From someone else’s mouth that might be braggadocio, but when Finley says it, he’s just telling the truth. Onstage, he’s infectious. It’s the whole package—his sound, his songs, his energy, his look. Hailing from Louisiana, he mixes a Memphis-to-Texas electric southern grit with Nashville-clever songs. He’s gangly and graceful with an indomitable smile that radiates beneath his black ridge-top hat.

“I don’t believe in doing a lot of holding back,” Finley says, “I’m going to give you everything I’ve got.”

Seratones – 2:30 pm
Get Gone, the potent debut album by the Shreveport, Louisiana natives in Seratones, makes a strong case that this little-known corner of the state is fertile ground, musically speaking. A.J. Haynes (vocals), Connor Davis (guitar), Adam Davis (bass) and Jesse Gabriel (drums) serve up a combination of Southern musicality, garage rock ferocity, and general badassery.

Haynes’s powerful singing voice, first honed at Brownsville Baptist Church in Columbia, Louisiana at age 6, rings across every track. Davis’s bass and Gabriel’s playing propel every song with the grit, energy, and rawness of punk, the feeling of soul, and occasionally, a little jazz swing. The other Davis offers a clinic in guitar riffs, from swaggering blues to searing interstellar leads.

James McMurtry – 4 pm
James McMurtry spins stories with a poet’s pen and a painter’s precision . Proof: The acclaimed songwriter’s new Complicated Game. McMurtry’s first collection in six years spotlights a craftsman in absolutely peak form as he turns from political toward personal.

“The lyrical theme is mostly about relationships,” McMurtry says. “It’s also
a little about the big old world versus the poor little farmer or fisherman. I never make a conscious decision about what to write about.”

Luther Dickinson – 5:30 pm
Luther Dickinson is the lead guitarist and vocalist for the North Mississippi Allstars and for a time among the many lead guitarists for The Black Crowes. On Blues & Ballads (A Folksinger’s Songbook) Vol. I & II, Luther Dickinson finds his way forward by retracing his steps. This ambitious double album collects twenty-one tunes from throughout his life and career—songs he wrote with his rock & roll band the North Mississippi Allstars, songs he learned from friends and family, songs passed down to him by his heroes and mentors, songs that have lived in the American subconscious for decades now—and pares them down to their irreducible elements. Voice, guitar, drums. Here and there some blues fife or Beale Street piano.

Dr. John & The Nite Trippers – 7 pm
The legendary Dr. John is a six-time Grammy Award-winning musician and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Known throughout the world as the embodiment of New Orleans’ musical legacy, Dr. John is a true icon in American culture. His colorful musical career began in the 1950s when he wrote and played guitar on some of the greatest records to come out of the Crescent City, including recordings by Professor Longhair, Art Neville, Joe Tex, Frankie Ford and Allen Toussaint.

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – 8:45 pm
Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats practically explodes with deep, primal and ecstatic soulfulness. This stunning work isn’t just soul stirring, it’s also soul baring, and the combination is absolutely devastating to behold. You don’t just listen to this record—you experience it. So it’s entirely fitting that the self-titled album will bear the iconic logo of Stax Records, because at certain moments Rateliff seems to be channeling soul greats like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave. But as this gifted multi-instrumentalist honors the legacy of the legendary Memphis label, he’s also setting out into audacious new territory.