See, hear and taste the Delta as three local businesses join forces to provide an evening of art, music and food from 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday.
The event kicks off with an artists’ reception from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Gallery Point Leflore.
Among those at the reception will be David Michael Moore, who will be showing and selling his handmade instruments.
Moore lives in Rosedale and plays various instruments, including keyboards, drums, accordion, chainsaw and dog bones.
“I do kind of experimental music,” Moore said. “I created a perverted zither and used that as a jumping off point and added traditional instruments where I saw necessary.”
Moore, who began making his own instruments in the mid-1990s, discovered early on that a lot of musical instrument makers were not necessarily musicians.
“I also make furniture,” Moore said. “I started by making a table that under it would be some kind of musical instrument, and when you were done, you could close it up and make a sandwich on it.”
He took that basic idea and made it smaller and longer to create other kinds of zithers.
“The zither has a simplistic design that all cultures have copied and used,” Moore said. “A piano is just a complex zither.”
Moore enjoys zithers because they can be attacked in different ways — from the way it is tuned to the use of a hammer or slide to play it — to create different typed of sounds.
“I have given people hope who have failed at the flute or guitar,” Moore said. “I have sold to 5-year-olds through adults.”
At 5:30, Turnrow Book Co. will have two authors who will sign and read excerpts from their books.
Rick Bragg, best-selling author of “All Over but the Shootin,’” will read from his newest work, “The Most They Ever Had.”
Southern storyteller Sonny Brewer also will read from his new novel, “The Widow and the Tree.”
The sounds of the region don’t end there.
From 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., local musicians Duff Dorrough, Bill Abel and David Moore will perform at The Blue Parrot.
Dorrough, raised in Ruleville, was influenced by blues, country, gospel, pop and rock music.
After performing with The Tangents, he formed The Revelators in 2001. He also has played with the late Jim Dickinson in the Thacker Mountain House Band.
Dorrough’s artist talents are not limited to music alone.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1996 with a major in painting and a minor in drawing.
Dorrough was featured in a Mississippi Arts Commission One Man Show in 2008. His work is collected across the world, including by the Cloudwatching Society of England who follow his oil paintings and pastels of Mississippi Delta Clouds.
Bill Abel, raised in Belzoni, has learned and performed with legendary blues musicians, including Kenny Kimbrough, Terry “Harmonica” Bean, T-Model Ford, Sam Carr and Cadillac John.
Despite being named Blues Musician of the Year by the Mississippi Delta Blues Society in 2006, he enjoys spending his time in Duncan, where he currently lives and enjoys painting the landscape.
“Painting with light and color, I hope to lead people to a high visual perception of color that the creator has given us to enjoy everyday,” Abel said.
Moore also will perform some of both his experimental and traditional music.
The music with be accompanied by food prepared by Regina LaVere, chef at the Blue Parrot.
