The New Fests on the Block

Forward Momentum’s Kevin McEniry wants RiverBeat and SmokeSlam to be your new May destinations.

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This year, for the first time since 1977, there will be no Beale Street Music Festival. Instead, on the weekend of May 3-5, Tom Lee Park will host the RiverBeat Music Festival. The three headlining acts for the three-night event will be ’90s hip-hop legends Fugees, electronic duo Odesza, and hot country-rap artist Jelly Roll.

Kevin McEniry is one of the key investors and driving forces behind Forward Momentum, the new company producing the festival. “We’ve got a team of eight full-time employees that work under the Forward Momentum umbrella, which runs Mempho Music Fest, Mempho Presents, as well as RiverBeat and SmokeSlam,” he says.

McEniry is something of an unlikely figure in the music festival industry. He’s a Memphis native who was, until October 2022, the CEO of nexAir, an 82-year-old company specializing in welding supplies, bottled oxygen, and other products for the medical industry. When the company merged with Linde Gas & Equipment, McEniry “retired” to try something new.

“When we exited the business, the timing was right for our employees and our family,” he says. “I intended to find something to do. I felt the market had been somewhat abdicated from a music promotion standpoint. Being all-in on the city, and trying to do everything I can to help, I know the number-one driver of tourism in Memphis is music. So what we hoped to do was just to bring more music to the city, frankly.”

Mempho Music Festival, first held in October 2017 at Memphis Botanic Garden, was one such attempt to reinvigorate live music in the Bluff City. McEniry says, “We were very intentional that we were going to put [Mempho] on five months away from Beale Street Music Fest. There’s room for both. It was going to be an additive to the city. We didn’t want [Memphis in May] to feel like we were competing with them, and we didn’t want them to feel like they were competing with us. We hoped to work with them initially, but we never got the opportunity to do that.”

While Mempho was flourishing post-pandemic, the Beale Street Music Festival ran into misfortunes and complications. First, Memphis in May, the 1977-founded nonprofit that oversaw BSMF, was involved in a protracted dispute with the Memphis River Parks Partnership over the redevelopment of Tom Lee Park, where both the BSMF and the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Contest were held every year. And the Covid cancellations of 2020 dealt a serious blow to all purveyors of live events.

“We want to help the local talent, and fortunately for the local talent, they’re good! We want to help local artists do well, so we want to give them a platform. It’s going to be a first-class event. We’re just trying to do whatever we can to ultimately help the city.” — Kevin McEniry

Then, in 2022, while the renovation of the park was in full swing, BSMF moved to Tiger Lane at the fairgrounds; but that event, designed as a comeback, was hobbled when headliners Foo Fighter cancelled after the unexpected death of their drummer, Taylor Hawkins.

In 2023, BSMF returned to a newly renovated Tom Lee Park, but had the misfortune of occurring the same weekend as Taylor Swift’s now-legendary, rain-soaked stadium show in Nashville. Later that year, the dispute with MRPP came to a head over claims of damage exceeding $1.4 million to the new park. As a result, Memphis in May announced they would permanently move from Tom Lee Park and canceled the Beale Street Music Festival, at least for 2024.

(For more on the MRPP-BSMF unraveling, see our October 2023 cover story, which includes an interview with Jim Holt, then-president of Memphis in May.)

“I can’t comment on what happened with Beale Street Music Festival,” says McEniry. “I can comfortably say that, our goal and our dream was never to stage a festival in an area where they did. We hoped they would be an ongoing concern for the near- and long-term future. Once that ongoing concern ended for at least a year, we were more than willing to step in and fill that gap.”

McEniry says it’s exciting to be able to tailor a musical experience that will complement the newly reinvented Tom Lee Park. “We want to partner with the park, but we want it to be a true partnership,” he says.

The renovation “is good for the city,” he says, “because you’re going to be able to activate the park year-round, where before, it was only activated some times during the year.”

He explains his group plans to make adjustments. “We won’t have the three large stages that BSMF had. We’ll have two large stages, and we will reduce the capacity fairly significantly. I think our capacity goals will be under 22,500 a day. In the past, Beale Street would draw up to 50,000, and it would be a great experience. The challenge is, the new park really won’t allow that, so we want to be good partners with the park, and we want to build a sustainable event over time. For those reasons, we’re going to be smaller, but we hope in a good way.”

The crew behind Mempho Music Festival, which enjoys an excellent reputation in the live music industry, has become the core team behind RiverBeat. “It’s just so rewarding for someone to come up to me and say, ‘I appreciate you putting it on and allowing me to work the festival,’” he says. “We want to carry that same brand over to RiverBeat. We want to have an elevated experience on every level.”

Fan experience is job one, McEniry says. “We survey our fans very intentionally after the festival, wanting them to identify any warts there were. If there was anything that went wrong, we want to know about it, and we want to figure out a way to address and fix it.”

In addition to the headliners, the inaugural RiverBeat will feature Atlanta rappers Big Boi and Killer Mike, dance-y indie duo Matt and Kim, Austin soulsters Black Pumas, L.A. rockers Mt. Joy, and Flint, Michigan, outlaw country act Whitey Morgan and the 78’s.

Memphis musicians will also enjoy an extensive presence, including soul legend Don Bryant and the Bo-Keys, Orange Mound rap titans 8-Ball and MJG, soul stirrers Southern Avenue, R&B songstress Talibah Safiya, the zydeco-infused eclectica of Marcella Simien, live phenoms The Lucky Seven Brass Band, and North Mississippi gospel family The Wilkins Sisters.

“We want to help the local talent, and fortunately for the local talent, they’re good!” says McEniry. “We want to help local artists do well, so we want to give them a platform. It’s going to be a first-class event. We’re just trying to do whatever we can to ultimately help the city.

“There’s a lot of good things going on in Memphis right now, and hopefully we can continue to grow these events. We can bring in regional and national talent, as well as regional and national attendees. We’re starting to have some real success at Mempho in building a dedicated following that the city can count on each October. There’s going to be a group of folks coming into town, staying in hotels, eating in restaurants, and attending the Mempho Music Festival. And there’s an opportunity with RiverBeat to do the same thing. We hope over time that we build a loyal following, and they come back year after year.”

For McEniry, promoting music and the arts is a passion that goes beyond entertainment. “Unfortunately we’ve got a large percentage of our population that’s living under the poverty line,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of youth that don’t have some of the opportunities that are provided in other places. I think everybody understands if you can get kids at any level engaged in the arts, things happen. They tend to graduate from high school. They tend to not get pregnant early in life. We’re hoping that we can engage folks in the arts and all the other benefits that come with it. One of the things we’re going to do, regardless of how well tickets sell, is set aside a thousand tickets to give to the public high school system here in town, so that some of those that may not be able to afford to come to RiverBeat, but would like to, will have the opportunity.”

Forward Momentum’s ambitions don’t stop with music. While Memphis in May will be holding the World Championship Barbecue Contest in Liberty Park, a new barbecue cooking competition, SmokeSlam, will take place in Tom Lee Park.

Almost 60 teams will compete for $250,000 in prizes, which McEniry says is the largest pot in the history of barbecue competitions. There will be carnival attractions like a Ferris wheel and musical acts, headlined by St. Paul and the Broken Bones. McEniry says SmokeSlam will be a major addition to the roster of Bluff City celebrations.

“We need to host a world-class event that showcases barbecue, which is part of our heritage, and provides a platform for these amazing competitors,” he says. “We’ve also made it interactive, inclusive, and fun for visitors. All events we produce through Mempho Presents believe in great fan experience, and we have the knowledge and expertise to deliver just that. Coupled with our steering committee of barbecue experts, we believe we have the perfect formula for a very successful event.”