Like many local bands before them, the members of Grits & Greens are steeply rooted in Hattiesburg’s moniker of “The Birthplace of Rock and Roll,” with those influences going back to the 1930s when The Mississippi Jook Band recorded in the Hub City.
The band continues that tradition today, with its soulful, blues-marked rock on originals such as “Fleas,” “Wind and Sea,” and covers from Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” to Led Zeppelin’s “What is and What Should Never Be.” The four-piece band – made up of singer/guitarist Ryann McGhee, bassist is Kenny Paul Mann, guitarist Jesse McGhee and drummer Jackson Bounds – continues to tour around the country and locally, most recently at Bites & Brews in downtown Hattiesburg.
Grits & Greens got its start in 2017 when Ryann and Jesse – who are married – began writing songs as an acoustic duo. The McGhees moved out to Colorado for a bit, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
That led the duo to come back to Hattiesburg and begin writing songs that necessitated a bass player and drummer. In May of 2021, the McGhees started the Ryann & Jesse band.
“That was with a different bass player and a different drummer,” Ryann said. “Our bass player had taken an internship in Atlanta, so he knew before we even played our first gig together, that he was going to be moving later that year.
“So we were kind of looking, and Kenny had had just recently freed up from another project he was in, so it worked out. Then the same thing with our drummer – he’s got school and he had a lot of stuff going on, so it really wasn’t working out with our schedules. So Jackson had kind of freed up, and he had done a few fill-in shows for us, and we felt like he really fit us well, so in February of this year we got our last puzzle piece and got Jackson in.”
The Grits & Greens moniker came about when Ryann wanted to rebrand the band’s name to something that paid respect to its Southern roots.
“Living out in Colorado really made us appreciate Mississippi a lot, and most especially the music scene here (in Hattiesburg), so we wanted something that said we’re from the South but we’re not necessarily a country band,” Ryann said. “I was just kind of writing down words, and green is my favorite color, and I wrote down ‘shrimp and grits’ and I like the word ‘grit.’
“’Grit’ is sort of a double meaning for us, because we feel like we do have a lot of grit. So I was putting words together and I wrote down ‘Grits and Greens,’ and I really liked it because it was an alliteration, it rolled off the tongue really well, and it had all my favorite things.”
The band recently returned from its “Harvest Tour,” consisting of 20 days and 4,000 miles across nine states.
“It was awesome; we had a great time,” Bounds said of the tour. “We hit Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and we spent a lot of time in Colorado in the mountains on the front range.
“That was really cool. Those little towns and places, they’re beautiful.”
Speaking of Colorado, the band also wants to continue to bridge the gap between here and there, especially as all the members have ties in some ways or another to that state.
“You’d really be surprised; if you go to Colorado and you’re part of that music scene, they know all the musicians in Hattiesburg,” Mann said. “There’s a big connection – I don’t know what it is, but there’s just always been a connection between Mississippi and Colorado.”
When the band is not on tour or playing local shows, its members are busy writing new songs and recording in places such as New Orleans. While Grits & Greens is working on an album, the focus right now is more on single releases and the songs themselves.
“We’re just trying to put out a lot of product,” Mann said. “We’ve been doing this cover series (of songs), and the second one we just released. It’s one take, one video shot, one audio take, one live recording of a cover song, just to show what we can do as a band.
“I think a lot of bands go into the studio and take a couple of days to record and edit and all that. But we just wanted to throw something out there, and that’s been a really good experience, and we’ve got multiple projects going on as far as the music goes. The album is coming; we’ve got enough cohesively that we want to tell a story and put an album out.”
For those singles, the band comes up with themed artwork intended to allow fans to connect to the songs and make them memorable. Mann has designed those for the cover songs, and the band has worked with an Alabama-based artist for the original releases.
“We did the first (theme), and it was the dog for ‘Fleas,’ and the color was green,” Jesse said. “So then the next one, Kenny said we should do another single picture of a living object, and in also a shade of green.
“So the theme just kind of happened, and we want to continue with themes – the next album could be another thing, but it’s its own series.”
The band will also continue the large tours with the Harvest Tour in the fall, and the Bloom Tour in the spring.
“We’re already planning our Bloom Tour right now, out to Colorado again, probably Memorial Day weekend,” Ryann said.
