Duane Betts & Palmetto Motel

W/ JB Strauss

Tuesday 7.18.23

Charleston Pour House

Main Stage

$22 advance /$25 day of show

730 doors /830 show

Duane Betts & Palmetto Motel

By the time Duane Betts began working on Wild & Precious Life — his triumphant debut solo album — he’d already spent the better part of two decades creating his own version of guitar-slinging, story-driven American rock & roll.

“It felt like the right time to make something that was entirely my own vision,” he says. “This is a record that guitar players will love, but at its core, it’s really a song record. It’s an album about who I am, where I come from, and what I believe in.”

Duane had spent 10 years playing guitar alongside his father, legendary Allman Brother Dickey Betts. He’d release an EP, Sketches of American Music and co-found Allman Betts Band.

Even so, the need to create a full-length solo LP gnawed at him; one that nodded to his roots while simultaneously pushing ahead. Following his instincts, Duane assembled Johnny Stachela, Berry Duane Oakley, John Ginty and Tyler Greenwell, and took up an offer from friends Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks to record at their Swamp Raga Studio in Jacksonville. The album was cut to 2-inch analog tape during a series of live studio performances in 2022.

JB Strauss

From the true southern city of Macon, Georgia, and a family steeped in oral tradition, JB Strauss meshes music with storytelling in effortless fashion.

Influenced by the heavy, electric style of bands like The Allman Brothers, Credence Clearwater Revival, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, along with poetic and witty writers like John Prine, Gram Parsons, and Jim Croce, it is fitting that JB borrows from the notion that ‘everything that rises must converge.’

Also noteworthy are the years JB spent with family and friends on Georgia’s Golden Isles. His music is redolent of the intricacies and depth of life in the marshes and intracoastal waterways and leans on their life-giving elements to feed the soul when the rivers of home run murky. As JB followed in both of his grandfathers’ footsteps, achieving a law degree all his own, he learned the stories hidden beneath the surface of life in the South. The musical result? The ability to deftly balance the human qualities of contradiction with spiritual redemption. “These songs are part of the foundation of who I am as a person and now as an artist,” JB says.

In “Man Possessed”, the title song of his debut EP, out everywhere December 5th, JB speaks of his grandfather’s life as a Judge and “…how that life wore him down like river over stone…he became a man possessed with moving on.” Another tune, “Piss Ant Hill”, which will be released as the first single on 11/22, is a humorous, yet poignant tale of a man whose fatal mistakes land him in Georgia’s Reidsville Prison. With no one to claim him when he dies, the subject’s destiny becomes a date with a pine box on prison land reserved for the unclaimed.

As JB launches his artist career, one can expect honesty and intensity, truth and salvage. His presence on-stage is paramount to the experience and fans will feel it immediately when they step into one of his shows. “Man Possessed” represents just the first chapter of a long musical journey ahead. Indeed, it’s harvest time for JB Strauss.

* Show is 21+. Attendees under 21 must be accompanied by a parent & will be subject to a $5 surcharge. The surcharge must be paid in cash at the door on the day of the event.