Free MP3 Download: North Mississippi Allstars' "Shake," from 2008's Hernando:
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Shoveling up huge scoops of Delta clay and hill country dirt is guitarist Luther Dickinson’s specialty. By the time he and his brother Cody started their North Mississippi All Stars in 1996, Dickinson had “been engulfed by playing in the hill country blues tradition for so long I just didn’t know how to write a rock and roll song anymore,” said Dickinson.
But he hasn’t forgotten how to play ’em. Dickinson’s latest gig is as lead guitarist for the Black Crowes ― a band synonymous with meat-and-potatoes rock and roll. And he blasts scalding riffs and licks, including his trademark kaleidoscopic slide, all over the Crowes’ new Warpaint and throughout the shows on their current tour.
“In some ways this gig is a breeze because I love playing lead guitar, and with the All Stars every day I have to agonize over writing a set list and getting the lyrics straight,” said Dickinson by phone from his Mississippi home during a brief break from the road.
“What makes it hard is that [the Black Crowes] are a big band, with keyboards and back-up singers, compared to the All Stars trio, and they play really loud. In quieter situations I can play better, so the biggest challenge is playing at that volume.
“The best shows for me are the ones where we have to play quieter, and I can just do my best. But I also like the shows where it’s so loud it makes me really angry and I just have to play through it. I’ve never drawn on anger as a force to push my music before.”
It’s not that Dickinson’s never tried to ― to paraphrase John Lydon ― use “anger as an energy.” Luther’s earliest musical outings were playing all sorts of roots music with his drummer-brother supporting their legendary pianist-producer dad in
Jim Dickinson & the Can’t Hardly Playboys. But then Luther and Cody followed that experience by forming D.D.T., a scrappy punk outfit.
“I grew up with the roots music side, because my dad and his friends were heavily influenced by [bluesmen] Furry Lewis, Bukka White and Fred McDowell, because they grew up around them,” said Dickinson. “Punk rock was my own rebellious journey.
“To tell the truth, I could never break through into writing punk rock songs ― the kind of angular riffage that got me excited about it,” he admitted, citing Black Flag’s Gregg Ginn as the player who most lured him to try. “I was just too rootsy.”
Luther was 13 when Jim Dickinson relocated the family from the West Coast back to his birth region just south of Memphis in order to, as Jim puts its, further his sons’ musical education.
It worked. There in the Mississippi hills Luther became friends with the Burnside, Turner and Kimbrough clans and their respective patriarchs: R.L., Othar, and Junior. Turner and Burnside became his chief mentors in the region’s droning, hypnotic style of blues.
Luther had already recorded an album-and-a-single’s worth of Turner’s ancient fife-and-drum music ― some caught on the CD
Everybody Hollerin’ Goat ― before Tuner learned Luther played guitar.
“When he discovered I played guitar, he really took me under his wing,” Dickinson related. “For a few years I’d bring my guitar over to Othar’s and play for him as much as I could.
“The thing about Othar is you could sit around him all day and play and he’d say, ‘Ah, you ain’t doin’ shit.’ But the second you’d play something he liked he’d jump up and start singing and dancing. He’d electrify the moment.”
Dickinson also toured with Burnside. “What I took from R.L. is the idea that wherever he played, he turned it into a Mississippi juke joint.”
Thus inspired, Dickinson kick-started the North Mississippi All Stars with a repertoire mostly nicked from Burnside and Fred McDowell. The group has evolved since their 2000 debut
Shake Hands with Shorty.
Polaris, in 2003, added the Allman Brothers’ mojo to their musical gris-gris bag, and 2005’s
Electric Blue Watermelon was a hippie blowout, reflecting their success in the jam scene. This year’s
Hernando, named after the north Mississippi town best known as the home of Jerry Lee Lewis, is a filthier beast thanks to Dickinson’s experimentation with guitar tones. His amps seem packed with mud and kudzu, sparking tunes that blend the aesthetics of stoner rock with old-school boogie ’n’ roll.
“The idea was to make a really aggressive blues-rock record,” said Dickinson. So Dickinson did his part by driving a series of amps ― a vintage 12-inch Gibson combo, a Fender Concert, a Marshall Bluesbreaker, and a Silvertone 2 x 12 ― two at a time with a distortion pedal custom-built by fellow Mississippi blues upstart
Alvin Youngblood Hart.
Live with the Black Crowes and the All Stars or, for that matter, the new Cody-led North Mississippi Hill Country Revue, Dickinson now chooses a Marshall half-stack with a buffet of Gibson guitars.
“I played Les Pauls mostly with the All Stars,” said Dickinson, “but lately I’ve been crazy for SGs. My favorite guitars are an Epiphone Casino that was one of my first guitars, and an ES-175 I got from Gibson, but because of volume and feedback issues I mostly just use those hollowbodies in the studio. The coolest guitar I have right now I got from the Gibson Custom Shop. It’s an SG with a Bigsby tailpiece and Firebird pickups. It’s really sweet and bright. And I’m getting one of the reissue Les Paul Goldtops with P-90s that everybody’s going crazy for.
“I need to carry a lot of guitars with me for the Black Crowes because their songs have so many different tunings,” he said. “But the criteria for my guitars are pretty simple: They have to feel good and sound good. Then, I know it’s going to be fun to play.”