Brianna Thomas Brings Freedom Highway Back to SOUTH
Brianna Thomas sang Freedom Highway at SOUTH in Philadelphia, and a 1965 civil rights song about Selma sounded like it was written that morning.
The room was set the way it is every weekend at SOUTH, glasses catching the stage wash, table cards standing straight, servers finishing their last lap before the doors opened. I have managed this room on North Broad Street for more than a decade now, long enough that the ritual of a weekend night mostly disappears into the background of a shift. Then Conun Pappas eased into a vamp on the piano, Brianna Thomas stepped up to the microphone, and the ritual stopped disappearing. I am Harry Hayman, general manager of SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club, and I have watched a great many nights here start ordinary and turn, somewhere in the second set, into something the room keeps talking about for weeks. This was one of those nights, and the song that did it was written sixty one years before Brianna Thomas ever stood on that particular stage.
What Freedom Highway carries
Freedom Highway is not the obvious pull for a room built around supper club standards and Sunday jazz brunch, and that is exactly why it landed the way it did. Roebuck Pops Staples wrote the song in April 1965, within days of watching television coverage of state troopers attacking marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. He gathered his children, Mavis, Pervis, Cleotha and Yvonne, at New Nazareth Church in Chicago and recorded it live for what became the Freedom Highway album, the record that pushed the Staple Singers from a gospel group with radio hits into a family that sang directly for the movement. The lyrics do not stay abstract. They reach back to name the Tallahatchie River, where Emmett Till was killed a decade earlier, and they point forward to the fifty four mile route that marchers walked from Selma to Montgomery on what is now a National Historic Trail. Pops Staples had already met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by then, and King was reportedly a genuine admirer of the family’s music before the movement gave them a reason to sing for him directly. When Brianna Thomas sang the song at SOUTH, she was not reviving a museum piece. She was picking up a live wire that has been carrying current since 1965.
The room the Bynum brothers built on North Broad Street
SOUTH sits at 600 North Broad Street, on the stretch the city calls Avenue of the Arts North, in a building Robert and Benjamin Bynum opened in 2015 after decades in Philadelphia hospitality between them. Benjamin runs the kitchen. Robert runs the room. Their own description of the place, America’s original music meets southern heritage cuisine, is the plainest possible summary of what they built, and it undersells how deliberately the two halves are balanced against each other. The jazz club itself seats under seventy five people, ticketed, with dinner served at the table in the hour before a band starts and conversation asked to quiet down once it does. That is an unusual thing to ask of a restaurant crowd on a Friday night, and it works because the room decided, on purpose, that the music comes first and the plates come second.
I have worked with Robert and Benjamin for more than two decades, going back to Zanzibar Blue, the jazz club they ran on South Broad Street that closed in 2007 after seventeen years of exactly this kind of programming. When it closed, this city lost a room where you could not separate dinner from the set, where the two were simply one evening. SOUTH was built to be that room again, on a different stretch of the same street, and I have managed it since it opened.
What draws Harry Hayman back to this stage
People ask me why, after more than a decade managing this room, a night like this one still catches me off guard. Harry Hayman gets that question in a lot of different settings, at hospitality panels as often as at last call, and the answer has not changed much. You can stream the Staple Singers version of Freedom Highway on your phone right now, in the parking lot, on the walk home, whenever you want. You cannot stream what happens when a singer who has spent her career inside the American songbook decides to stand in a seventy five seat room in North Philadelphia and make a civil rights hymn from 1965 land like she wrote it an hour earlier. That happens once, in one room, for whoever paid attention to be there that night.
The part of the job nobody photographs is what makes it possible. A booking calendar built months out. A sound engineer who spent the afternoon getting the piano and the vocal microphone to sit in the same space without fighting each other. A kitchen timing plates so dinner clears before the band needs the room quiet. None of that is romantic and all of it is why a night like this can happen on an ordinary weekend and not only when a festival puts money behind it.
Brianna Thomas and the band behind her
Brianna Thomas grew up in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of drummer and vocalist Charlie Thomas, and made her first public appearance at six years old singing What a Wonderful World as a duet with her father. She moved to New York in 2007 to study at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, came up through the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead residency at the Kennedy Center, and spent years being typecast as a specialist in the hot jazz and blues repertoire of the 1920s and 1930s. WRTI’s review of an earlier run at SOUTH put it plainly. That early reputation painted her into a corner her actual range never fit, and her 2020 record Everybody Knows was the sound of her stepping out of it, songbook standards next to bawdy blues next to her own writing.
The band behind her at SOUTH is not a pickup group. Conun Pappas, on piano, grew up in New Orleans, trained at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and later at the New School, and has played beside her long enough to be billed as part of her band rather than a hired hand for the night. Marvin Sewell on guitar has spent decades playing behind Cassandra Wilson and Jack DeJohnette, the kind of credit that makes other musicians in the room sit up before the audience does. Fernando Saci plays percussion, a native of Campinas, Sao Paulo, working a range that runs from samba and salsa to funk and African rhythm. Ryan Berg on bass and David Hawkins on drums held the floor under all of it. They were not accompanying Brianna Thomas that night. They were answering her, phrase for phrase, for the whole set.
Sixty one years later, the highway is not finished
What surprised me was not that the song still worked. Protest music from any era can move a room if the person singing it means it. What surprised me was how little translation it needed. Freedom Highway asks a country to look at what it is willing to let happen to people trying to vote, trying to be safe, trying to get somewhere on a road that was not built with them in mind, and in 2026 that ask does not require a historical footnote to land. Brianna Thomas did not editorialize any of it from the stage. She sang the song straight, let the band build under her the way Jazz Philadelphia has watched happen on that same bandstand for years, and let sixty one years of distance do whatever it was going to do to the room on its own.
I could not tell you what was in every mind at every table when the last chorus ended. I know the room went quiet in a way it usually does not, even after a good set, and that people stayed in their seats after the applause instead of reaching straight for the check. Most nights at SOUTH end with everybody talking at once. This one ended with people looking at the empty stage a beat longer than they needed to, the stage lights still up, the band already reaching for water.