It’s been a while but Grayson Capps is back with us in the Book Cellar!! It’s like a special guest star appearance!!

Hailed by NPR’s Mountain Stage for his “unbridled energy and authenticity,” Capps first emerged as a solo artist in 2005 following stints in the New Orleans thrash folk band the House Levelers, which he joined while still a student studying theater at Tulane, and his subsequent blues-rock group, Stavin’ Chain. His proper debut release under his own name, ‘If You Knew My Mind,’ earned rave reviews, with the New Orleans Times Picayune writing that “his character-based narratives are guaranteed to make you ache and exult” and Exclaim! calling it “a Southern gothic tour de force.”

After Hurricane Katrina forced Capps to relocate to Franklin, TN, he went on to release a string of similarly exalted albums that earned him devoted followings in both the US and Europe, including 2006’s ‘Wail & Ride,’ which JamBase said “hums with quiet wisdom and unforced momentum;” 2007’s ‘Songbones,’ described by All Music as “poetry filled with the bloody glory and taut acceptance of real life on the bottom;” and 2008’s ‘Rott & Roll,” an album that prompted American Songwriter to declare, “Take the poetry of Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt, combine with Steve Earle’s edgy attitude and stir with a little cup of the bayou-blues (think Howlin’ Wolf) and you start to get a taste of Capps’s scrumptious gothic gumbo.” He followed it up in 2011 by assembling a crew of Gulf Coast all stars to back him on ‘The Lost Cause Minstrels,’ a record which found him more than living up to the “Tennessee Williams-meets-Charles Bukowski” tag he’d earned from Blurt, and upon returning to Alabama, he teamed up with Will Kimbrough, Sugarcane Jane, and Corky Hughes to host a weekly songwriters’ night that proved to be so much fun it resulted in a pair of collective albums released under the name Willie Sugarcapps.