Years ago, Labelle Turner adjusted his bass guitar in his lap before his fingers played the opening notes of Ricky Skaggs’ “Honey, Won’t You Open That Door?” He worked hard, and there was no better way for him to unwind from his days as a crop-duster pilot than to pick up his guitar and play a few tunes.

Sometimes, Turner would invite others over to play with him, but on this day, his companion was Joe, his 7-year-old grandson. The first grader sat before his grandfather, bobbing his head to one of his favorite country songs and singing along to the music. This moment is one of Joe Austin’s favorite memories of his grandfather.

“That’s the one song that we got to play together,” Joe Austin recalled.

His grandfather had a unique fingerstyle method to playing the guitar, one that he taught himself. The playing style involved using a thumb pick or thumb to keep the bass going and then picking the melody with the index and middle fingers, producing a full, pleasant sound.

“It’s definitely harder,” Austin said of the technique. “You’re doing two individual things at one time, so the bassline is always different from the melody. You’ve got to keep that bassline going and then play something else.”

Austin’s grandfather died when he was child, leaving his two uncles to teach him how to play the guitar. He grew up in Pontotoc, Mississippi, where he sang in his southern baptist church with his mother and sisters.

Around the age of 16, Joe fell in love with the fiddle after witnessing Glen Harrell play at a bluegrass festival. After hearing the musician play, Austin knew he needed to similarly learn to play the instrument. Harrell introduced him to Marlon Grisham, a left-handed guitarist and fiddle player from Ripley, Mississippi, who taught Austin how to play the fiddle in three months.

“I wanted to learn so bad that all I did was lock myself in my room and play,” Austin told the Mississippi Free Press. “(The) fiddle is a very magical instrument, and I think the reason is because it’s so close to the human voice. You can kind of make it sound like you’re singing with it.”

Grisham taught violin at Northeast Mississippi Community College and managed to get Joe an audition with the school’s country music performance ensemble, Campus Country. The school offered scholarships for people who played in the group. After graduating from South Pontotoc High School in 2000, he accepted a full scholarship to play fiddle with the group.

“That group taught me everything I needed to know to become a musician professionally,” Austin said. “They taught you how to run the sound system. They taught you how to set up shows, and we played shows at different high schools and festivals and things.”

‘Soul and Heart’

While in college, Joe worked on a horse barn with his friend in Booneville, Mississippi. During his second year of college, he left school, took the money he saved and struck out for Nashville with his friend. Eventually, the duo got a job working for Oren Ingram, a polo farm owner in Franklin, Tennessee. Austin worked there by day, but at night, he would play gigs on the Nashville strip.

“A lot of those bands and the way they work up there is from three o’clock till three in the morning,” Austin said. “It was different slots and different bars all the way up and down Broadway that you could play at. I would start at three o’clock, and I’d play three-hour slots at one bar and then go play three-hour slots down the street with another band.”

The fiddle player would do gigs three to four nights a week until performing shifted into being his main source of income. Eventually, he quit the polo farm and began playing gigs full-time. Around this time, he also began songwriting in Nashville circles, having been a fan of songs with depth and power, he said.

“(Songwriting has) always been something that I desired to be able to do,” Austin told the Mississippi Free Press. “The songs that I listened to growing up, they had so much soul and heart in them, which is something that a lot of music in the industry these days lacks a lot of.”

Around 2006, Crossin Dixon, a group in which Austin was a part, signed a record deal with Broken Bow Records in Nashville, but the experience left much to be desired, he said. Austin got to see behind the curtain of the music industry, and once he realized that business took priority over the music, he became disappointed and tried to find ways to exit the industry.

“I worked my whole life to get to that point, (and) then I realized I didn’t want any part of that,” the Pontotoc native said.

Some of his friends who had been working in Texas were commenting on how the songwriting scene and the Texas Red Dirt Underground scene was really booming. People were writing real songs and making real music, they said. Wanting to live in that sort of environment, Austin moved to Dallas in 2012. Once there, he moved in with his cousin and found a job.

“I got in with some songwriter friends and started going to songwriter nights and open-mic nights and meeting people; it wasn’t but a few short months where I had gigs again,” he said. “I was working a little part-time job to kind of keep everything balanced out. The Texas scene was really good to me.”

While there, the musician worked with Texas singer-songwriter Tom McElvain. The artists toured together for a while, and McElvain asked Austin to produce some songs for his 2018 album, “Redemption.” They recorded the songs at a residential studio complex music studio in Tornillo, Texas, right outside of El Paso.

Not much followed after the song, and Austin went back to working and playing gigs around Dallas. Because his father was having some health issues, Austin found himself traveling back and forth between Texas and Mississippi. Spending time with his dad led him to miss his family more, and he came to the conclusion that everything he was doing in Texas he could do from the state that reared him. In 2018, he moved to Oxford.

“Mississippi’s home. It’s where I wanted to be, and I made the decision to start coming back,” Austin said. “On one of those trips back (to Pontotoc), I met my wife. We got married, … and I moved back. I’ve been here ever since. I’ve not regretted leaving Texas because it’s been a great situation here.”

Forming the Tallahatchies

After getting married in 2020, Joe formed a band with Brian Sherwood, Jon Harrison and Wesley Graham called Joe Austin and the Tallahatchies that same year. The band derives their name from the Tallahatchie River, which they cross every time they leave Oxford as serves as a dividing the line between the Delta and the hill country. Austin is also a huge fan of Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” which is about Billy Joe jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

“(Our band’s sound) kind of hard to put a label on it because it’s very roots rock. It’s got some southern-rock feel; it’s got some delta-blues feel to it in some places,” Austin said. “It’s kind of just an amalgamation of everything that we’ve grown up on. It’s got some bluegrass feel in some places. I think it’s very Mississippi, you know?”

Austin met Brian Sherwood, a Cleveland, Mississippi, native, during a session at the Delta Music Institute. The two were working for another friend and hit it off. Austin and Memphis drummer Jon Harrison have been playing together in bands for more than 10 years. Austin met bassist Wesley Graham at the Sam Phillips Recording studio in Memphis, where Graham was engineering the session. The North Carolina native filled in for a bass guitar player who didn’t show up to record, Austin remembered.

“Those first few gigs when we played, everything kind of came together as fast as it did,” Austin said of his band. “There’s definitely some special energy there, and it all gelled really well, so we knew early on. Everybody felt what was happening.”

Austin and Sherwood are the primary songwriters in the group, writing enough songs during the pandemic for an album. They didn’t have a lot of money, so twosome took side jobs to make enough to buy a portable studio that they still use today. Graham had an old tape machine from the 1970s, so the recorded their debut album at his house.

“It was an interesting process. We started doing the main tracking in about a week. We had an old task cam 388 tape machine that gave it that old vintage sound, which is what we like,” Austin explained. “I think those old records are some of the best records. We did everything old-school.”

The group named its debut album, “3711”, released on Feb. 19, 2025, after the address of the house it was recorded in back in Memphis. The album has 13 songs, and only one other musician is featured on the album, Rick Staff, who played the organ on at least four tracks. Austin and Sherwood perform all the vocals in the album.

The band plans to release more singles throughout the year, including songs that didn’t make the album. The four also have plans to tour, with some gigs booked in states like Tennessee and South Carolina. As a band, the group’s main goal is make great music that finds the people it needs to and helps them, Austin said.

“I treat it as a calling,” he explained. “We’re not in this to make money. We’re not in this to get rich or to be famous. We don’t care about any of that. We just want our music to connect with people and help people. If our music helps somebody that’s having a hard time or having a bad day, then our job is complete.”

Joe Austin and the Tallahatchies debut album “3771” is available on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming platforms. The band is actively touring. To learn more about the group or to keep up with their performances, visit joeaustinandthetallahatchies.com, which includes dates for upcoming shows.