George McConnell Downloads

George McConnell Launches “Virtual 45” Download Series
Former Widespread Panic, Beanland guitarist to release new material
exclusively via digital download singles (with the B-side!)

George McConnell

Guitarist George McConnell has been playing guitar since the age of fifteen. He learned the ways of the world under the tutelage of Lulu — Mississippi’s first black female beer-truck driver. At the tender age of ten, McConnell traveled the back roads of Mississippi with Lulu, delivering delicious Falstaff beer to patrons of juke joints, honky tonks and pool halls across the Delta.

The beer warehouse served as a practice space for one of the employee’s bands, Little Red and the Reversibles, and the young McConnell would sneak in after hours to play guitar through the band’s equipment, leading him to the precipice of music’s slippery slope. Since then, he’s played lead guitar with a trio of bands and operated a vintage guitar store. All the time, he was writing songs.

McConnell is debuting his new batch of tunes exclusively via digital download on his new website, georgemcconnell.com. As a throwback to his early days of discovering new music, he’s releasing the songs in a “Virtual 45” format, with the songs available only as a pair — just like the “A-side” and “B-side” of a 45 RPM single.

“I’d go to the record store to buy one song,” McConnell explains, “and you would also get the song on the other side, the B-side. And a lot of times it was better! With the music industry changing and the emphasis seemingly going back to the single in this digital age, I wanted to bring back that fun I had in discovering a B-side.”

The first two releases of McConnell’s Virtual 45 Series will be the rip-roaring rocker “Goodbye, So Long” and the soulful, swinging “In Walked You” and “Hollywood Babylon/Feel No Pain.” Both “45s” will be released on November 4, 2008 (today), exclusively at www.georgemcconnell.com.

The first of many “Virtual 45s” to come in the following weeks, these releases mark the culmination of a lifetime of beer trucks and jukeboxes.