Last week my lovely wife of four years and one day, Mel Larch, produced a tribute to Aretha Franklin on her radio show, Curtain Call (heard on The AIR). The late legend was a big fan of musical theater, and performed many memorable show tunes during her career. She even made plans to have her life story turned into a stage musical, and we hope those plans are realized. Mel played the Queen of Soul interpreting many classic showtunes, and tossed in a few of her biggest hits, too.

To accompany the PopCult post where I plugged Mel’s show, I tossed together a quick digital painting based on my favorite Aretha moment, a scene from The Blues Brothers. People were so happy with that small graphic that I decided to use it, in an easier-to-see form without the text, for this week’s Monday Morning Art. So that’s why we have this week’s digital painting, my tribute to The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. You can hear special replays of Mel’s tribute to Ms. Franklin on Curtain Call Tuesday morning at 9 AM, and Wednesday afternoon at 4 PM. You can also click on the image for an even bigger version.

Our Monday Marathon continues on The AIR, which you can listen to at The Website, or on the embedded player at the bottom of this post. This week it’s all live, local music, for 24 hours, starting Monday morning at 7 AM. We’ve grouped the performances together, so you can hear every one of the dozens of local artists in our live music library in extended sets (where we have more than one live tune, that is). Some of the recordings are national acts who were recorded locally. Groups that only have a few live recordings in our archives will be sprinkled throughout the schedule all day.

The schedule roughly includes C2JC at 8:10 AM, Christopher “Qiet” Harris at 9:30 AM, Groove Heavy at 10: 20 AM, Hybrid Sould Project at 11 AM, Go Van Gogh at Noon, John Lancaster at 1: 30 PM, Low Cut Connie at 2: 30 PM, Mark McGuire at 3:20 PM, Mojomatic at 4:40 PM, The Fat And Sassy Band at 6: 25 PM, The Scrap Iron Pickers at 7:30 PM, The Sprugie Hankins Band a 8 PM, Travis Stephens at 8:45 PM, Time Lancaster at 10: 50 PM, The Contrarians at 11 :40 PM, Sothern Culture on the Skids at 1 AM, Rye Baby at 2 AM, Unkown Hinson at 2:40 AM, We’ll wrap up this full day of local tunes with three hours of Rubber Soul, from the Beatles marathon concert last February. All times listed are approximate, so give or take five or ten minutes, and they are Eastern Daylight time.