Papa Mali and Double Uptown Shotgun Heat Up The Outerhang After Hangout Fest

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Papa Mali and his Double Uptown Shotgun outfit rolled out of Hangout Music Fest weekend straight into an outdoor set at The Outerhang — the open-air stage at the Undertow Bar, 25025 Canal Road in Orange Beach — giving post-festival crowds an encore nobody had to buy a wristband for. While the main festival grounds packed up for the year, the band set up shop on the water, turning the weekend’s last night into a Gulf Coast funk party with no ticket required.

The timing was canny. Hangout Music Fest draws tens of thousands of visitors to the beach each May, and by Sunday night the crowds are looking for somewhere to land — bands they missed, stages they can actually get close to, and a last evening that belongs to the locals. The Outerhang, carved onto the back deck of the Undertow Bar on Cotton Bayou, has built a reputation as exactly that kind of room: an open-air stage where touring musicians can stretch out and the audience stands close enough to see the strings. A band the caliber of Double Uptown Shotgun choosing it for a festival-weekend set said everything about the venue’s growing standing on the Coast.

The band stacked serious credentials. Frontman Papa Mali handled vocals and guitar, joined by Mobile’s own Chris Spies on keys, Galactic bassist Rob Mercurio, and Terence Higgins of Dirty Dozen Brass Band fame behind the drums. That is a rhythm section with New Orleans credentials of the first rank: Mercurio has spent years anchoring Galactic, one of the funky movers of the Crescent City’s modern scene, while Higgins keeps time with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the ensemble that reshaped New Orleans brass tradition and carried it onto the world’s stages. Spies, a longtime fixture of the Mobile music community, brought the hometown link that made the night feel like a family reunion as much as a concert.

Gulf Coast soul, all night long

The set leaned hard into Gulf Coast soul and funk, running through covers including Lee Dorsey’s “Give It Up” and “Neighbor’s Daughter” and Isaac Hayes’ “Do Your Thing.” The songbook told the story on its own. Lee Dorsey, the New Orleans R&B great, wrote the template for the loping, behind-the-beat funk that Papa Mali has spent a career channeling; “Do Your Thing,” from Isaac Hayes’ early-seventies run, stretches out into long instrumental grooves built for exactly the kind of band assembled on the Outerhang stage. Nothing about the evening was museum music — these are living, breathing grooves, played by musicians who grew up on them and, in Papa Mali’s case, by a frontman raised in the Shreveport and New Orleans scenes who carries both in his voice.

For the crowd, the appeal was the closeness. The same players who fill festival stages and theater dates were playing an outdoor bar deck a few feet from the audience, trading verses over a rhythm section that could lock into a groove and hold it for ten minutes if the night called for it. Sets like this are the Gulf Coast’s secret economy: the big festivals get the headlines, but the after-hours rooms — the Undertows and Flora-Bamas and beach bars up and down Highway 182 — are where the touring musicians actually live, and where the music goes longest into the night.

Papa Mali himself is a fixture of that world. A guitarist, singer and producer with deep New Orleans ties, he has spent decades moving between his own bands, sideman work and the studio, building a catalog that runs from swamp-funk to gospel-tinged soul. His projects tend to collect great players the way a jam session collects requests, and Double Uptown Shotgun — the name alone announcing its New Orleans street-parade lineage — is exactly that kind of assembly: a bandleader’s vision staffed by the best friends a funk record could buy.

The players behind the sound

The lineup drew a map of the Gulf South’s musical bloodstream. Rob Mercurio’s Galactic has been the engine room of New Orleans funk for a generation, a band whose records and endless touring turned Crescent City grooves into a national festival staple — and whose bassist has played with just about everyone who has passed through the city with a groove in mind. Terence Higgins brings the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s street-beat heritage, a drumming style that swings like a parade and hits like a freight, and he has carried it through decades of touring and recording with the band and beyond. Together with Chris Spies’ keys and Papa Mali’s growl and guitar, the four-man unit had everything the music required: the bottom, the backbeat, the chords and the voice.

Spies’ presence gave Mobile fans their own hook into the night. The Keyboardist has long been one of the Port City’s most reliable musical exports, playing across the Gulf Coast and beyond while keeping his roots in the local scene, and audiences on both sides of the bay have watched his career accumulate credits year after year. For the hometown crowd that made the trip down Highway 182 to Cotton Bayou, seeing a Mobile musician on stage with members of Galactic and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band was part of the evening’s pleasure — proof, again, that the region’s talent pool flows both ways.

The venue, for its part, has leaned into that positioning. The Undertow’s Outerhang stage sits on the water side of Canal Road, close enough to the Perdido Pass area to catch festival spillover and close enough to the locals to stay busy all season. Open-air decks, sunset over the bayou and a sound system built for live funk make it a natural stop for touring bands between larger dates, and its post-festival slot has become a small tradition on the Orange Beach calendar.

The momentum keeps going

The same crew kept the momentum going: Papa Mali returned to the Undertow on June 22 with Good Enough for Good Times, presented via JamsPlus. The follow-up date gave the Coast another chance to hear the guitarist’s other long-running outfit — Good Enough for Good Times, a band with its own deep Gulf South pedigree — and confirmed that the Undertow’s relationship with Papa Mali was no one-night stand. JamsPlus, the presentation company behind the show, has specialized in bringing national-caliber roots, funk and jam acts to intimate Gulf Coast rooms, the kind of booking that turns a Tuesday-in-June bar date into a destination show.

For Orange Beach, the stretch of dates was a small demonstration of what the local music economy can be when the pieces align: a festival weekend that draws the world’s attention to the beaches, followed by the after-hours venues that catch the wave, followed by return engagements that build something lasting. The Hangout Music Fest brings tens of thousands of visitors to town each May, but the rooms along Canal Road and the beach highway are where those visitors — and the locals — discover the region’s living music culture, one low-ticket night at a time.

The night at The Outerhang ended the way the best Gulf Coast nights do: long grooves, a crowd that stayed past the last scheduled note, and a band that seemed in no hurry to leave. Papa Mali and Double Uptown Shotgun gave Orange Beach the encore the festival weekend deserved — funk with New Orleans bloodlines, played outdoors on the water by players who have spent their lives perfecting it, with the promise of more to come when the bandleader rolled back through town with Good Enough for Good Times.

A songbook rooted in the Gulf South

The covers the band chose were not random selections — they were a syllabus. Lee Dorsey’s “Give It Up” is New Orleans funk at its most essential, a track cut with the Meters that distills the city’s rhythm-and-blues tradition into a two-and-a-half-minute strut. “Neighbor’s Daughter” rides the same easy-rolling pocket, the kind of song that sounds simple until a band tries to play it and discovers how much finesse the groove requires. Isaac Hayes’ “Do Your Thing” comes from the other end of the era and the other end of the tempo: a slow-burning epic from the heyday of Memphis soul that gives a band room to stretch, solo and ride a groove until the audience forgets to sit down. A band that can walk from Dorsey to Hayes without stumbling knows exactly where its bread is buttered.

Papa Mali’s own career runs through both cities that songbook represents. Raised in Shreveport and forged in the New Orleans scene, he has spent his life in the sound that the Gulf Coast trades in — swampy guitar, church-bred vocals and a drummer’s sense of where the party lives. His work as a producer and collaborator has put him in studios with some of American music’s most distinctive voices, and his live projects have always been about the same thing the Outerhang audience got on this night: a band of heavy players, a bag of great songs and the freedom to take them wherever the crowd’s energy points.

The after-hours economy of festival weekend

There is a reason the biggest music festivals keep their host towns’ bars busy long after the headliners leave the stage. Touring musicians spend festival weekends in the same beach towns as their fans, and many of them are happy to play a low-key room after their official duties end — partly for the money, partly for the joy of playing small after a festival mainstage. The venues that catch those sets build reputations that outlast any single weekend. On the Alabama and Florida Gulf Coast, that circuit runs from bars on the beaches to rooms along the bays, and the Undertow’s Outerhang has worked itself into the rotation as a place where musicians want to play.

The economics favor everyone involved. Fans who could not afford festival wristbands, or who simply wanted music without the crowds, get a world-class band at bar prices. The venue fills its room on a night when every other bar in town is competing for the same post-festival traffic. And the musicians get a relaxed night to play what they want, with an audience close enough to hear the conversation between the drums and the keys. The formula has turned post-festival slots into some of the most anticipated dates on the Coast’s calendar — insider events that locals guard like secrets.

By the time Papa Mali and Double Uptown Shotgun played their last chord that night, the Hangout Music Fest’s audiences had gone home and the party had quietly moved to a deck on Cotton Bayou. The band’s credentials said arena, but the setting said Gulf Coast: salt air, a water view and a groove that ran past midnight. It was the festival weekend’s real encore — and with the June return already booked, Orange Beach knew it would not have to wait a year for the next one.