Legendary R&B group Sister Sledge will headline downtown Mobile’s MoonPie Over Mobile celebration on New Year’s Eve, bringing decades of disco-era hits to the crowd gathered to watch the city’s giant lighted MoonPie descend to ring in the new year.
The group is scheduled to perform at 11 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 31, in the heart of downtown Mobile, just ahead of the midnight MoonPie drop that has become one of the region’s signature New Year’s traditions. The timing sets up a single hour in which the band’s catalog of hits will carry the crowd from the final stretch of the old year to the first minutes of the new one, with the illuminated MoonPie lowered above the downtown streets at midnight as the countdown concludes.
Sister Sledge is best known for the enduring anthem “We Are Family,” along with other hits such as “Thinking of You” and “Lost in Music,” all released during the group’s rise to fame more than four decades ago. The Philadelphia-bred group of sisters built its reputation on harmonies that only family members could produce, and those records have remained staples of weddings, reunions and dance floors ever since.
The performance comes on the heels of a major honor for the group. “We Are Family” was recently inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, an archive that preserves sound recordings deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. The registry selects a limited number of titles each year from the full span of American recorded sound, placing the song alongside a canon that runs from early blues and jazz to the defining popular records of each generation.
Member Kathy Sledge said the recognition placed the song among an elite class of American works.
“I think adding ‘We Are Family’ to the Library of Congress, more than anything, shows that it has outlived so many things,” Sledge said. “It’s up in there in the Library of Congress next to Martin Luther King’s speech.”
A song that would not age
Sledge, who was just 16 years old when she recorded the song, said the track’s staying power still surprises her. A teenager at the microphone when the record was cut, she has now watched “We Are Family” move through four decades of American life, picked up by each new audience without ever being remade for them. She said the group’s music continues to resonate across generations and international audiences, with “Thinking of You” proving especially popular in the United Kingdom, where the group’s catalog has enjoyed an afterlife on dance floors and radio that has, in places, outpaced its American footprint.
That international following is part of why the group has become a fixture on the global New Year’s Eve circuit, performing everything from large public celebrations to private parties for high-profile clients, including an event for Malaysian royalty in London alongside Cyndi Lauper. Sledge said one of her fondest New Year’s memories came in 2015, when the group performed in Dubai alongside music icons Nile Rodgers and Chaka Khan — a fitting pairing, given that Rodgers co-produced the records that made Sister Sledge famous.
An explosive set for Mobile
Ahead of the Mobile show, Sledge said she was looking forward to bringing her group’s high-energy performance to the city’s celebration for the first time. She promised an explosive set built around the band’s catalog of hits, along with new creative touches the group has been developing.
“This is one of the first shows I’ve done in a long time where I’m getting to be explosive with all the songs we know and love and be creative,” Sledge said. “There’s going to be a lot of energy and a lot of fun and a lot of hits, and don’t be surprised if you end up on stage with me.”
The invitation to the audience is more than stage patter at a Sledge show. The group’s live performances have long been built on the call-and-response warmth of records like “We Are Family,” and a crowd of thousands singing along in the downtown streets is, in a practical sense, the natural arrangement of the song.
The honor from the Library of Congress has given the group a fresh reason to tour the record, too. Induction into the registry tends to produce a second wave of attention — documentaries, reissues, anniversary retrospectives — and Sledge said the timing of the Mobile date lets the group play the song at a moment when new audiences are discovering it alongside the ones who never stopped listening.
The 11 p.m. slot also means the performance serves as the warm-up act for the event’s true headliner: the MoonPie itself. MoonPie Over Mobile draws large crowds to the downtown area each Dec. 31 for live entertainment, food and the ceremonial lowering of a giant electrified MoonPie, a nod to the city’s Mardi Gras tradition of tossing the moon-shaped treats from parade floats. The connection is more than novelty — the MoonPie has been a fixture of Mobile’s Carnival throws for generations, and the New Year’s Eve drop borrows the city’s oldest public celebration to mark its newest one.
Organizers have built the event into one of Mobile’s most popular annual gatherings, drawing families and revelers from across the Gulf Coast for a free, family-friendly send-off to the new year. The free admission and downtown setting put the event within walking distance of the city’s restaurants and hotels, and it has grown into the kind of evening that fills the streets around the main stage with strollers and lawn chairs well before the opening acts finish.
Beyond the stage
Beyond the New Year’s Eve performance schedule, Sledge said she has stayed busy with a range of projects, including a recently signed movie deal chronicling the backstory of “Lost in Music” and “We Are Family.” The film project would trace the records from their creation in Philadelphia through their rise to worldwide fame, a story that runs through one of the most productive stretches in American pop music.
She has also been writing new music with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, known for their work with Janet Jackson, Prince and Mariah Carey, as well as with the European production duo Horse Meat Disco. The pairing of a classic vocal group with the architects of modern R&B production is an unusual one, and Sledge described the sessions as a way to keep the group’s sound moving forward rather than preserving it behind glass.
What the night will look like
For the crowds on Dec. 31, the shape of the evening is familiar to anyone who has spent a New Year’s Eve downtown. The streets around the celebration fill through the evening, the warm-up entertainment gives way to the headliner, and at 11 p.m. Sister Sledge takes the stage with the countdown an hour away. By midnight, the crowd that arrived for a concert becomes the crowd that watches the giant MoonPie descend, with the band’s final songs running directly into the city’s countdown tradition.
The 11 p.m. start is late by concert standards but deliberate by the event’s own logic. Families with young children can claim their spots early and stay as long as they can manage, while the revelers who arrive for the midnight hour get a full set of hits as their warm-up. The single-stage schedule keeps the whole crowd in one place when the MoonPie drops, which is the image — thousands of faces lit by the descending treat — that has come to define Mobile’s New Year’s Eve in photographs and broadcasts across the Gulf Coast.
The booking follows a pattern that has defined MoonPie Over Mobile in recent years: pairing the drop with a nationally known act whose catalog spans generations, so that the audience of families, college students and longtime revelers all hear something they know. Few catalogs fit that brief as completely as Sister Sledge’s, and few songs carry the collective warmth of “We Are Family” sung by a downtown crowd of strangers.
For Mobile, the night also serves as a rehearsal of sorts for the Carnival season that follows within weeks. The same downtown streets, the same crowd-control plans and the same parade infrastructure come back into use in February, and the New Year’s Eve celebration has become the city’s biggest annual test run of the machinery that carries it through Carnival.
Sledge said she is ready for what the crowd brings.
The group’s appearance closes out a year in which “We Are Family” has received some of the highest honors American music can bestow, and it opens a new one — at midnight, under a descending MoonPie, in a city that has been throwing the treats from floats longer than almost anywhere else in the country. For the audience on the downtown streets, the plan for the evening is as simple as the song that will close it: stand together, sing along, and don’t be surprised if you end up on stage.