Music and spirituality go hand in hand. Ask many musicians, and you’ll get some variation of the same realization. A perfect example of that inevitability is the story of one local musician: Dave Mercer, a decades-long performer, local band staple and near-legend of the Augusta music scene. Some of y’all might know him as “Muz.”
Pick a weekend and drop into any of the local haunts around town like Fox’s Lair, Metro Pub and Coffeehouse, Cantina Local or The Boll Weevil Café & Sweetery, and you’ll most likely find Mercer sitting on a stool, solo or with bandmates, singing songs he’s written over the years as well as crowd pleasers that echo from every generation.
Mercer let music permeate the very fabric of who he is from an early age, yet sometimes that decision came at a very high cost. It’s easy for folks to bypass an entertainer’s backstory, but knowing the journey that brought them in front of the mic can be just as transcendent as the songs they sing.
As Mercer’s skill increased, so did his interest in other instruments like the drums.
He and his two friends had the makings of a band.
Born and raised in the Savannah River Region, Mercer grew up in Grovetown when there were just dirt roads, an IGA and a Fun Time Pizza. His first introduction to music came through church piano lessons, spurred by his grandmother. Like most young kids, he plucked around on the keys to please the adult in the room. He learned a few chords that came in handy down the road when the real song bug took hold at 13. That’s when Mercer discovered his mother’s lonely old guitar sitting in the corner of her room, and when the music thing started to take root.
Mercer spent the next few years with his friend from church, surrounded by printed pages of tablature, teaching each other songs by their favorite bands. As Mercer’s skill increased, so did his interest in other instruments like the drums. He and his two friends had the makings of a band.
At 16, when he wasn’t tearing up the roads out by Euchee Creek in his ’89 Chevy Celebrity or playing with the youth band at church, Mercer was opening up for regional touring punk acts like The Independents and Decrepit with his first real band, The Inmates. They made their own merch, recorded their own CDs, and after a few bouts with sports and even horse riding, Mercer felt assured of his calling. Music would be his life.
You can read the rest of this article in the August/September 2026 issue of Augusta magazine.
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