Moonlight: Music On a Mountain

A former advertising copywriter and photographer, and a Beatles-era boomer to begin with, Keith Harrelson abandoned any realistic approach to professional achievement in 2003, when he opened the Moonlight Music Cafe, a hybrid coffeehouse-music hall in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama— a time-lagged metropolis not known for its embrace of acoustic folk music. Keith’s lifelong proximity to working tunesmiths, and regular involvement in staging live music festivals across the Southeast, convinced him that the essence of America’s canon of original song craft, and the appreciation of its earnest practitioners, could best be abetted on the smallest of scales— from the short risers of a petite indoor stage, in a carpeted room holding perhaps a hundred respectful souls in thrall to a performer’s unique talents. For thirteen years, paddling upstream in a twice-failed economy, Harrelson managed somehow to maintain a refuge for local and traveling troubadours, most of whom remember the room as a mini-concert hall where the artists and their work were given an honored priority, by the presenter and the audiences he worked so hard to assemble for them. With his retirement in 2017, Keith watches with approval as The Moonlight extends its legacy under new ownership, and enjoys the freedom of a much less structured weekly schedule, in the company of an acre of mature Southern hardwoods, and two and a half ankle-banging cats.