Grammy award nominee, Easy Eye Sound recording artist, R.L. Boyce has been an invisible hand behind some of the most culturally important, vital music America has to offer the world. R.L. is the reigning master of Mississippi hill country blues, a raw and powerful trancelike hypnotic blues music style that has ancient roots and has influenced myriad blues, rock, punk, grunge, and hip-hop artists. Dom Turner is best known as guitarist/ vocalist, founding member and key songwriter of the iconic and multi award winning Australian blues group, Backsliders. 

Dom is a regular visitor to R.L. Boyce’s hometown and the pair have performed at a number of festivals and venues in Mississippi including the Otha Turner Family Picnic and the R.L. Boyce Picnic and Blues Celebration, and in Australia in 2019 where they were a hit at the 2019 Girrakool Blues Festival and the 2022 Blues on Broadbeach Festival. 

Born and raised in Como, Mississippi, R.L. Boyce started performing as a drummer in Otha Turner’s fife and drum band (whose music is featured in the movie “Gangs of New York”) and then with Napolian Strickland and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Inspired by local blues guitar legends including Fred McDowell and R.L. Burnside, R.L. taught himself to play guitar and became a front man, playing a style of blues unique to the north Mississippi hill country of Tate, Panola, and Marshall counties. R.L. takes whatever the “good Lord” puts in his mind, channels it down through his fingers, and gives it to the world. Capturing the juke-joint, moonshine fuelled, picnic party life of Como, Mississippi, Boyce takes the listener through Saturday night and over that fine line that separates it from Sunday morning. This is god-fearing music on Mississippi terms. His songs are often delivered in an improvisational fashion, with references to his collaborators, his environs and whatever else happens to be on his mind at that particular moment. As R.L. himself says, “Most of it, when something hits my mind, I just start. I don’t do no rehearsing with nobody. I don’t do nothing like that. Whatever hits me, I jump in on it.” 

Australian Record Industry Award (ARIA) nominee, Dom Turner has varied musical influences—a hybrid blend of Hill country blues, delta blues, Piedmont blues, rock, dub and traditional sounds of Asia. Dom has well as over 30 years of recording and performing blues in Australia and internationally with the Backsliders, as well as a variety of solo and collaborative musical projects including touring as a solo artist in the USA, playing and teaching blues guitar at Augusta Blues Week in West Virginia, and touring Mexico with US blues greats, Del Rey and Steve James. Dom also performs with US blues harmonica legend, Phil Wiggins, and Toledo Ohio based lap steel guitarist Nikki D Brown in The Turner Brown Band. Dom has recorded and released cross-cultural music recordings with Vietnamese stringed instrument master, Kim Sinh, as well as with innovative Korean komongo musician, Jin Hi Kim and Chinese Guqin musician, Tony Wheeler. In 2008 Dom was invited onstage to play with slide guitar legend Derek Trucks at the Adelaide international Guitar Festival. His trademark ‘slide’ guitar sound can be heard on numerous session recordings and his songs have featured on the ABC TV programme Seachange, as well as the soundtrack to Tim Winton’s best-selling novel, ‘Dirt Music and the 2013 Channel 9 TV series ‘Underbelly – Squizzy Taylor’. In 2008 Dom was invited onstage to play with slide guitar legend Derek Trucks at the Adelaide international Guitar Festival.