Melissa Weber considers herself cursed. With a near-encyclopedic knowledge of 15,000 records scrounged from a lifetime as a “crate digger,” the world-renowned DJ artist known as DJ Soul Sister has been sharing that curse with New Orleans for over 30 years, working a turntable as a savant beholden to the long-lost art of mixing and beat matching straight from vinyl records.
A young omnivore for funk and disco tracks, Weber spent much of her childhood “borrowing” her father’s record cutouts, sequestering them into her room where she would play them repeatedly on her nearly indestructible Fisher Price record player. Considered musically gifted by her teachers, Weber never practiced and frankly didn’t have to as she absorbed the melodies that were bumping across the bass lines of Kool & The Gang, Brass Construction, or Funkadelic records, reshaping and radicalizing her synapses into a network of references upon which her artistry would one day be built.
“I was born in 1975, but I felt like I was born a decade too late,” Weber said. “I always felt like I should have been born in 1965 and partying at the discotheque instead of being stuck at home with a babysitter.”
After hours spent kneeling at the altar of long-forgotten records, Weber found success DJ’ing for WWOZ, where she still performs every Saturday night on “Soul Power with Soul Sister,” before being coerced by a friend into performing her first live set at The Caddyshack on Poydras in 1997. With little more than a crash course in the finer points of the turntable, DJ Soul Sister’s curse was finally unleashed as two decades’ worth of religious devotion to the groove uncorked upon an adoring crowd who were eager to subsume themselves within the melodic menagerie her fingers found and the love she, above anyone else, wanted to hear in the music.
“By the time I did that first night, I had been performing my show ‘Soul Power’ on WWOZ for a few years, and the joy of community radio is that your show is who you are,” Weber said. “DJ’ing isn’t about technique or debating vinyl versus digital, it is about the love of music and expressing that in a way that reveals true to you. If you don’t love the music, you have no business DJ’ing anywhere.”
DJ Soul Sister’s unique sound has offered her the opportunity to perform alongside the totemic acts whose records she lovingly spun in the dark of her childhood bedroom: Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers, Tower of Power, and George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. Considered by some of the greatest DJs in the world to be one of the greatest DJs in the world, Weber directly credits George Clinton and his uninhibited, barefoot style of performance as inspiration for the special something she is chasing each time she steps upon the stage.
“George Clinton is why I perform my sets barefoot, as a way of what I call ‘feeling the feeling’. Feeling the feeling is so important because it’s about channeling from above and feeling sound from below, having the music flow into you from every direction. It’s all very metaphysical and weird, not normally what DJs say, but for me it’s an absolute necessity,” she said.
Though she performs fewer sets than she once did, with the notable exception of her monthly ‘HUSTLE! with Soul Sister’ nights at Tipitina’s, Melissa has evolved her instrument, today sharing her love of music through writing, scholarship, and research as she is in the midst of completing her master’s thesis in musicology. It’s a new era for her, though don’t be surprised to see DJ Soul Sister manning the turntables into her 80s, because that curse, that blessing, it never dies. It’s not something you can’t buy; it’s not something you can teach, as DJ Soul Sister knows all too well; it’s simply a feeling you have to feel.
