by Chip Schramm

The aptly named North Mississippi All-Stars are based around the drums and slide guitar sound of brothers Cody and Luther Dickinson (see the South region section from the month of October '99 for more background and an interview with Luther.) The NMAS are like a musical amoeba, expanding to include many other musicians form their home state at various times, then contracting back down to the basic sounds and rhythms that define the North Mississippi hill country's blues and rock tradition.  The mainstream media has begun to catch on to the All-Stars, and the first point of reference is always their father, Jim.  Jim Dickinson is an icon of the worldwide music community, producing and/or playing with such legends at Ry Corder, Bob Dylan, and Duane Allman, just to name three.  To dismiss the bloodkinship of the Dickinson clan as incidental to the success of the NMAS would be foolish. However, only after speaking with the band and listening to the music they create, both live and in the studio, it becomes obvious that their attitudes about life and living are what make their music so soulful and sincere.

In addition to the Dickinson brothers, the North Mississippi All-Stars feature Chris Chew, a childhood friend of Luther's on bass.  With a gospel music background and a day job working as a truck driver, Chew epitomizes the hard working man of blues lore.  As the popularity of the All-Stars has continued to grow, Chew has taken to the road more often, even missing an occasional Sunday service at his church in Holly Springs.  There is no doubt that the roots of the NMAS and their material are derived from the blues tradition, but their stage presence lends itself perfectly to the jamband scene.  They never shy away from sharing the spotlight with other musicians, from Warren Haynes and Allen Woody of Gov't Mule, to Chris Wood of Medeski, Martin and Wood and Jojo Hermann of Widespread Panic.  The have included fellow Mississippi native Patrick Smith on keyboard during one tour and also consider Gary Burnside a permanent All-Star.  Theirs is an unselfish tradition, borrowing from the past and melding their own unique style around blues standards without compromising their roots or creative drive in the process.

Listening to the North Mississippi All-Stars play for the first time is like tasting an original dish from a famous chef.  You can identify the various ingredients that make up the meal, but can't quite put a finger on what it is that makes them so special.  Both live and in the studio, the NMAS incorporate influences from at least a dozen blues and rock legends, from Fred McDowell to R.L. Burnside to Jerry Garcia to Duane Allman and back again.  Perhaps the greatest part of their father's influence comes from their production work in the studio.  At the ages of 23 and 26 respectively, Cody and Luther have already recorded and produced their first album almost entirely by themselves.  Luther even produced the first and only album of living legend Otha Turner, one of the original purveyors of the drum and fife tradition.  A review and analysis of "Shake Hands With Shorty," the All-Stars new album, appears in the CD review section this month.  I had the opportunity to chat with the All-Stars again right after their Spring tour ended.  Excerpts from my conversation with Cody Dickinson follow.

C:  Shake 'Em On Down is the first song on your new album.  I borrowed an album from a buddy of mine down the street, R.L. Burnside's "Too Bad Jim," and I noticed that that is the first track on his album, too!

D:  Is it really?

C:  Yeah, I know you guys share a lot of influence, and you have Gary and Cedric Burnside playing on your album, too.  You have 11 special guests on Shake Hands With Shorty.  Where exactly does their influence come in?

D:  Well, on "Shake 'Em On Down," we kind of electrify the Mississippi Fred McDowell version.  Of course, hearing R.L. do it is great, they do it a bit differently.  We totally redo his Goin' Down South and we've learned a lot of stuff from R.L.  I tell you, jamming with Cedric and Gary is great because I grew up around these guys, and Cedric has done so much touring that he's a total pro.  We get together and just have a good old time, drumming and stuff.  Lately, Gary Burnside has been touring with us playing second guitar and that's been great.

C:  I saw that somewhere you have said that he's a full time All-Star.  Is that from here on or just for the time being?

D:  Yeah, we're going to do a lot of stuff with him on the next record. He's learned all the material that we do live.  He went out with us on this last Galactic tour.  We've been having a great time with those guys.  It's awesome.  They have a new record coming out, too.  It's great.  They've been killing live.  We've been hanging out a lot and I told them that they gave us our first real taste of the big-time shows.  They do big shows, man.  The last show we did with them was in Chicago.  It was the second time that both our bands had played that town.  We didn't know how many people were gonna come, but it ended up selling out at like 1,600 people. It was a huge show.

C:  Cedric and Gary play drums and bass respectively, what is their relation?

D:  Gary is R.L.'s youngest son and Cedric's uncle.  Cedric is R.L.'s grandson.  Gary plays some bass on the record on Goin' Down South and All Night Long.  But live, Chris Chew plays bass and Gary plays second guitar.  Sometimes he and I swap up and I play guitar and he plays drums.  Gary's great.  He writes songs.  He has Tyrone Davis-type R&B originals and he also has blues like Delta blues and Hill-Country blues originals.

C:  I read in the liner notes of Too Bad Jim that Fred McDowell actually taught R.L. how to play guitar.  You guys are kind of following the progression in that line.  I know that in the New York Times once they labeled you guys as "carrying on the Fred McDowell Legacy" or something like that.  Do you ever feel like that puts too much pressure on you?

D:  Well, what's cool about that is that ultimately we're just a rock-and-roll band.  The shows we do, to me, because the music is so traditional and the songs are so old, have an interesting twist.  I think it's great.  It's not really a burden that we're spreading the tradition. It's great because all these kids that we're doing these shows for are hearing these songs that they might never hear if we weren't out there playing them.  Plus whenever we go a long way away, (we're about to go to Europe for a month,) it gives us a sound of our own, or at least we share with people where we're from.  That's what it's all about.

C:  I know Patrick Smith has played keyboard with you sometimes on the road.  Are y'all members of the Mississippi musicians union or what?

D:  Well, the whole concept of the All-Stars was to have a group of people playing together.  It was Luther's concept of playing the Fred McDowell songs onstage.  He was listening to "Crazy 'Bout You" and just had that idea one day down in Water Valley, Mississippi.  The main cities that the All-Stars started to boom in first were Oxford, Mississippi, Memphis, and Vicksburg.  For some reason, we hit it in Vicksburg before Jackson even. We met Patrick through Wes Perriman who runs the biscuit company down there.  They're good friends and Patrick plays there all the time.  We had him sit in on keys and I thought he was just amazing.  We even took him on one Galactic tour.  He's so busy with his own band [see the South Region section from March for more on that] but it's been great knowing him and jamming with him.

C:  What's it like balancing life on the road with life in the studio?  I know you guys are on the road almost non-stop and you had spent quite a bit of time working on the album in the meantime.  Luther even does some producing work.  Have you felt a little burned out at all?

D:  No, it's funny.  When we go on tour, we open for quite a few different bigger bands.  We play these theaters in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio, more than a lot of the headlining acts.   When we load in and do sound-check, the house guys there are like, "Hey, we just saw y'all two weeks ago!" and it's true.  We've been on the road non-stop.  We just did a seven-week run with one week in-between.  That one week off we had, Jon Spencer was at our place in Coldwater, just waiting for us to start cutting.  The whole week home was spent in the studio.  We cut what's gonna be an album that's gonna be released as "Jon Spencer and the North Mississippi All-Stars."  It's bad-ass.  I'm really excited about that.

C:  Did you all play on that together?

D:  Yeah, I played drums and bass and Luther played guitar.  I'm really psyched about it.  I don't get burned out or bogged down, because each and every day I'm making progress.  The progress becomes more and more obvious. I've geared my whole life towards it, so I'm ready.

C:  There are a couple of tracks on the album that really strike me.  I got the album right before I went on a long road-trip, so I wore it out, right out of the case.  There are points on some tracks, like Po' Black Maddie, where I can hear some Allman Brothers style riffs, and then you break it down much like John Bonham of Led Zepplin, with the quick drum solo in the middle.  Are these influences incidental to your sound or is their inclusion intentional?

D:  Well, in a lot of the drums parts at least there are a lot of direct references.  I reference Mitch Mitchell in that song, and Robert Barnett of Big Ass Truck.  I play a lot of his stuff on the record.  We definitely wear the influences on our sleeve.  As far as the Allman Brothers progression on Po' Black Maddie, it just seemed so obvious, we started doing it onstage just for fun and it became part of it.  When we went in to do the record, we tried to capture all the good stuff we'd come up with onstage on the last couple of tours.  We just wanted to throw it right in there.  The transition into Skinny Woman, we were all about that because that's exactly what we try to do live-

C:  Segue right into it.

D:  We like to Segue into different songs.

C:  I know you want to try and make the album and live experience equal so people can appreciate them both.

D:  Right, exactly.  We're gonna freak out on the next couple of records and stretch things out even more.  On this one, we had a lot of music we needed to document.

C:  I did a little bit of research to try and learn some more about the songs on your album.  I know a couple of the songs you have on the album like Station Blues, KC Jones, and Someday Baby I've heard from other band that have similar influences, many coming from Memphis.  Sometimes I've seen these songs recorded under different names. I know Station Blues I've seen listed as Sittin' On Top Of The World.

D:  Oh definitely.

C:  Would you say this is more a result of the oral tradition passing blues music down from generation to generation or is it simply because these are your own rock interpretations of these songs?

D:  Yeah, what we call Station Blues is kind of a combination of that and Sittin' On Top of the World the way that Otha does it. That's a direct reference.  Of course there are a lot of songs called KC Jones.  It's kind of like Stag-O-Lee or whatever, but we do the Furry Lewis version that we learned from Mudboy and the Neutrons.  That's total Memphis.  That's good though.  You're absolutely right, man.  It's a strange hybrid.  Even though we try to do these songs like we've heard them before, even more gets lots in translation.  That's part of the artist's interpretation, I guess.  The lyrics are so great on those old tunes.  It's hard to resist playing them.

C:  Sure, I know the Grateful Dead recorded an acoustic variation of KC Jones and called it On the Road Again.  The Memphis Jug Band cut that as a 78 back in the 20's.  You guys also have your own Jug band, [Gutbucket] of course.  They also recorded a song called Stealin' which was the B-side to the Dead's first release Don't Ease Me In and they did some of these other-

D:  You mean "Stealin', Stealin', pretty mama don't tell on me."  That song?  Gutbucket used to do a version of Stealin'.  That's cool, I didn't know that.

C:  Do you guys feel any influence from the Grateful Dead, or do you just share some of the same influences?

D:  Definitely in our live shows.  You can't help but think about it these days.  They were the ultimate live band.  But on that record, you know, there's more of the influence on All Night Long with the guitar solos that reference Lovelight.  That's a Dead reference, sort of.

C:  Via Bobby "Blue" Bland

D:  Yeah, that's one of the best records ever.  I love conjuring the [Dead's] spirits onstage.  They were just crazy.  The music they made was totally out there.  On the records, though, they had a totally original take on it.  The verses we did, like KC Jones, the riff I play on that on open tuning was the first thing I ever learned on guitar, literally.  Putting that song on the record was like putting the first thing I ever started playing on my first record, but it was the Mudboy and the Neutrons version, as far as that song goes.

C:  You've always told people that you love living in Northern Mississippi and would never move away, no matter how big your music gets.  Aside from the music itself, what's the most appealing thing to you about the Northern Mississippi and Memphis areas?

D:  Well, man, you know I've been pretty much all over the country, at least east of Mississippi.  There's just nothing like the girls in Mississippi.

C: True

D:  You know what I'm saying?  That's just special.  Plus getting to live right down the road from Otha and R.L. and all their families, the Kimbroughs, that's awesome.  It's just a beautiful country, the way it's so undiscovered still to me in a way.  I tell ya, though, we go across the country, from city to city and see the big cities and the mountains and everything.  There's just nothing quite like coming home to Mississippi. If I lived somewhere else, it wouldn't be like coming home.  It would feel like I'm still traveling.  You know what I mean?  I was born here in Memphis.  I just love it.  My dad tried to leave.  He lived in Miami for a while and that didn't work.  I'm going to learn from his experience and not do it.

C:  One last question.  What gets you more fired up: having a brilliant moment onstage or having a brainstorm in the studio?

D:  I had a funny conversation with Jon Spencer in the last session we did. We were talking about the difference between being in the studio and being onstage, and I told him I loved making a good record and the studio was where it was at.  He said "Don't you love it when people clap for you?" That kind of sums it up.  I love making a good record because it's timeless and it's a document of where we are right now, but going out and building up momentum playing live music is a whole different thing.  I've learned to love them both equally.  They create a good balance.

Check out the CD review section for a review of the All-Stars' debut album, "Shake Hands With Shorty."

[My song research for this interview was aided greatly by the work of Blair Jackson in his book "Goin' Down the Road:  A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion" -CS]