The Come Up of The Urban Hideout

From the Mud to the Mirror 

The Urban Hideout wasn’t built for the spotlight.
It was born in the shadows—
From years of hustling, cutting, creating, and surviving.

See, we’ve lived long enough to understand pain.
Not the kind you watch.
The kind you carry.
The kind that seeps into the cracks of your life and tries to stay there.

But here’s the thing about the blues:
It doesn’t run from that pain.
It stares it down and turns it into something beautiful.
A song. A look. A space. A feeling.
It transforms struggle into soul—and makes it something others can connect to.

The blues doesn’t just mark emotion.
It marks history.

Blues music rose out of the ashes of the Civil War,
born from African American communities in the rural South.
Not the music of the enslaved, but the sound of those
trying to live free in a world still built to cage them—
freedmen and women navigating the brutality of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
It came from sharecroppers. From heartbreak. From injustice.
It was fed by Black spirituals, field songs, and labor chants—
and over time, it became the voice of the unheard.

From the 1870s to the early 1900s,
blues moved through the South, then caught fire across the country
when W.C. Handy dropped “Memphis Blues” in 1912.
And when the Great Migration hit—Black families leaving the South for new lives in the North and West—
they took the blues with them, and that sound evolved with the streets it landed on.

Then came Prohibition.
The booze went underground.
And so did the music.
Speakeasies became sanctuaries for sound—where blues and jazz could breathe,
far from the eyes of the law, and the grip of the mainstream.

Mobsters ran the clubs.
The feds chased the booze.
And the real ones—the oppressed, the immigrants, the outlaws, the artists—
shared smoky backrooms under one roof.
Places like the Cotton Club and “black and tan” lounges blurred lines
and let blues singers like Bessie Smith tell the truth through song.
Even gangsters like Al Capone backed Black musicians,
because he saw in their struggle the same fire his own people carried.
The blues and the streets grew up together.
Same pain. Same pulse.

That’s the energy Meredith “Phee” Avery connects to.

That’s why, when Phee dropped her all-original album “New Paradigm,”
She made room for “Feelin’ Good” by Nina Simone.
Because she recorded that whole project during the darkest chapter of her life.
When she thought it was all gone.
That track? That was her resurrection song.

Phee has been a recording artist for 20 years,
a stylist and barber for 14,
a published novelist,
and someone who’s walked beside society’s rejected.
She saw beauty in the overlooked.
Pride in the broken.
Artistry in the wounded.

So Phee built The Urban Hideout for them.
For us.

A sanctuary for those who know what it means to carry weight and still show up sharp.
This space is for the ones who want to turn bad things into beautiful things—
who feel the soul of the blues, no matter their walk of life.
It’s for the ones seeking community in history, music, literature, and fresh fades.
For the folks who’ve been told they were too much or not enough—
and want to be around others who just get it.

This ain’t just a barbershop.
It’s a soul house.
A memory keeper.
A backroom for the brave.

Welcome to The Urban Hideout.
This is where history cuts clean.