New Sounds as Old as the Hills

In the lobby of a grand Hollywood hotel, all the out-of-towners gawk as extras for a period film gather amid racks of costumes. But North Mississippi Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson is far more excited by the sight of an ordinary brown shipping box that bassist Chris Chew has just retrieved from the desk clerk.

“Free strings!” exults the easygoing, deep-voiced musician as he grabs a handful of small, black-and-red boxes out of the package. “Man, how many years have we paid for these things?”

More years than you might think. Luther, 28, and his drummer brother, Cody, 24, first got guitars when they were barely grade-schoolers growing up in rural north Mississippi. The sons of legendary rock keyboardist and producer Jim Dickinson, they’ve been playing together in various bands for almost as long, trying out everything from punk to roots rock to what their father wryly terms “a kind of unfortunate fusion.”

In 1996, after forming the Allstars with their childhood pal Chew, 27, the Dickinson brothers finally settled on their distinctive style, a modernized yet authentic take on the ancient hill-country blues kept alive by their legendary neighbors R.L. Burnside, Othar Turner, and the late David “Junior” Kimbrough.

Burnside and Kimbrough came to larger fame in the ‘90s, when they were “discovered” by the Fat Possum record label, and Luther’s mentor, Turner, 92, plays perhaps the purest form of this regional style, a distinctly haunting fife-and-drum music that dates to the Civil War and sounds as if it’s being channeled straight from the Earth’s core.

The band quickly built a grass-roots reputation on the strength of its live shows. The trio rocked-up a bunch of classic hill-country tunes for its 2000 debut album, “Shake Hands With Shorty,” even recruiting Turner himself, along with Burnside’s sons Garry and Cedric, to play on it. The collection garnered positive reviews, mainstream attention and a contemporary blues Grammy nomination.

Indeed, the Allstars have taken hill-country music about as far from Kimbrough’s fabled backwoods juke joint as it could go.

“We’ve got blues, rock ‘n ‘roll, gospel, punk, hip-hop--it’s really the Slim Shady generation,” says Luther, basking in the sun by the hotel pool with his bandmates.

Indeed, some believe the Allstars could become the 21st century’s answer to the Allman Brothers Band, turning a whole new generation on to the joys of Southern rock.

“I dunno about that,” says Luther. “We just want to take it to the people and keep it real.”

Keeping it real has gotten the Allstars pretty far. But everyone involved knows the true test of whether the band can go to the next level will come with its forthcoming album, featuring almost all original tunes.

‘The talent is definitely there,” says Dave Bartlett, co-owner of Massachusetts-based, roots rock-oriented indie Tone-Cool Records, the Allstars’ label. “I’ve always thought of ‘Shake Hands With Shorty’ as comparable to the Allmans’ first record, since it’s just a wildly different take on the blues while still drawing on the roots and feeling of the music.”

Bartlett acknowledges that broad commercial success today is often tied to radio airplay, but he believes the Allstars can achieve wider fame through the same combination of touring and word-of-mouth that has served them so well. “[Radio airplay] would help us reach that Allman Brothers-type level sooner,” he says, “but we’ll get there soon enough.”

Although the players understand that the modern touches make their music appealing to a younger audience, their strengths are rooted in tradition. Even the enormous, affable but no-nonsense Chew, whose duties also include shooing Cody’s numerous female fans off the tour bus, draws his unique walking bass style and vocal harmonies from his family’s gospel legacy.

The Dickinson brothers grew up with their dad’s extensive record collection, and their tastes run the gamut from Hendrix and the Allmans to Black Flag and Rage Against the Machine. As kids, they absorbed their father’s work with countless artists from Ry Cooder and legendary drummer Jim Keltner to the Replacements to his own longtime group, Mud Boy & the Neutrons, which also mixed up blues and roots rock.

Everything left an impression on the boys, but in the Dickinson household (which included their mother, Mary Lindsay), learning about music was a casual thing.

“It wasn’t that age-old story of the [Beach Boys’] Wilsons or whatever. You know, the control-freak father,” says Cody, a rail-thin, pensive-yet-extroverted young man who unabashedly whips off his T-shirt after a few minutes in the heat. “It was not like that at all.”

The brothers always had guitars, drums and recording equipment within reach, Luther explains, but, “Dad told us, ‘Rock ‘n’ roll is self-taught.’ ”

Jim Dickinson knows what he’s talking about. A respected figure on the Memphis music scene since the mid-’60s, he has played keyboards for recordings by countless artists, from the Rolling Stones to Aretha Franklin to the Flamin’ Groovies. His extensive producing credits include Big Star, Mudhoney and Primal Scream. His approach to instructing his sons may have been deliberately hands-off, but the message came through loud and clear.

“Luther came to me with his guitar at one point, trying to get me to teach him,” the elder Dickinson says in a separate interview. “And I said, ‘No. If I teach you, then you’ll play like me.’ ”

Yet the boys learned in ways even their father didn’t notice until later. “In the ‘80s I was working with Ry Cooder a lot, doing movie scores,” Jim Dickinson recalls. “I would play them the tapes, but it really didn’t cross my mind that they were absorbing it at that level

Even more profound was Luther’s experience with Turner, a close contemporary of the late, influential bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell. In addition to gaining from Turner a fundamental understanding of how to play truly emotional and incendiary guitar, Luther has produced two of the blues elder’s critically acclaimed albums.

“The thing about hill-country blues is that it’s modern-day country blues,” Luther says. The Turner family, like the Burnsides and Kimbroughs, are living musical dynasties whose members play at their own juke joints and sprawling family picnics, perpetuating the age-old regional sound.

Jim Dickinson was impressed by how Luther’s adolescent friendship with Turner deepened over time. “I thought that kind of a relationship between a young white boy and an older black man was impossible,” he says. “Luther would play Fred McDowell songs for Othar, who was McDowell’s neighbor and lifelong friend. [Othar] would just shake his head and say, ‘No, that’s not right,’ until it was right, and then he’d jump up, holler, throw his hat on the floor, and say, ‘Boy, you’re playin’ it now!’ ”

Rendering the blues with enough feeling to satisfy a man like Turner requires not just life experience, but “black experience,” the elder Dickinson contends.

“Unless you to some extent participate in that culture, [that understanding] is not available to you. Until you’re onstage with a black musician who is much better than you are, and you make a mistake, and he turns around and looks at you, you don’t know what criticism is. That’s the way you learn to play in this neck of the woods.”

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What exactly is hill-country blues? Even listeners with only a passing fluency in the blues can hear the difference, Luther explains. “The Delta blues and the urban blues have chord progressions, and turnarounds, and a more traditional type of structure,” he says. “In hill-country blues, they simplify everything down to just rhythm and melody.”

But the Allstars don’t play pure hill-country blues. “Cody’s rocking up the drums with a hip-hop beat,” Luther says. “His drums are the key to modernizing it.”

An accurate assessment, to judge by the group’s recent performance at the Roxy, where an audience of fresh-faced kids and grizzled veterans grooved along together. The trio alternately thrashed with the fury of a punk band, noodled like the early Grateful Dead and boogied like a fiercer version of the Allmans.

They hope to release their second album this summer, and a lot is riding on how well the Allstars’ own material is received. Judging from the handful of smokin’ new numbers they played at the Roxy, the future is bright.

Not that Luther expects his work to match the music that inspired him. “Those songs have been passed down from generation to generation,” he says. “The ancient language of those lyrics is just unobtainable. Burnside is a national treasure, and there’s no way we can come even close to that.”

Instead, the Allstars see themselves as ambassadors of sorts, and their potential success as a way of spreading the word about the Turners, Burnsides and Kimbroughs whose legends have yet to be written.

“If we ever get powerful enough where we can bring the second-and third-generation hill-country musicians out on the road with us, and turn everybody else onto them, man, that would be great,” says Luther.

“We’re not just some sort of bluesy pop act,” adds Cody. “We’re playing music that represents not only us as people, but musically where we’re from. There’s a deeper meaning to it.”