For nearly five decades, Jimmy Lee Hannaford has made his living the way most working musicians along the Gulf Coast do: night after night, gig after gig, playing the songs people already know and love. But the Foley-based, Mississippi-born songwriter has always had another side — a writer’s side — and in the fall of 2024 he finally gave it a full showcase. “Jubilee,” his second full-length album, gathered ten of his own songs into one record and, in the process, captured the sound and spirit of the bay country he has called home for the better part of two decades.
The album’s arrival was quiet by the standards of the music industry — no label machine, no promotional tour — but it represented something bigger for Hannaford, who had spent years as one of the most reliably busy performers on the Alabama coast while his own material waited in the wings. With “Jubilee,” that material finally got its moment, recorded largely in a Fairhope home studio with a producer who heard something in Hannaford’s songs that he felt demanded to be heard.
From Mississippi to Austin to the Eastern Shore
Hannaford is a Mississippi native who came to the Eastern Shore from Austin, Texas, roughly seventeen years before “Jubilee” was released. By the time he arrived, he was already a seasoned performer with nearly a quarter century of stages behind him — he first picked up the instrument as a young man, and by the time the album came out he had been playing for almost forty-five years.
What he found on the Eastern Shore was a music scene that rewarded exactly the kind of player he had become: a vocalist and acoustic guitarist with a harmonica rack around his neck, comfortable in a listening room or a beachside bar, able to read a crowd and keep them around. Work came steadily, and it has stayed steady ever since. Coastside audiences have crossed paths with him at spots ranging from Tacky Jacks in Orange Beach to the FOP Lodge in Foley, and his calendar over the years has been one of the fullest of any working musician in Baldwin County.
But the solo acoustic circuit only tells half the story. Hannaford is also known as an accomplished, energetic bassist, and that side of his playing has put him on stage with a long list of Gulf Coast acts — the Nervous Tics, Sugarcane Jane, the Twang Gang, Andy MacDonald, and the Flying Cobras among them. That breadth matters when thinking about “Jubilee,” because the album is the work of someone who has spent decades absorbing the full range of Gulf Coast music from the inside, first as a listener, then as a sideman, and only later as a frontman with songs of his own.
A producer who insisted on hearing the songs
The record exists because of a chance encounter on a bandstand. Damon Henderson, a Fairhope-based musician, songwriter, and producer, first noticed Hannaford playing bass with the Nervous Tics, a band led by mutual friend Jimmy Lumpkin. Henderson was intrigued — and more intrigued still when he learned that the seasoned sideman in the rhythm section had a stockpile of original songs that nobody had ever properly recorded.
Henderson invited Hannaford into his home studio, and what began as an invitation turned into a long series of sessions that ultimately produced the entire album. Henderson not only produced; he pushed Hannaford to do something he had always wanted to try — play most of the instruments himself and sing the bulk of the vocals, rather than assembling a band to interpret the songs for him.
In Henderson’s estimation, the result captures something specific about the place where it was made. “He’s a soulful Southern storyteller with a distinctive voice,” Henderson said of Hannaford, “and this album tells the stories and shares the emotions of our region of the country with elements of blues, folk, rock, and country music. The songs are multi-level — there is an emotional concept mixed into each song that makes it all work.”
For his part, Hannaford has described the record as a gathering of long-kept favorites. “These 10 songs on the album include some of the favorite ones I’ve written over the years,” he said at the time of its release. “I had been performing some of them for many years but had never found the right opportunity to record them properly. Damon came along out of nowhere and made it happen, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.”
Why “Jubilee”? The bay itself provided the name
The album takes its title — and its centerpiece song — from one of the Gulf Coast’s most singular natural events. On a handful of summer mornings, usually between June and mid-September, conditions along Mobile Bay’s eastern shore align in a way that brings sea life to the water’s edge in astonishing numbers. Flounder, crabs, eels, shrimp, and catfish suddenly crowd the shallows, and residents who hear the news in time grab gigs and nets and head for the shoreline before dawn.
Scientists at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab have studied the phenomenon for years, and the explanation is a matter of water chemistry as much as folklore. Mobile Bay is remarkably shallow, and in the heat of summer its water is warm and often stagnant, which means it holds little dissolved oxygen. Salty, oxygen-poor bottom water accumulates in the deeper parts of the bay during calm conditions; when the right combination of tide and wind pushes that water toward the eastern shallows, the bottom-dwelling creatures in its path are forced ahead of it, scrambling toward the surface and the shoreline in search of oxygenated water. Good swimmers can simply swim over the advancing mass; crabs and flounder cannot, and they end up piled along the sand.
Mobile Bay is widely considered the only place on Earth where jubilees occur with any regularity — a distinction shared, loosely, only with certain bays of Japan — and they have become part of the identity of the communities along the bay’s eastern shore, from Daphne to Point Clear. Word of a jubilee still spreads the old way, by phone calls in the night, and whole neighborhoods have been known to turn out on the sand with flashlights and buckets.
That is the imagery at the heart of “Waitin’ on a Jubilee,” the gentle, mostly acoustic song that anchors the album. Hannaford wrote it out of time spent along the scenic bay, and Henderson regards it as the record’s defining statement. “It’s a beautiful piece of musical artwork, balanced between abstract human emotions and the real-life mystery of this Gulf Coast phenomenon we call a jubilee,” he said. “All of the songs on this album are worthy of this same praise, and yet, each is unique in style and message. It is worth a listen whether you are from here or whether you want to know what it feels like to be from here.”
One player, many hats
Listeners who mainly know Hannaford from his solo acoustic sets may be surprised by how much ground the album covers. While much of it rests on his acoustic foundation, the record rocks and grooves in places, with intertwining electric guitars — much of which Hannaford played himself, adding lead guitar, harmony vocals, and keyboards to the resume he brought into the studio.
One collaborator does appear throughout: Jose Santiago, Hannaford’s longtime accompanist, who contributes congas and djembe on roughly half of the album’s songs, giving several tracks a light, percussive lift that suits the material’s Gulf Coast sensibility. The rest of the record is, by design, largely the work of one man — the arrangement Henderson encouraged, and the fulfillment of something Hannaford had wanted to attempt since he first started playing music some four and a half decades earlier.
A song rescued from another decade
“Jubilee” is Hannaford’s second full-length release. His first, “Outside In,” came out in 2002, during his years in Texas. Most of the new album was built from scratch in the sessions with Henderson, but one track carries a much longer history with it.
“A Place in My Heart” was salvaged from the earlier Texas recording experience. The song had been left incomplete and was never included on “Outside In,” but its original foundation — recorded in the summer of 2001 — survived. The finished version features Scott Blesener on violin and harmony vocals, the late Ron Erwin on drums, and John Main on bass, all recorded more than two decades ago. Hannaford added new vocals and electric guitars in the present day, so the song spans the two halves of his recording life: musicians from one era, completed in another. For a record that is largely about a songwriter finally setting his stories down, it is a fitting inclusion.
Where the music lives now
“Jubilee” was released in October 2024, and Hannaford marked its arrival with a CD release party at Bill-E’s, at 19992 Highway 181 in Fairhope, on the evening of Thursday, November 7 of that year. Since then the album has lived on streaming services and in local record bins — it has been available on CD at Dr. Music in Fairhope, the independent record store that has long served Eastern Shore collectors — as well as at Hannaford’s own live shows, where he remains a fixture.
For a working musician, that is the truest homecoming of all: an album built at home, named for a wonder that happens just offshore, sold a few blocks from the studio where it was made, and played live for the neighbors who have watched him work for years. The Gulf Coast has always had more music than attention to spare, and “Jubilee” is a record made by someone who has spent his life in that surplus — steady, local, and built to last.