The singer Darrow Fletcher. Photograph by Ben Shirai

A decade ago, Richard Lewis, a forty-two-year-old investment analyst and soul-music fanatic, needed to relocate from Los Angeles to Manhattan. The moving truck went missing somewhere in the Midwest, and he ended up in the city with nothing but a pillow, a blanket, and a suitcase of clothes. This went on for a week, and by the sixth day he needed a break. He went to a soul night he’d seen listed, called Subway Soul Club, where, he told me, he was “blown away that, once again, despite several years of studying soul music, the d.j.s were spinning loads of things I’d never heard before.” This made him happy, but before the night was out he wanted to have more fun. “I went up to the tall, English d.j. and requested the Isonics on Kammy, thinking I would be the cool new guy in town asking for something he surely wouldn’t have.” As it turned out, the d.j, Michael Robinson, immediately pulled the record out and put it on the decks. Lewis might have lost his furniture, but he had found a friend for life, and a new calling.

The pair, each of whom had dedicated far too many waking hours to securing vast quantities of obscure soul records, often talked about teaming up for a d. j. night of their own. As connoisseurs of the scene however, they didn’t see the point. At the time, there were plenty of great soul-music parties happening. But their discussions always circled back to one question: why wasn’t anyone bringing the musicians who recorded their favorite music—folks like Lou Pride, Darrow Fletcher, Willie West, and Marva Whitney—back to town for live shows? By 2008, the question had taken over their lives, and they decided to address it themselves—the monthly party series Dig Deeper was born. “Thankfully, neither of us had any experience booking live music or promoting,” Lewis said. “Otherwise, Dig Deeper would probably never have happened. As it turns out, it was a ridiculous amount of work pulling one of these shows off.”

Dig Deeper shows, which pair soul musicians with a backing band, have a few prerequisites. First, they have to feature musicians who can actually be found, a process that takes years in some cases. “Most artists aren’t on Facebook,” Lewis said. They rely on word of mouth and pull in favors from friends in the legal field. Second, there have to be enough records by a given artist to comprise a set. “Many of the records are painfully rare, with only a single digit number of copies known to exist,” Lewis said. “If we didn’t have the records, there wasn’t a show.” And that leads to the third stipulation: making sure there’s a local backing band who can learn the material. In the past they’ve teamed up with the Solid Set, the Sweet Divines, and Crazy Baldhead, and without their work, and especially without the contributions of J. B. Flatt and the Brooklyn Rhythm Band, the series couldn’t have happened. “The band leader took a CD we put together of the records,” Lewis revealed, “and painstakingly transcribed everything—writing up the charts for the horn section, the rhythm section, keys, backing vocals, etcetera, and they rehearsed independently. Typically, the only time the entire band got a chance to play with the artist before the show was at sound check, on the day of the show.”

The pair launched Dig Deeper in June, 2008, with Don Gardner, a Philly soul artist who recorded “My Baby Likes to Boogaloo,” an iconic record that bridged many sixties scenes—soul, mod, garage, and more. “It always incites dance-floor mayhem within one note of putting the needle down,” Lewis said. Gardner hadn’t appeared in New York in forty years, but they found him. “As we’d hoped, the club was jammed with people desperate to see him.”

Dig Deeper shows ended up being a form of time travel. When the stage lights went up and the band hit the first note, the artists were young again and the audience got to witness something that would never have happened had Lewis and Robinson not put in the effort. “Nearly every show we put on, the artists hadn’t performed in N.Y.C. in at least a decade, more often thirty or forty years,” Lewis said. “Somehow we picked up where the Apollo left off in the sixties—probably half of the artists we have brought to town played their last N.Y.C. show at the Apollo back when this music was first made. We didn’t even know there was a mantle that needed picking up, we just sort of stumbled into it.”

But this Saturday, after presenting nearly fifty artists, the pair are putting on their last Dig Deeper show for a while, and taking an indefinite hiatus. Day jobs and other responsibilities have become too much. In recent years, they’ve also presented Jamaican music from the sixties, and for this show they are flying in the legendary crooner and ska-era hit maker Derrick Morgan. When they look back on the series, a few things stand out, such as the effect that their concerts have had on the musicians themselves. “The singer we waved goodbye to at the airport at the end of each weekend was a different person than the one we picked up a few days before, beaming, talking about the show,” Lewis said. “Every single show, with almost no exception, had a song, or often several, that the singer hadn’t delivered since the day they’d recorded it, forty of fifty years ago,” Robinson added. “We actually got to experience that moment first in each show’s soundcheck, usually in front of us two in an otherwise empty venue,” he added. “So the singer and the whole band going full pelt performing just to us always felt like we’d won some kind of amazing golden ticket.”

Dig Deeper concerts also did something more rarified—they acknowledged artists while they were still alive. These days, the media often only pays attention to an old performer through an obituary. Lewis and Robinson celebrated them in the present. Not only did they pay the performers—a far too unusual arrangement for many of these artists—they also gave them something more intangible. When asked if they ever broke even, Lewis replied, “We never had a business plan. But once, an artist who’d gotten on stage the night before to do her first show in decades broke down in tears on the way to the airport and told us it that it was the first time they felt that anyone had taken them seriously as an artist. My thought was, ‘Yes. I think we broke even just fine, thanks.’ ”