North Mississippi Allstars

North Mississippi Allstars

EVERYONE'S HOLLERIN' ALL STARS

These Roots Rock Revivalists Are Heading to the Hills
The theme is Mississippi hill country blues; variations on the theme include forays into Chicago and the Mississippi Delta, with nods to traditional country, Allmans-style improvisation, Hendrix's distortion-rich fury, and the current lingua franca by way of drum samples and loops. On SHAKE HANDS WITH SHORTY, the North Mississippi All Stars -- comprised of brothers Cody and Luther Dickinson (sons of legendary Memphis producer-musician Jim Dickinson) and redoubtable bassist Chris Chew -- have delivered an accomplished, searing document that is at once about a hundred years old and utterly contemporary. Cut in the Dickinson's home studio in Coldwater, MS, and coproduced by the Dickinson brothers, the album captures the fire and arc of the jamming journey that is an All-Stars set. Shortly before the release of SHAKE HANDS WITH SHORTY, Luther -- who also produced Otha Turner's EVERYBODY HOLLERIN' GOAT, cited by Rolling Stone as one the essential blues albums of the '90s -- offered some insights into the All Stars' general mind set about things via cell phone from the All Stars' van as they motorvated across Pennsylvania to another gig.

bn.com: You have definite ideas about how you wanted to represent the All Stars on record. What were trying to say about the band on this album?

Luther Dickinson: We had all this music we had worked up playing live over the last three years, and we just wanted to get that down, try to capture as much of that spontaneous interplay that we do live; make sure that each song represented that to where people who have heard us over the years will like the record; and people who buy the record and come see us will find it relevant enough that it doesn't feel like two totally separate things. We still experimented a lot and did whatever we wanted. The All Stars are part of a tradition, and it's important to go back and play those old songs and do our thing to 'em.

bn: What do you look for in a song that tells you the All-Stars can do something with it?

LD: I like something with a good beat, a nice riff, a good groove to it, and a good vocal melody that we can all work with. And I just love those ancient blues lyrics. It's funny, a lot of the songs come from solo guitar artists, playing acoustic guitar and singing. And that's the challenge, 'cause you hear that stuff and you think if you had Cody rockin' the drums on a number like that, you could really take this riff somewhere. We just listen for a good riff and a good groove. I love that hill country melody style where you have a minor scale type of riff going, a blues-type riff, and a major, almost country-sounding melody on top, a great harmonic contrast that we can harmonize.

bn: You've touched on this already, but I'd like to get your take on it. Mississippi blues is not one style of blues, but many styles -- Bentonia blues is not like Clarksdale blues, and those kind of subsets exist all over the Delta. And hill country blues is not like Delta blues. How do you define the difference between hill country and the other styles?

LD: The other styles each have their own idiosyncracies. The hill country style, I always bring it back to the fife and drum. Because if you had a Delta player play "My Babe" or a song that Fred McDowell would do, he'd do it in the I-IV-V barrelhouse piano style; but Fred would play it with just the vocal melody on the slide and a rhythmic bass pattern on the low strings, finger-picking, right? And he doesn't change the chords -- it stays on that one note of the open tuning throughout the whole melody, right? R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough do the same thing, each in their own way. To me it's like the fife and drum, 'cause you have two, three drummers playing this beat, and the fife playing the vocal melody, like slide guitar. To me that exemplifies the hill country style. The minor blues riff with the major key vocal melody on top creates a contrast between the major and the minor. R.L. Burnside does that a lot, Fred McDowell did it a lot too. But to me, I think it goes back to the fife and drum, and I've heard Burnside and McDowell say that too. Then when I get the honor to play with Otha, that's what I always try to do -- tune up to the fife and play like he and Fred McDowell were playing together.

bn: You said the All Stars are part of a tradition. What do you feel the band stands for?

LD: Freedom. I think that's what it all stands for and that's why people love it so much. Rock 'n' roll, southern music, Elvis, integration -- rock 'n' roll stands for freedom. The lifestyle, traveling, playing and doing what you love -- I think that's what it boils down to.

bn: You and Cody co-produced this album, and you produced that great Otha Turner album. Do you see yourself continuing to produce the All Stars?

LD: No, we're not going to take that heavy responsibility on our next record. I think we're just gonna write the songs and let our dad have it.

bn: Your dad's going to produce your next album?

LD: Yeah! Definitely. But we knew we had to do this one. He likes to record stuff fresh in the studio -- not only first or second take, but first or second time it's ever been played! That's what he's going for, that's what he likes. So we had to do this one, because we wanted to make a record of what we do live.

bn: Did he critique this album after you finished it?

LD: He was real happy, really pleased. We'd have been crushed if he wasn't. We didn't know if he would like it. But it touched him, it really did.

bn: Does the road go on forever?

LD: It's great, though. We're working on our next record out here on the road. We've got a voltage adapter in the van that we can plug two things into. So we plug in the sampler, and we have this portable four-track with internal microphones, a Fostex X14 -- it's really hip, man -- and we plug these jokers in.

bn: So you're recording in the van?

LD: Yeah! We've got drums, guitar, bass. We plug it up to the stereo system. We have a tape adapter. And then if we're not doing that we have the TV and the PlayStation to pass the time. We're jammin', man!

--David McGee