SEBASTIAN — For 20 years, music promoter Franni Southern delivered a massive music festival named for her to the jazz and blues fans of Fort Lauderdale.
Frannipalooza, as it was known, ended when she moved to Sebastian with her new husband, Delta blues performer Ernie Southern, who had played at her events.
Today, the pair offers up regular doses of the blues to an often wildly appreciative local audience at a gentrified biker bar called Earl’s Hideaway.
Ernie Southern, who is also a regular at the downtown Vero nightspot called Bodega Blue, plays a pounding, stomping set of largely original compositions on Tuesday nights at Earl’s.
On Sunday at Earl’s, a not-to-be-missed afternoon jam takes place that is largely Franni Southern’s creation.
On an outdoor stage overlooking the Indian River, her Frannipalooza days come to life again, as she brings in an array of touring blues and Southern rock bands.
Beer flows, the crowd whoops, and the sand dance floor fills in front of the band.
At full tilt, the free concert manages to drown even the roar of the Harleys pulling in to the gleaming rows lining Earl’s old Florida façade.
For the past five years, ever since Earl’s general manager Emil Franke hired Ernie Southern to play, and Franni Southern to stage the Sunday concerts, word has spread among a music-loving set that is more likely to arrive in BMWs – the cars, not the bikes – than Harleys.
And even the lushly tattooed, pony-tailed, leather-clad set seems delighted to welcome newcomers to their hangout.
“Ernie was playing at a bar up the road and one of the girls that was bartending here came in there to see him,” says Franni Southern. “She told us, ‘I wish we could get some decent music at Earl’s. So we came down together and Emil hired Ernie.”
Franni, meanwhile, was recovering from neck surgery after a serious bus accident that left her in chronic pain.
“I’d been in the business for 30 years, but I couldn’t work after the accident. But I told Emil, ‘Let me see what I can do,’ and he said, ‘OK, you’re on your own.'”
Earl’s is essentially in the Southern’s back yard – they now live only five minutes away. But the concert series that launched Franni’s career, Frannipalooza, began literally in her Fort Lauderdale back yard, when she invited dozens of friends to a potluck dinner, and every musician she knew came to play.
The annual parties grew so large they ended up using a state park, drawing thousands and written up regularly in the local press. It was a long way from her birthplace of Hudson, N.Y, where her earliest memories are of dancing with her father to the greats of jazz and blues.
She began her adult life as a full-fledged flower child in Woodstock, Berkeley and rural Vermont, where she lived for years on a 14-acre farm with no running water.
One day, when she and her two young sons were living in Stockbridge, Mass., a confluence of wintry misfortune finally drove her south.
“It was the day John Lennon was shot,” she recalls. “My pipes froze, my car wouldn’t start, and I took my babies and drove to Florida.”
It was December 1980. In Fort Lauderdale, Southern eventually found a job tending bar at Musicians Exchange, a major blues scene in South Florida.
Over the next 13 years, Don Cohen, the founder of Musicians Exchange, became her mentor. Throughout the 1990s, he staged concerts in the parking lot with artists like Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor and B.B. King, that eventually became the Riverwalk Blues Festival, one of the largest blues festivals in the country, drawing crowds of 30,000.
Franni Southern was learning music promoting at his coattails.
“The contracts, the riders, the agents, it trained me in all different aspects of the business.”
Meanwhile, she had bought a house six blocks west of the performing arts center.
With all her musicians friends, she started hosting parties there on Memorial Day weekend, that her friends named Frannipalooza.
“It started that everybody paid $5 and brought a dish and we would give the money away to a local charity. The first year it was 50 people, then 150, then 300. After it hit 1,000, we had to pull permits.”
Eventually Frannipalooza was moved to a state park. Franni continued to host parties afterwards for volunteers.
It was at one such party that she noticed Ernie Southern.
“I happened to walk into the kitchen and he was sitting in the corner playing his guitar and I said, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry.’ We started dating, and he was the most intelligent, kind, compassionate man I’d ever met in my life.”
Ernie Southern was born into a family of scenic artists on Long Island – his grandfather painted the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz, he says. It turns out music was his art. He started singing doo-wop as a 16-year-old.
His group, Nick and the Knacks, opened for Jay and the Americans and Little Anthony and the Imperials.
It wasn’t until he was in the Navy, stationed on the U.S.S. Enterprise, that he became inspired by the music of Robert Johnson, and began to play Delta blues.
“I heard a slide guitar and it reminded me of singing. I practiced and practiced until I could do it.”
He moved to Berkeley, Calif., and enrolled at a small college.
“I had a great music teacher who inspired me, and I didn’t study anything but music.”
Eventually he settled in Fort Lauderdale, where he lived for 26 years.
To pay his bills, he worked as a wine consultant, traveling the country doing wine shows for a German distributor.
But the blues were never far from his mind. He was playing at the Pourhouse in Fort Lauderdale when Franni first went to see him play.
“I thought he was just incredible. His playing was so passionate. He had this big National steel guitar, with a deep tone and heavy strings and his vocals were so stirring,” recalls Franni Southern.
Six months after their 1999 wedding, a tour bus they were riding in returning from a concert crashed.
Franni suffered a concussion and a hairline fracture in her neck that still requires treatment today.
The trauma prompted them to leave Fort Lauderdale. She sold her house and headed north to St. Augustine.
On the way, they stopped at Ernie’s father’s house in Sebastian.
“We fell in love with the place and never left.”
Much of their work these days involves fund-raising for various charities. But music is never far from their minds.
“Everybody wants to be famous with money. I’m really doing it for the music,” says Ernie. “That’s why I’m poor. But you can’t beat the feeling at Earl’s.”
In each venue, it seems, she fell into the music scene, almost by default.
Big name stars were on her periphery as if by design, Jimi Hendrix hung out at the club where her friend was a doorman; her house in Pittsfield, Mass., bordered on the property of Arlo Guthrie.
In California, a friend was friends with the Righteous Brothers.
“I was always in the mix,” she says.
“I was born into it,” she says. “My father still has a collection of 33s and 78s in the thousands, from the ‘30,40s, and ‘50s. I remember him dancing around with me to Louis Armstrong as a little girl, and I’ve seen him do it with every child that has come into the family in the last 50 years.”
