These Hills Are Alive

By ERIC POOLEY

Near the town of Coldwater in Tate County, Miss., where the kudzu hills rise gently from the Delta flatlands in the west, there's a gravel track that runs through stands of scrub oak and pine to reach a dusty clearing: two single-wide trailers, a small vegetable patch, a bluetick hound sleeping in the lee of a faded green Lincoln. Music is in the air--the fierce, hypnotic boogie known as hill-country blues--because this is the headquarters of the North Mississippi Allstars.

A hot little blues-rock band that's bringing the sound of the Mississippi hills to a brand-new audience, the Allstars are three men in their 20s, two of them white and one black: Luther Dickinson, who sings and plays snaky slide guitar; his brother Cody, a monstrously talented drummer; and their friend Chris Chew, who adds fleet-fingered bass and the vocal harmonies he learned at the Rising Sun Baptist Church in nearby Hernando. The Allstars spend most of their time on the road (their van, Dirty Red, has logged 53,000 miles in the past 18 months alone), fusing the punkish energy of juke-joint blues with rock-guitar solos and hip-hop beats--and getting neo-hippie kids twirling to old Mississippi Fred McDowell tunes and hard-core kids moshing and crowd surfing to primal Robert Johnson licks. Their debut CD, a raucous collection of hill-country standards called Shake Hands with Shorty, is generating ecstatic reviews, and though purists complain that the Allstars play adulterated blues, most folks in north Mississippi (and on college campuses) aren't interested in museum-ready music. They'd rather dance.

It's a muggy Tuesday afternoon, and electric blues is pumping out of a ramshackle red barn that sits in the weeds 50 yards beyond the Dickinsons' trailer homes. Outside the barn, a few people are drinking beer and swapping tall tales about mysterious guitar pickers and the talismanic powers of black-cat bones. Inside, Luther and Cody are jamming with two legendary blues families: the sons and grandsons of R.L. Burnside, 72, and of the late David ("Junior") Kimbrough, both giants of hill-country boogie. On the walls, a gallery of American icons--Betty Page, Casey Jones, Father Flanagan, Mississippi John Hurt--keep watch as Cody, a skinny 24-year-old with Prince Valiant hair and a powerful chest, works a zebra-striped drum kit. With his mouth open, head cocked and eyes scrunched in an expression of mind-bending wonder, he sets up a martial beat taken from the fife-and-drum bands that have been playing in these hills since the Civil War, then dances around it with virtuoso rock and jazz accents. Luther, 27, his soft features framed by thick black curls, finger picks his Gibson hollow body and uses a bottleneck slide to make it skitter and howl. Garry Burnside locks in to the groove on bass (Chew is off working today, driving a truck for Williams-Sonoma), David Kimbrough Jr. adds a slinky guitar part, and Kenny Kimbrough wails on a conga. The instruments chase each other around the barn, hanging on a single chord and repeating a riff over and over with subtle variations and rising power while the folks outside dance in the dirt. This is trance music--the kind of sonic moonshine that has been served up for decades in the juke joints of north Mississippi--and it raises a question: How did these shaggy Dickinson kids learn to play it so well?

Part of the answer lies in that name. Luther and Cody are the sons of Jim Dickinson, legendary Memphis roots-rock producer, pianist and raconteur who has played with Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, among many others, while producing everyone from Ry Cooder to the Replacements to Toots & the Maytals. He exposed his sons to the blues from an early age (when hill-country master Fred McDowell died in 1972, Luther attended his funeral in utero), and the boys grew up at their father's sessions. "Studio" was the first word out of Luther's mouth. They formed a band when Luther was nine and Cody six. A few years later, in 1986, Dickinson and his wife Mary Lindsay moved the family from a town east of Memphis to Hernando in the Mississippi hills because the boys were unhappy at a private school filled with white kids. In Hernando, they went to a public school filled with black ones, and felt as if they had come home.

"I can't really explain it, but moving here changed everything for us," says Luther. "I think Dad knew it would."

By the time Luther was in high school, he and Cody were playing in a punk band that evolved into what they call "postpunk thrash-rock fusion." But something simpler was tugging at them. When Luther was old enough to drive, he and Cody began showing up at Junior Kimbrough's Juke Joint, near Holly Springs, soaking up the music of the Kimbroughs and Burnsides. (The juke, a mecca for blues hounds from all over, burned down last April.) Then Luther started visiting the area's oldest living bluesman, a 92-year-old goat farmer named Otha Turner, who presides over the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band in Senatobia. Turner became his mentor. "To learn from a first-generation bluesman is soooo cooool," Luther drawls. "I mean, Alan Lomax recorded him! If Howlin' Wolf was still alive, Otha would be older than Wolf. Otha, he's got these wild, silver eyes. He's like a spiritual guru. He lives in a time machine."

Using techniques learned from his father, Luther began recording Turner's band. (Rolling Stone called the result, Everybody Hollerin' Goat, one of the five best blues records of the 1990s.) After a while, Turner let Luther sit in--and taught him to value feeling over flash. When Luther's playing became speedy and banal, Turner would shake his head; when Luther started to make it simple and right, Turner would nod. And when Luther really found the zone, Turner threw his hat down, stomped his feet and shouted--and his pressboard-and-tin shack vibrated like a big drum. "Once that vibration got inside me," says Luther, "it was all over."

He became obsessed with country blues--the way licks and lyrics moved from musician to musician and region to region, the subtle differences between the music of the hill country and its better-known cousin, the Delta blues. And on a sweltering night in 1996, while lying half asleep in a friend's trailer listening to some old blues, Luther had an epiphany. "The whole thing just came to me. We're gonna play electric versions of these old acoustic tunes and call ourselves the North Mississippi Allstars." After a few months of woodshedding, they made their debut at a Memphis punk club, on a bill with Turner and R.L. Burnside. "The crowd was bigger than anything we'd ever had," Cody says. "People were dancing right out of the box. We knew we were on to something."

After a year of hard touring and residencies at some of the better tourist traps on Beale Street, the brothers lost their first bass player, recruited their huge, beatific friend Chris Chew and hit the road again, becoming mainstays of the Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia alt-rock circuit. They radiated so much talent, innocence and enthusiasm that an impressive roster of stars--Lucinda Williams, Beck, Warren Haynes, Al Kooper, Widespread Panic--have asked one or both to sit in. And as they developed a following and played longer sets as headliners, they found themselves opening up the hill-country sound with long, Allman Brothers-style jams. "It happened by accident," says Luther. "The music just stre-e-etched."

"Left to our own devices," says Cody, "we're gonna rock. We can't help it."

Hanging out in their trailer late at night, Cody is deep into Tomb Raider on his Sony PlayStation, maneuvering Lara Croft through this or that circle of hell while Luther picks some minor-key licks on an ancient archtop. A moth flies out of the guitar's F-hole, and the brothers watch it flutter around the room. Luther sings a plaintive blues: "Don't bury me in this cursed ground/ Don't bury me in this cursed ground/ When I die let me fly/ I'm nothin' but a sound."

The words seem familiar, but a visitor who thinks he knows something about the blues can't quite place them. Who wrote that one? "That's mine," says Luther, bashful but proud. "Our next record is gon' be all originals. But it's still gon' be hill-country music. I mean, we're not leavin' here." They can't; the hills are in them now.