The Family Roundtable

Melissa A. Weber is an artist-scholar and music historian whose areas of interest and expertise include 20th century popular music, the music and culture of her native New Orleans, and archives. Her expertise and research has resulted in writing and/or presentations for the American Musicological Society, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Pop Conference, Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, and Society for Ethnomusicology, among others. 

Professionally, she serves as curator of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, a unit of Tulane University Special Collections. As an adjunct professor, she teaches History of Urban Music at Loyola University New Orleans. 

In her spare time, and under the moniker of Soul Sister, she has hosted her Soul Power show on WWOZ FM New Orleans community radio station for over 30 years as of 2024. As a performance DJ, she has shared stages with artists ranging from Questlove to George Clinton & Parliament-Funkadelic and was the first DJ to receive a prestigious Big Easy Entertainment Award. Her broadcast programs and live performances feature only the music she loves, from her personal collection of vinyl: 1970s and 1980s R&B, funk, disco, jazz, rare groove, rare groove, jazz fusion, true school hip hop and more.

Her record collection earned her a spot in the 2014 book Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting and the documentary Dig We Must, slated for summer 2025 release.

Her writing includes pieces for the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Wax Poetics, Red Bull Music Academy; Vinyl Me, Please; and an essay about Parliament-Funkadelic in the 2024 book How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music.

She first fell in love with Prince in 1980 with the 45 she owned of “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad” (and “Baby” on the B-side). She has thrown Prince-themed gatherings, including dance parties, film screenings, and talks, in New Orleans since 2013, and opened (as DJ Soul Sister) for The Revolution in 2018.