After four decades practicing medicine in Northampton, physician Bruce Weinraub — also known as “Dr. B” — has found a new out-of-state career as a music venue owner and music festival producer.
Weinraub lived and worked in Northampton from 1984 to 2024, when he relocated to Clarksdale, Mississippi. There, he runs the music venue The Blue Room and produces the Son House Tribute Festival. Named for the legendary blues guitarist and singer who passed away in 1988, the festival honors a man who anchored the documentary “Two Trains Runnin‘” and inspired generations of musicians, including Bonnie Raitt and Jack White. The festival’s second annual event took place in late May, headlined by Grammy-nominated blues musician Jontavious Willis.
Ever since he was a child, Weinraub has loved music from the Black diaspora, particularly blues and jazz. He wasn’t entirely sure why — he was too young at the time to analyze it — but “it was something innate, I think, in a lot of ways,” he said. He began taking piano lessons at a young age and continues to play today, nearly seven decades later.
The Mississippi Delta, where blues originated, was “always like a mystical place to me,” he said. His “musical heroes,” as he called them, including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and John Lee Hooker, were all from Mississippi, giving the state a natural appeal. About a dozen years ago, he began visiting Clarksdale regularly, including for the annual Juke Joint Festival.
“After my second or third visit, I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to come as a tourist anymore,’” he said.
In late 2022, reeling from the difficulties of working in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic, Weinraub decided that he was ready for a change.
“I just woke up one morning and said, ‘I’m moving to Mississippi,’” he said.
Though his life now revolves around music, he still practices medicine two days a week at the Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. In fact, his tagline is “Healing with a Feeling.” As he sees it, “I owe a debt to the Mississippi Delta, as far as what it’s done for me personally and creatively,” so continuing that line of work in a high-need area just makes sense.
Ultimately, healthcare and festival organizing share deep commonalities despite their obvious differences.
“You’ve got to deal with people. You’ve got to be organized. You’ve got to have a plan,” he said. “You’ve got to multitask. … Dealing with easy people to deal with, dealing with difficult people to deal with — that’s what I dealt with for years, so it wasn’t that difficult to transition, actually. It felt like a natural thing.”
Weinraub still holds a deep affection for Northampton, visiting a few times a year. During his most recent visit, he watched his daughter graduate from her master’s program at Smith College. There are many aspects he loves about the city, such as Paradise Pond, the proximity to mountains, the college-town vibes and Neilson Library. Throughout his professional career, he worked as a staff member at Cooley Dickinson and primarily in private internal medicine. Most memorably, he enjoyed working with Dr. Jeffrey Zesiger. Paradise City is also where he originally got his start as a musician playing in local bands.
At the same time, he deeply appreciates Clarksdale, despite the town’s challenges with poverty and its complicated history. The pace of living in Clarksdale is much slower than it is in Northampton, where “it’s hustle, bustle and a lot of cars,” Weinraub said. He also finds himself feeling a stronger connection to the local artistic and cultural scene.
While he claims he is still “a New Englander at heart,” he appreciates that Southerners have a way of speaking that is “very colorful and funny.” In Clarksdale, there is “a spirit and a vibe here that is special,” he said. “I’m not sure why … but people feel it when they come down here, that it is a very special place in a lot of ways.”
In fact, he believes that for anyone who loves music born from the African diaspora, a pilgrimage is mandatory. “A trip to the Mississippi Delta is a requirement if you really want to get a feeling for where that music came from and touch base with the culture that invented it. … Jazz, R&B, hip-hop, rap — it’s all from here,” he said.
“I think anybody who is a musician — rock ‘n’ roll, blues, jazz — needs to take a trip to the Mississippi Delta and get a feel for it,” he continued. “And it will change their lives.”
For more information about the Son House Tribute Festival, visit sonhousetributefestival.com.
