Gina Boykin

Gina Boykin runs Live Music Junkies, the page Atlanta musicians and venues use to find each other.

Brad Banyas met her outside the Masquerade at the venue's 35th anniversary, about three weeks before she came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast. He was standing around in a coat feeling like a goober when she walked out and asked how it was going. They got to talking, she explained what she did, and he worked out that he had been inside that building the year it opened. She remembered the night well.

Boykin was going to shows several nights a week and combing the web to find them, mostly at places that are not music venues: restaurants, bars, breweries. She kept running into good players, some of them fifteen or sixteen years old, working rooms that were eating dinner. She would talk to them between songs about how a song got written and what it meant to them, then tell her friends and coworkers, who always came back with the same question. How did you find this person. She started the page to answer it, first as a list of free music, then as something bigger. Her database of musicians and genres now runs to about a thousand names, mostly local. Venues call her for recommendations. She says she might end up a professional booker, but right now she is a connector.

Her answer to anyone new in Atlanta is the same every time. Start at open mics, and she keeps the list of the thirty to forty that run every week. Have a friend film two or three minutes, because she cannot recommend a musician to a venue with nothing to watch. And if you are on stage and you ask her what she wants to hear, she will tell you the same thing she tells everybody. Play an original song.