[saxophone playing] - The band started in October of '87.

We played our first gig here at the Shell in the spring of 1988.

So we've been playing here now for 38 years.

Thity-eight of their ninety years we've been playing.

It always feels great.

It always, you know, the vibe is good.

The sound is good.

I mean, this place was built in 1936.

You know, it's been everything you can imagine here from opera to Allman Brothers and Elvis, you know?

I mean, this place, it's legendary.

- Hello, Midtown Memphis.

[people cheer] I am the last Lynch between you and FreeWorld.

Thanks for coming out tonight.

This is the next to last night of the Orion Free Concert Series for the summer.

- It's a special place to a lot of people, and everybody has got a Shell story.

- We've got our buckets going around and we have a free concert series, but none of this is free.

Everybody gets paid.

It's a wonderful thing that we all get to do it in Memphis.

[people cheer] Please help me give a big welcome to our storied stage to the one, the only FreeWorld.

[people cheer] - Thank you.

We got a special night of music for y'all.

- We love you, [inaudible].

- Oh, yeah, thank all y'all for being here.

Thank all our sponsors being here.

Oh yeah.

[soft guitar music] We played here for countless Earth Days and Jerry Garcia Days and benefit, after benefit, after benefit.

There's something about the Shell, something about it.

It just feels right.

It feels good.

We love it.

It loves us, and it's just a match made in heaven.

♪ The closer that we get to the edge ♪ ♪ You know the better the view ♪ ♪ Yeah, you know we got a better view ♪ [upbeat funk music] [FreeWorld sings inaudibly] - That, of course, was Memphis favorites FreeWorld, wrapping up the first part of the Orion Free Concert Series at the Overton Park Shell, helping to celebrate 90 years of the Overton Park Shell here in the Mid-South.

Hi, I'm Darel Snodgrass from the WK&O radio stations.

I've got some great folks here with me from the Shell, Executive Director Natalie Wilson, Board Member Al Kapone, Content and Archives Manager Cole Early, and Board Member Belinda Anderson.

Thanks so much for coming in.

So one thing that happened actually right before this concert that we just saw with FreeWorld is you broke ground on a new and very exciting addition to the Overton Park Shell.

Tell us what's happening there.

- Great, in 2022, we created a really aggressive strategic plan, and one of those goals was total preservation of the Shell, but we realized that we can't preserve it without upgrading it for the future.

So with this upgrade, with our focus on preservation, we have created the visionary Terry Lynch Artists Lounge that will sit right behind the Overton Park Shell, immersive in nature, Art Deco in style, and it will be just like the beautiful colors of lighting that we have on the historic stage.

The artist lounge will be a world-class artist experience for touring artists and local artists as well.

- Woo-hoo.

[group laughs] - This is very exciting.

Now, what a lot of people don't know is that what we mostly see, of course, is the Shell itself and the wonderful lawn there that people sit on, but your actual backstage area at the Shell is very, very small.

It is not a lot of room for these touring artists to have there, and this is going to make a huge difference.

- Oh, it will also open the door for Memphis to bring more musicians to Memphis that we will not be looked over, and this is an aggressive approach, world-class experience that will tell artists that they matter and that Memphis provides that experience that nowhere in the country will.

It is the spaces not only the technology of human connection, but it is a state-of-the-art listening lounge.

It will be showers and restrooms and everything you can imagine that we used in this space.

It's also a flexible space for weddings, corporate gatherings, anything we want to do.

It is a space that will be the future for the Overton Park Shell's expansion and vision.

- Yeah, it's very, very impressive.

I saw the the drawings when I was there the other day.

It's going to be just an incredible addition to this space.

Now, as we mentioned, this is the 90th year for the Shell, and you are the executive director now.

What does that mean, 90 years in that history and going forward?

- You know, I feel very much humbled to be a part of this stage in its history, because the Shell in the history has heady times, has times where it has almost not made it and survived.

We are at a place at 90 years that we're, not only surviving, we're thriving.

It is an honor to be a part of that, an honor to celebrate it, but not only celebrate the history of 90 years, but the future and the vision for where we want to be.

- Cole Early, I was down there a couple of weeks ago with our producer here, and you were kind enough to give us a tour of the backstage area there, which is sort of the history of the Shell essentially put up on the walls of the backstage down there.

There's so much history there.

I'm sure a lot of us know, you know, of course, 1954 Elvis, the first rock and roll show, they say and a lot of the other events.

What are some things that people may not know about the history of the Shell?

- Well, hopefully they will also come to the Backstage History Museum tour, - It's fascinating, yeah.

- But you know, that's sort of a trick question.

Darel, you know, one thing that I really like is the person who arguably discovered Elvis Presley, Marianne Kisker, and there's a strong history of strong women at the Shell, by the way, which is a cool theme in the museum as well, but she performed on that site before it was even built in the early parts of the Depression, and when they were entertaining people in hard times, they had free dirt floor theater productions, and she was on the first cast of those, and then as a theater major at Southwestern now called Rhodes, she was on the first stage productions when they actually built the stage 90 years ago.

- That's one of the things I find fascinating about the history of the Shell, and I don't know if everyone realizes this, is that it was built in 1936.

It was part of the Works Progress Administration that was a work program for people who were out of work in the Depression.

- Yes, and they also built the airport and the hospital, and it was the site of Elvis Presley's first live show, and there are a lot of, as you see in the tour, a lot of different Elvis touchpoints.

For instance, the WPA employed Elvis's dad for a while as well.

So all different kinds of out-of-work people, and they even employed artists, which is super cool, Burton Calicott, who started the art college next door.

His last remaining artwork from that era is in the Pink Palace, his big murals, but he had a rainbow painted on the back of the stage in the late '80s.

So top Memphis artists, it's not only music.

It's art forms of all sorts.

- Now, when you go on the backstage tour and you see all this stuff that you've got up on the walls there, posters and records and photographs and things, and I know that all of that stuff was scattered around.

What's been that process of gathering all of that and curating that exhibit?

- Well, as you know, there have been many ups and downs of the Shell historic preservation-wise and different entities running the thing.

So the archives have been relatively spotty over the years.

Thankfully from the Save Our Shell era, David Leonard saved, really, a whole bunch of stuff, but they also had a yard sale at one point and got rid of a lot of stuff back in the early 2000s, unfortunately.

So we're slowly rebuilding it.

We have some great stuff in the museum.

People are constantly donating.

So if anyone out there in TV land wants to donate artifacts Shell-related, we would love to have them, and if you want to hang onto your originals, and it's ephemeral, we would love to at least scan it for the archives, and it would be held in perpetuity for the next 90 years of Memphians and people from around the world to enjoy.

- I was amazed at some of the early material that you have from the very early days of the Shell, but I know that there are gaps in this knowledge.

Is there anything in particular that you would like to have from any period that you would like to fill out?

- Wow, I don't know.

Elvis Presley's first big show or Johnny Cash's first big show.

It'd be cool to see video of that, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

[laughs] - But there's so many great, different eras, and we're so lucky to have the stuff that we do have.

Recently, we received this great black and white footage of Keith Sykes as a teenager hanging around on the stage and playing around.

I don't think he was a pro yet, but so anyway, that was super fun to get.

- Oh, that's great stuff.

Al Kapone, now you are, of course, very well-known musician here in the Mid-South, have been for many years now.

What's sort of the transition there from performing at the Shell and being a musician into being part of this, into being a board member?

How did this come about?

- Well, of course, Natalie reached out to me about it in to be a board member, but before becoming a board member, just being an artist and performing at the Overton Park Shell, I'm a history buff first and foremost.

So when I was able to really dive in and know the history behind the Shell, all the artists that performed, it just made me more excited to be a part of that history, and not only as performing on my own, but also being guest artist performance for people like the North Mississippi All Stars and just showing that diversity for the Overton Park Shell.

So being a musician and performing there, that was the first love of, you know, as a artist in the first place.

So when she reached out to me about being a board member, I was open to it, and once I became a board member, I actually saw how much that group of people that come together to talk about what's going on, about to happen, with the Overton Park Shell, how much they really care about, not only the artists, the musicians, but the people that's coming to the event, and I really feel a labor of love whenever I'm a part of that board.

So being on the other side, it's a different side and a good feeling to be a part of that as well.

- Yeah, now you were talking a little bit before we went on with Natalie about work that you are doing now, things that you are working on and possibly some future performances at the Shell, and I don't know how much you want to get into that, - We can get into it.

- But let's talk about it.

- Let's go.

- Let' talk about it.

What you got planned?

What you got coming up?

- Well, what I've been doing, I said for the last five years, first and foremost, I'm from the Memphis rap underground scene that started in the early '90s from groups like 8Ball & MJG, Three 6 Mafia, and the list goes on and on.

I can name them for days, but now I say in the last five years, I've been focused on blending blues and rap together, and it's just been a fun experience just connecting the dots, because it hit me one day, like nobody has been from Memphis, the home of the blues, and when it comes to hip-hop and our own brand of hip-hop, nobody just really locked into that fusion.

So I kind of got into it, and the more I got into it, I feel like I'm doing a preservation of my own blending those two and actually doing some education initiatives where I kind of go to different places and really, not remind, but make sure the younger audience or this generation audience know about the blues and the blues artists that came before us, because to me, the blues is what, is the foundation of pretty much all American music, in my opinion.

So being a part of that is, I'm carrying that flag.

They said W.C.

Handy is the father of the blues.

So I'ma take the father of hip-hop blues title.

[group chuckle] - Well, we're going to look much forward to things that you've got coming up there.

I know you're still planning out those appearances, and we're going to let people know about that as we get closer to them, and actually, Cole, this actually brings up a good point that Al Kapone made, is one of the eras of performances at the Shell are, what they call the country blues shows, and that was a big deal at that time.

- Yes, Jim Dickinson, at 19 years old, realized he could rent the Shell from the city for $50, and so he started having all kinds of cool things that brought people together now that things were desegregating at that period, and so one of the things he was involved was the first and only blues festival in the world to be dedicated to the older style of blues, we call the country blues, the original folks who were recording on Beale Street in the '20s, like Freddy Lewis, people like that.

So they celebrated that music early on when, really, the big blues festivals at the time were, what I call the city blues or loud electric blues, which were great in their own right.

but this was a really unique festival.

Unfortunately, in that time of the '60s, things were changing really rapidly, socially and politically, and so it got away from its original intent.

It started to be more funk, more rock and roll, and that was the segue into, what we call the classic rock period around there where huge bands, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Allman Brothers, people like that tended to play, but as Al Kapone said, it all starts with the blues and all American art forms, and so W.C.

Handy played right across the street from the Shell when that first big blue song ever came out, "The Memphis Blues".

So it's all in the neighborhood still, and today, and we see it changing, and it's an honor to have people like Al Kapone and other artists sort of blend all those different genres.

FreeWorld did the same thing, right?

- Right, right.

- So yeah.

So it's super cool to have them help us live the history as well in an art form that we all come there for in a beautiful setting.

- Belinda Anderson, I want to talk to you a little bit, because you've been involved with this organization for quite some time, beginning when it was the Leavitt Shell a few years ago and now with its original name, the Overton Park Shell, and I know that that this is a very important part of your life, and one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, and this is something we see, of course, in the nonprofit area everywhere, is the importance of volunteers, because you guys, board members and staff, you do all you can, but it's a big job.

You've got to have help from the community.

- Absolutely, and the board is a volunteer organization.

So they're part of what we see every day.

First of all, the volunteers, we love our volunteers.

The volunteers, they love the Shell, but more importantly, they love music, and what a powerful combination to have a group, a team, that is so willing to support anything and everything that the Overton Park Shell does.

They work in elements.

It's hot in the summer.

It's cool in the fall, and here lately, we've had tons of rain, and sometimes that shifts us, and we'd have to get a indoor venue quickly, and no matter what, our board, our volunteers, are always there to support everything that we do, and it's just a phenomenal thing.

I work with a lot of volunteer organizations or coordinate volunteer organizations, and the Shell has a phenomenal group.

We're thrilled to have them.

- I want to just talk to you a little bit too, because you've been involved in this organization for quite a while now.

What's the importance of this organization to the greater Memphis community?

Because it seems a lot of people have a lot of feelings about the Shell.

- I hope a lot of good feelings about the Shell.

We have a strong board.

We have a strong staff, and we are here to partner with the city for another 90 years.

We want to provide music.

Memphis is music, and we provide it, and we think we do it the best.

- Yeah, well, obviously, that's true, and there's a lot going on there now, and this is a sort of Natalie and Cole question, but over the course of the last 90 years, there have been many attempts to get rid of this place, to tear it down, to put parking lots, just to remove it, and it has fought back every time.

Can one of you address maybe some of those attempts and what the Shell had to do?

- Yeah, I think Belinda said it well.

Volunteers in a visionary board believed in the importance of advocacy.

That word, nonprofits, don't always know what that means and how to do it.

It's that ability to say we're important enough to go about it in the way that brings us all together, that fights for its history, that fights for its relevance, and I think that the heady times that we talked about before of almost losing the Shell during many years, it was fighters, it was believers, it was visionaries, who said, this is too important.

I love to tell a story of Thomas Boggs, the legendary Thomas Boggs, who of the Box Tops and started Huey's restaurants, chained himself to the Shell, because he saw that they were going to try to take I-40 through the park and take the Shell down, and he saw the vision.

This was Memphis' stage.

It was too important to his history but also the future.

That, to me, is a story of that visionary Memphians see the importance of a public space in a private lens with vision that can create, you know, save the Shell or any public space, because you can see a vision for it, and you see the importance of it, but I think it takes volunteerism.

It doesn't just take paid staff.

It takes a board of leadership who come together intentionally, and volunteerism, it's a powerful story.

- That's definitely a recurring theme in the Backstage History Museum is the passion for saving cool things in Midtown, and that's a great story.

- Yeah, it's interesting when you look at the history of the place, and it seems like there were times when there were conflicts between the people who loved the music, especially a lot of the young people, and the place where it is right there in the center of Overton Park, which is a very sort of settled and a traditional part of town, and then that conflict came about quite often.

- Yes, and we won, [group laughs] - Thank goodness.

- And not only that, unfortunately, the music scene in the country, there are a lot of historic venues that have not made it past COVID, pretty much, and so the beauty of the Shell now, and like Belinda mentioned, and like Natalie mentioned, is the board and Natalie's leadership, they're taking this thing to a whole different level, and I think the artist lounge is symbolic of what's going on on that front and how solid it is.

I don't think, you know, I can't imagine the Shell going away these days, you know, and that's a lot to say through those ups and downs that have been happening basically since the '60s, and there are these different icons, a lot of women, who are passionate about saving the Shell, and it's because of them that we're all even talking about it today here.

- Yeah, very, very true.

Natalie, we've been talking a lot about the past and about things that have happened in the Shell.

Talk about the future.

What's your vision for what is going to be coming up at the Shell?

- Well, I think, for me, and what, as Cole said about the pandemic, it changed us all, changed our world.

It changed our society.

It changed our perception of each other too, and so for us, as the Shell, it's like we want to see a vision that we will evolve.

Our mission is to build community.

We used the performing arts as a catalyst, but it's building community first.

So with that vision and that mission, we can do anything we want to do.

We want to be more accessible to community, all communities, all neighborhoods, all zip codes have access.

It's intentional, and I believe in that intentionality is equitable.

So one of the vision points that we created during the pandemic is Shell on Wheels, where we take our mission to every community.

It's a mobile replica of the Shell with the sound, lighting, and power inside of it.

We can go into any neighborhood, any street, any field.

We can do it.

We can bring our mission and bring love and joy and unity through the performing arts but also looking at the future past that, and where will that take us?

As we're more accessible, not only for local musicians and that 50% of our artists of our series is local musicians, but what could the future hold from the national and international scene?

Because we're thinking about what would drive more artistry to us, to the city.

How will that help the ecosystem of our city and our fragile entertainment industry?

It really is fragile in Memphis right now.

The Shell wants to be an empowerment of putting people to work like we did down the WPA when we started at the beginning.

We want to keep people working, keep people in Memphis, bring more cultural opportunities.

The Shell can be a hub for that.

How can we work together throughout our city, bring these venues or different groups and especially artists to a place that evolves in that way.

So for me, the word is so important of evolution.

We will always, we should always, evolve.

- One of the things that struck me when I was going through the tour with Cole was how, in the early days of the Shell, especially, you had people like Marguerite Piazza and Vincent DeFranc and the classical organizations in the city, and we, a lot of the times, I think of the Shell as being a popular music, a blues, a rock and roll place like that, but you've always been involved with the other parts of music in the city, the Opera Memphis, Tennessee Shakespeare, the Memphis Symphony.

They are all performing there now.

- Absolutely, well, we're big enough that we can do all of the performing arts.

I'm real careful.

I love music.

It's our first love, obviously, but we are a stage for all of the performing arts.

Why not recreate the past?

We bring Shakespeare.

We did it in the past, but how can we bring in the new edge of accessibility to community members to learn this access to a different art form that they never knew anything about, but they come to the Shell, or they have Shell on Wheels experience of bringing it to them, and it opens their world to a new experience, a new love, a new passion, maybe even a new talent, and I think that's a driver of improving our community, creating a more thriving community that we need, and the arts provide that accessibility.

It provides that holistically.

- Absolutely, Al Kapone, which actually brings up something else, do you talk to people in the music community who are maybe unaware of the opportunities that they have here with the Shell?

I mean, have you talked to folks and said, "You got to come play at the Shell".

- 100%, actually, I'm actually the music consultant with the Memphis and Shelby County Film and TV Commission, and that's actually part of my job title as a consultant outreach.

So that's 100% a part of one of the things I do, 'cause there's so many people in the city that are in their own silos or in their own neighborhoods, and they don't realize what's right here in our backyard.

So that's one of my missions to just scream out the good news about, "Hey, do you know about this?

"You know about that?

"Have you been to the Overton Park Shell to experience for yourself?"

And more people are hearing about it and finding out and actually coming, and they're enjoying it, and they're going back and telling people.

So yeah, that's definitely one of my missions is just to get the word out more and more.

I always look at myself as I'm a born and raised-in-Memphis Memphian, but I look at Memphis like a tourist.

Like tourists come in and, "Oh, wow, wow."

I'm living here like that all the time.

Whoa, whoa, and I'm always trying to go back and say, "Hey, did you know about this is here?"

And it's trying to energize and get everybody excited about our city, because we have so many jewels like the Overton Park Shell.

- The Overton Park Shell is 90 years old, and it is still going strong.

There are lots and lots of things happening.

I will refer you to overtonparkshell.org.

You can get all the information there as well as the schedule of the concerts coming up.

Keep your eye on places down there.

We've got so many great things coming up.

The Terry Lynch Artists Lounge is going to be opening before too long.

It's going to be an incredible place, and I want to thank my guests today who came in, Natalie Wilson, executive director, Content and Archives Manager Cole Early, and board members, Belinda Anderson and Al Kapone.

Thank you so much for coming in, and we appreciate it.

[soulful choir music] - Thank you too.

- Thank you.

- And we hope that you've enjoyed this look at 90 years of the Overton Park Shell.

[upbeat rock music] ♪ More love, more love ♪ ♪ Look around the world today ♪ ♪ Hard to see what there is to say ♪ ♪ Many people lost and cried ♪ ♪ Not sure if your home is dying ♪ ♪ But there's a way to show ♪ ♪ One truth we already know ♪ ♪ Say the words and make 'em feel it ♪ ♪ Sing aloud, let your heart reveal it ♪ ♪ More love ♪ ♪ More love ♪ ♪ More love ♪ ♪ That's what I'm talking about ♪ ♪ More love ♪ ♪ More love ♪ ♪ More love ♪ ♪ More love ♪ [acoustic guitar chords]