This year’s SmokeSlam barbecue competition will bring some fine music to Memphis, including headliners Shane Smith & the Saint, The Revivalists, and Big & Rich, but it will be especially meaningful to some hometown favorites who’ve gone from success to success, yet never quite felt they’d nailed down their sound until their 2025 release.
The story behind Southern Avenue’s fourth album, Family, is one of the prodigal daughter — lead singer Tierinii Jackson — who had to leave her past behind before returning to it to find herself. And now, this band and this singer have crossed a threshold. But it’s taken a while. Jackson was still chasing after her ideal sound — the sound of this album — almost a decade into a career that was already charmed.
Eight years ago, Southern Avenue came bursting out of nowhere with talent and promise — seemingly fully formed. In fact, blues guitarist Ori Naftaly had previously made his way from Israel to Tennessee, only meeting Memphis native Jackson and her sister, drummer and singer Tikyra, aka TK, after souring on his first band. Their chemistry, melding Naftaly’s guitar chops with TK’s power-groove beat and Tierinii’s soul-steeped voice, was electric; soon they’d added keyboardist Jeremy Powell and a roster of bassists, and were the toast of Memphis.
Three albums and a Grammy nomination followed, but, as Nafatly confides now, “We were always looking for our sound. We got signed to Stax seven months after we first met, and we were still getting to know each other as people.” Having merely cobbled their debut together, Naftaly says, “the second record had a lot of record label involvement: ‘You should be the new Alabama Shakes.’ And then for the third we had Steve Berlin, and he had a particular vision for us.” But after that, a new band member joined and something clicked.
“In 2021,” Naftaly recalls, “Ava — Tierinii’s and TK’s younger sister, who’d only sung with us off and on — graduated from Belmont University in classical violin, and we asked her to join us full-time. When that happened, we started to change.” By then, Naftaly and Tierinii had also fallen for each other in a big way, married, and brought a daughter into the world. Seismic events all around.
Musically, it wasn’t Ava’s violin that was the game-changer (though you’ll hear some of that), but her singing: She exponentially amplified the power of Tierinii’s and TK’s blood harmony. Their effortless blend was a revelation: Though they’d all grown up attending the church founded by their grandfather, their age differences meant they’d never quite sung together. Not like this.
Meanwhile, the ever-evolving Mississippi blues rolled on, and Tierinii was taking notice. “I got inspired listening to Cedric Burnside’s album, I Be Trying,” she remembers. “It felt like home to me. That kicked me off into listening to all the Hill Country blues, and something magical happened. When we were growing up, we were only singing church music, but I was familiar with just about every song on that Hill Country blues playlist. I’d been hearing it my whole life! The melodies were the same as what we grew up singing in church. Only the lyrics were a little bit different.”
For the soul singer-songwriter, embracing both her guitar-playing father’s roots in Senatobia, Mississippi, and the church she grew up in “felt like I found my place in the blues.” But that required a bit of reckoning with her past.
“In my early adulthood, I ran from the church because I had bad experiences. So it was a real moment of healing when I started listening to this Hill Country blues. It reminded me of the love that I grew up with. I’d forgotten about the music side of the church. But then I reconnected with myself and embraced everything that I shunned for so many years. It was a homecoming, a rebirth back into my inner child.”
Her exuberance was infectious, as the band dug in to write their story in a flurry of inspiration. “When I had this epiphany,” says Tierinii, “it was like, ‘Duh, of course, this is what we’re supposed to be doing!’ It was no longer about making the label happy or appealing to a younger generation. It was strictly about honoring our roots and our ancestors, and that’s what the blues is. I think the contemporary aspect will come with the stories that we tell and the freshness of our voices.”
Meanwhile, Naftaly worked with North Mississippi Allstar Luther Dickinson to perfect his bottleneck guitar technique, and the band dove deeper into the rawest roots of the blues, making the most personal music of their lives. Singing what they know has given their sound full flower, even approaching the majesty and power of the Staple Singers, as Naftaly’s grinding riffs gel with TK’s beat and the pulse of either Dickinson or the dearly departed Blake Rhea on bass, laying down a gritty, gravel road for the sisters’ harmonies to roll over like a Cadillac.
The final piece of this puzzle was cutting it. Yet Naftaly wasn’t overly cowed by recording at Royal Studios. Those magical walls, acoustically perfected by the late producer Willie Mitchell, bore witness to countless Hi Records classics. Yet what mattered most to the band was the man working within those walls: Willie’s son Boo. Having produced Cedric Burnside’s Grammy-winning album, Boo knew. “It’s really not about Royal,” says Naftaly. “It’s just about working with Boo and being able to finally have him in the room. The focus was on being able to write the most important songs we’ve ever written and then bring them to a person who would actually get it.”
Producer John Burk, who executive-produced their first two albums, also got it, allowing the band to breathe. And as they drink in the air of the Jackson sisters’ homeland more deeply than ever, their personal odyssey becomes a journey into the very building blocks of the blues themselves, to be pulled apart and reassembled just as Southern Avenue sees fit, as they’ve never been heard before.
See Southern Avenue play SmokeSlam on Friday, May 16th. For details, visit smokeslam.com.
