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Hailing from New Orleans, Melissa A. Weber serves as curator of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, a division of Tulane University Special Collections. She also teaches a History of Urban Music course in the College of Music and Media at Loyola University New Orleans. As a researcher and historian who is pursuing her M.A. in musicology, she has presented papers related to popular music studies at various academic conferences. In her spare time over the past two decades, she has hosted her weekly Soul Power show on WWOZ FM community radio in New Orleans and a monthly program on Gilles Peterson's Worldwide FM. Also under the artist moniker of DJ Soul Sister, she has won awards for her live performances, and has been featured in Nelson George's Finding the Funk documentary and the book Dust and Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting.

For the Bonus Beats #4 Break, Weber has a conversation with violinist Gina Kronstadt about the golden era of string sections in popular dance music during the 1970s and early 1980s. Krondstadt's playing can be heard on hit singles for The Jacksons, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Stevie Wonder, to name a few.