Early James

Frederick James Mullis, Jr., an Alabama singer and songwriter, began using the stage name Early James while appearing at venues around Birmingham in the early 2010s. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys attended one of those performances, signed him to Easy Eye Sound in 2019, and produced the resulting debut Singing for My Supper, a luminous and deeply Southern set issued that March with full-band support. COVID-19 cancellations forced James to shelve touring plans and begin work on new material, which he road-tested in 2021 alongside the Lone Bellow.

Auerbach returned to the helm for Strange Time to Be Alive in 2022, an album that sharpened James’s established voice while broadening its cinematic scope and yielded the streaming hit “Real Low Down Lonesome” featuring Sierra Farrell. Their next collaboration, Medium Raw, arrived in 2024 after sessions at Nashville’s historic Honky Chateau; the unprocessed, intimate collection paired James with upright bassist Adrian Marmolejo for many of its stark tracks.

An eccentric troubadour who pulls from every strand of Americana, Early James fuses country storytelling with blues changes, soulful grooves, and rock flourishes, a hybrid first showcased on Singing for My Supper and refined across the subsequent releases.