Tag: jim dickinson

MIXTAPE: John Murry’s Southern Soundtrack

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When we needed a Mixtape selected for a Southern soundtrack, we knew John Murry was our guy. After all, he is related to William Faulkner.

The Connells — “Lay Me Down”

A song from a pair of North Carolina attorneys and their band about a child they knew who received a bicycle for his 11th birthday, rode it away from home on his own for the first time the next day, fell into a ditch, and broke both of his legs. It rained. The little guy slowly drowned as the water rose.

Lead Belly — “You Don’t Know My Mind”

Though he sang his way out of prison not once, but twice, I seriously doubt it was this song that he sang for his white captors to gain his release — a song now white-washed and remembered fully in circles that have kept a tradition alive, added meaning and mirth to his verses by adding theirs while reviving and performing his original verses. Kenny Brown is a legend in Mississippi. His earliest version, recorded for Fat Possum, is still a touchstone for me.

Furry Lewis — “Judge Harsh Blues”

Another song about law and (dis)order, written by a man who preferred to be known as the one-legged street sweeper of Beale Street in Memphis than a bluesman. The Rolling Stones and U2 both gave him gifts of expensive guitars while he was still alive, living at the top of Beale. He pawned both the day he got them. FTW. RIP, Furry. Universality? All arrestees will soon (or do now) know about 11 months, 29 days … I can’t sign my name either, Furry. I have never known it.

Vic Chesnutt — “Isadora Duncan”

To dream he was dancing with Isadora, the woman who unabashedly danced and — with a sash pulled by the dance and the dancer — first exposed her bare breast to a stupefied, stupefying, and puritanical public … and to write of that dream from a wheelchair. Dance on, Vic. What beauty, what timelessness, what a gift he gave us (though “we” weren’t ready, perhaps, to be exposed to his transcendent and righteous indignation and powerfully fragile poetry).

Big Star — “Holocaust”

In honour and in memoriam of LX Chilton and Chris Bell (though not on this recording), I intend to drop acid later today and report back to no one. Big Star did not simply pave the way for “jangly indie pop”; they created powerful, powerful music with the help of the legend that was Mr. Jim Dickinson (living on, mister!) despite the “obstacles” Ardent and an entire industry placed in their way. Memphis was dying, Elvis was dead, and those listening were “… a wasted breath, you’re a sad eye, you’re a holocaust.” Basketballs, deflated, served as percussion, as there’s no need for a formal drum kit (just ask Stephen Merritt — or anyone who stomps while singing — or any kid in a kitchen with pots and pans and wooden spoons) when heart, broken or bruised, and soul are captured on tape, just as living and gone ghosts on celluloid prints were. William Eggleston playing piano on “Sister Lovers”? Magic. All of it was magic. And this kind of magic terrifies. What happened to them in that place that necessitated this bit of “horror”? No one ever asks the right questions, I suppose.

Jim Dickinson — “Wild Bill Jones”

Jim was the moral compass Southern music needed after the Civil Rights Movement, after Elvis’s death, after Yankee A&R folks no longer visited Memphis — “the capital of Mississippi” — anymore in search of “that” thing the South breeds. The master had tamed the beautiful beast, or so the beautiful beast would have their “master” believe. Bob Frank wrote this one. Kinda. He’s the greatest songwriter you’ve never heard.

Lost Sounds — “Ship of Monsters”  (Not on Spotify)

Jay Reatard was an incredibly complicated person, a lover and a fighter, as sensitive as they come, capable of an empathy that can only lead — in our world — to those blood visions that took him from us too early. I slept most nights at the People’s Temple near the old 616, making prank calls with Jay and the Oscars, and playing shows as a fake straight-edge hardcore band while inebriated. This record was being recorded at the time in the space at the bottom of the warehouse. Scott Patterson and I would listen to “Scenic” on the roof. Abe and I would listen to “Art Bell” in the kitchen. Jay broke a fucker’s arm with a bass for trying to attack him (and us). To fear goodness is silly. But common now. Leaves many stranded. He fought. For me, this was a record that attacked the core of something I lived inside, the first to do so. It taught me. Jay and Alicja Trout are that decency and violence the world needed and still demands. A better vision. No wave. Wtf that means.

Johnny Cash — “Delia’s Gone”

So many have done this. Christ, he did it justice, though. There’s a chair, a gun, suspicion, paranoia, direct Biblical allusions, and death. There ya go.

O.V. Wright — “A Nickel and a Nail”

His life was cut short by heroin, and his career defined by an ever-lurking fear; but he sang of it so well — of the terror of a twilight existence.

Townes Van Zandt — “Waiting Around to Die”“

He wrote this song after he was married. His new bride came to collect him to go to their wedding reception. He needed to finish writing a song down. He did. This is it.

Bob Dylan — “Mississippi”

Written at Zebra Ranch in Mississippi, this song is one that tells a universal truth — at least for those of us from *that* universe. How does Bob know? Same place, different centuries … “I stayed in Mississippi a day too long,” and can’t figure out what sin I committed I must now atone for. He somehow knows place as decay. As stagnant water in motion.

Sparklehorse — “Rainmaker”

Mark Linkous … His life, his words, his melodies simply resonate with me and reverberate in eerie ways. The rainmaker IS coming. He wasn’t “like” Wm Blake; he was cut of the same cloth. Wm Blake was “like” him, too. How odd we are, to see time as distances measurable. “All you’ve got to do is look in the sky and wish.”

Neutral Milk Hotel — “King of Carrot Flowers Pt 2 & 3”

Jeff used to borrow my amp and wrestle — and bite — my 110-pound labrador. This song is one I think I knew before I heard it. It’s that brilliant. “… and dad would dream of all the different ways to die.”

Reigning Sound — “Can’t Hold On” (Not on Spotify)

If ever a man was born out of time, it’s Greg Cartwright. Just listen.

Squared Roots: Luther Dickinson Carries the Torch for Jim Dickinson

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Jim Dickinson was a musician’s musician who worked with everyone from Bob Dylan to the Replacements to Sam & Dave. One of his earliest gigs was in the Dixie Flyers, a group much like the cats in Muscle Shoals who backed a multitude of great soul artists on big hits. But, on the advice of Duane Allman, Dickinson jumped ship in 1971 to go it alone. Though he made a few solo records — and various band records, as well — what Dickinson will likely be remembered for is his work as a side player and producer. Whether toiling alongside Ry Cooder or the Cramps, Dickinson always brought a little bit of Memphis with him.

He also passed that same Memphis mojo on to his sons, Luther and Cody. The two have spent the past 20 years as the North Mississippi Allstars, at least when Luther wasn't playing with the Black Crowes, producing records for Otha Turner, or working on solo records, like his recently released Blues and Ballads: A Folksinger's Songbook, Vol. 1 & 2 which finds him carrying on his dad's song collecting tradition.

I'm excited to talk to someone who has first-hand knowledge of the subject at hand. Usually, we're just speculating about “Why do you think Bobbie Gentry slinked away into obscurity?” or whatever. So … your dad was born in Little Rock, grew up in Chicago and Memphis. That's some blues cred, right there.

Yeah!

But he was so much more than just the blues. Did his passions run just as wide, or did he have a secret favorite style that he kept to himself?

You know, he was a song collector. When we were young and he started to teach us — because we were so interested, he said, “Okay, I gotta teach 'em.” He didn't force it on us. He started teaching us his repertoire and each song was a wildly different genre. But it all fell under roots music. There would be a Texas swing song into an R&B ballad to a country-honky tonk number to a blues song or a folk song or a jazz song that we were all struggling to get through. He just loved songs. And he really loved words. He was of a generation that really had its formative years without television, listening to the radio shows. Also, his vision was really bad, and he learned how to memorize what he heard because it was so hard for him to read. He just really had a way with words.

He was just a baby in Chicago … I think he was nine when he moved to Memphis. But growing up in Memphis — for a kid searching for, pre-rock 'n' roll … he'd hear some dixieland or some boogie-woogie that would have that feeling that the whole generation was reaching for. I think this is true of people from all walks of life: You can be a politician or a doctor or an athlete but, in that generation, the American cultures were really reaching for each other and music brought them together. Like on WDIA in Memphis, that's where he heard some R&B and some gospel, then found blues.

In the '60s blues revival, when the blues masters who were living in the South were rediscovered, that really changed everything. At this point, this is post-rock 'n' roll because the rock 'n' roll heyday was really short: Elvis went to the Army. Chuck Berry went to jail. Jerry Lee Lewis went to England. Carl Perkins had the crash. It was a really short explosion, but then folk music came and the song collecting came.

But, then … and this is what was so amazing … just the cultural phenomenon of North and South … the young music lovers from the North, they had the perspective to literally drive to the South and find the blues men and pluck them out of obscurity, rediscover them. Dad, you know, he'd listened to the records, he'd been to the library, he'd read about these men. And, through no fault of his own as a kid, the segregation was such that it took the musicians from the North to come down, to cross those lines. That's a beautiful thing, that perspective. Once that happened, that's when, in Memphis in the mid '60s, there's Furry Lewis, there's Sleepy John Estes, there's Bukka White, there's Reverend Robert Wilkins, there's Fred McDowell. It was unbelievable.

And, in Memphis, dad's generation … they weren't hippies. They were bohemians. They were behind the times. They didn't really like the hippies. They were a little bit older. When the art community and the blues men discovered each other in Memphis, a good time was had by all. [Laughs]

[Laughs] That's part of what I love about his career. He came up with the Dixie Flyers playing on all those great soul tracks with big artists. But he also championed underdogs, and found those folks who were either up-and-coming or somehow lost in the shuffle. He didn't just go for the gold. He really went for the music.

It's true. I think he felt like a bit of an outsider himself. That's part of how he perceived himself which becomes part of how you're perceived. But he left Memphis and went to college in Texas. He was so afraid of the draft, so he ended up going to Baylor because there was no ROTC. [Laughs] He didn't want ROTC. He didn't want fraternities. But he had to go to college to keep from getting drafted, so he went to Texas. When he came back, all of a sudden, he sees what is to become Stax. It took him a while to catch up.

His concept of “Memphis music” was that it was a group of outcasts making music in the middle of the night. And it goes back to Sam Phillips, really, because he was so ahead of his time. Sam Phillips and Dewey Phillips … Dewey Phillips was a disc jockey who would play any genre of music and that's, really, where that comes from. In dad's book that we're just now working on a deal for, he talks about how Dewey Phillips addressed his audience on the radio as “good people.” It was, “Hey, good people.” It wasn't a Black audience. It wasn't a white audience. It was just good people, and he would play any type of music — blues next to Hank Williams next to gospel.

But Sam Phillips, man … he was really searching for something and he pushed these people to invent rock 'n' roll. He discovered Howlin' Wolf in 1951. In Memphis, to enable the African-American artists like that is so heavy. Sam said discovering Wolf was more important to him than discovering Elvis. So, he recorded the blues catalog. But then, he found the young white kids and everyone searching for a new sound and he's turning them onto the catalog … it's the oral tradition. That's the American roots art — the oral tradition of the lyrics. He was searching for what became rock 'n' roll. He was trying to bring the cultures together to make a new thing.

And your dad was deep in all of that with a bunch of different bands. It seems like being just a side player wasn't quite enough for him.

Ohhhh … that was his favorite! He loved that.

Was it? So, when it was all said and done, was the level of success and respect he achieved enough for him? Or did he have bigger ambitions that never quite materialized?

Well, he was so happy to have played with the Rolling Stones on “Wild Horses.” He definitely wished that he could have toured with them. But, he did play on “Wild Horses,” and he loved it. He was also so thrilled when he did Time Out of Mind with Bob Dylan because that was one of his ambitions that he fulfilled. And it was so fulfilling. He would say, “A lot of things in life disappoint. Bob Dylan is not one of them.” He was thrilled. In typical Dylan form … dad was standing in the parking lot one day, smoking a joint, and Bob wandered over and said, “Hey, man, you know Sleepy John Estes, right? How do you make that C-chord, man? How do you play that lick in 'Drop Down Mama'?” [Laughs] So they hit it off!

Of all the many projects he played on, what's your favorite — the one that you always go back to or the one that you can't get over the fact that it's your dad on it?

Oh, man. Wow. [Pauses] You know, the Ry Cooder records, Boomer's Story and Into the Purple Valley, are really, really cornerstones. It's that whole idea of … I mentioned song collectors and the idea of repertoire in roots music — meaning anything from blues to country to gospel to jazz to anything under the umbrella — and reinterpreting it. With his band, they would improvise and play the music so loosely and unrehearsed and aggressively interpretive, they thought of playing roots music as jazz. So, that's one thing.

But the Ry Cooder records … Cooder was a song collector, but he had that California twist. He had the whole of Hollywood musicians and instruments in the palm of his hand. He could get the best musicians playing the most exotic instruments with a phone call. When Cooder recognized dad for who he was and what he knew and was capable of in the recording studio and hired him as a producer, they really made some great folk-rock records that still … there's just nothing like them.

What was interesting for us … we grew up learning Furry Lewis and Bukka White and Sleepy John Estes from our father and his friends. And his friends' sons all became musicians. The scene was so strong. Their band was Mudboy and the Neutrons. Our band is Sons of Mudboy and we keep the repertoire alive. The repertoire is what has to be protected and carried on. It can be interpreted however you like — that's the freedom. It's just about the melodies and the poetry.

The blues was something secondhand to us. We learned it through our parents. But, then, in the early '90s, I discovered Otha Turner and his family. And that was a lovely thing. But they played fife and drum music. Then, Kenny Brown, who was our friend and was a guitar player. But THEN, when I finally heard R.L. Burnside and went to Junior Kimbrough's Juke Joint, it was multi-generational, electrified country-blues in my backyard.

R.L. Burnside took me under his wing and took me on the road. He and Kenny showed me the ropes in '97, and we've been touring ever since. He literally took me out of town. [Laughs] I'd never been anywhere before. What blew dad's mind was that the blues exchange happened again. He didn't think that his sons would be able to learn and play with real blues men.

It just keeps going.

Yeah. You know what's something else? There was a period of time when they all passed away and we were all recovering. Everyone — the blues men, our father, his friends. It's just part of growing up and regaining your feet. I like writing songs about people, championing them as folk heroes in my art. Because Stagger Lee and Casey Jones were men who walked the earth, once upon a time. It was the songs that made them legends, so you sing the legend. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Exactly. Larger than life. Let 'em live on.

Exactly! The repertoire and the new songs about them.

So when I came home to the Hill Country Picnic, which is when everybody in Mississippi gets together, I couldn't believe there was this whole group of young kids playing with Gary Burnside, Dave Kimbrough, Duwayne Burnside … driving them around and letting them borrow their equipment, giving them lunch money. These kids, they didn't know R.L. and Junior. But, to them, Gary, Dave, and Duwayne are R.L. and Junior. It's happening again!

Luther Dickinson photo by Don VanCleave. Jim Dickinson photo by

The Main Street of Black America

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It was a crisp fall day in Memphis, late October or early November 1909, when W.C. Handy loaded seven musicians onto a wagon and rode it to into the heart of the city’s business district. There, they launched into a lively piece of music he had adapted using elements picked from street musicians and gambling den entertainers, the newly penned lyrics stumping for mayoral candidate Edward Hull Crump.

Mr. Crump won’t ‘low no easy riders here

We don’t care what Mr. Crump don’t ‘low

We gon’ to bar’l-house anyhow

As Preston Lauterbach describes the scene in his fascinating new book, Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, it was a fairly raucous performance, especially for downtown Memphis. “As the song swung to life, [Handy] saw bosses twirling their stenographers in the windows above. Colored dancers swayed on the sidewalk.” The performance marks the first time blues music had been played for a public audience, the first time it crawled off of Beale and commanded the attention of the general public — or, to put it bluntly, white people.

Handy’s “true claim to fame was never to have invented blues music outright, but to have crossed the music over from Beale Street to Main Street, from colored honky-tonks to mainstream America,” Lauterbach writes, adding that the musician “had carried this Negro music to where it could be widely influential and historically recognized.”

None of the musicians on the wagon, nor any of the bosses dipping their secretaries, nor anyone within earshot would have understood the significance of the event, yet it might be considered the big bang of American popular music, as well as a turning point in local history. In Beale Street Dynasty, Lauterbach recounts the history of the neighborhood, its various rises and falls over more than a century. “What made Beale so unique was that there wasn’t another place like it in the 1800s,” says Lauterbach. “It was the Main Street of black America, the hub of Southern black culture. It was Harlem 40 years before the Harlem Renaissance.”

He portrays these events — the race riots, the political corruption, the musical innovation, the social striving — through the eyes of Robert Church, America’s first black millionaire and a dynamic character in Memphis history. “He had been born a slave,” says Lauterbach, “but he managed to build his fortune — first on saloons and gambling halls, then on brothels. He created this underworld empire, but funneled a lot of the proceeds into legitimate businesses and more progressive organizations. He was using vice to underwrite virtue.”

Of course, Beale Street had an amazing soundtrack, with musicians like fiddler Jim Turner and W.C. Handy playing in establishments up and down Beale and nearby Gayoso. Music was, for many years, only secondary to the business and political machinations, but “that’s reversed now,” says Lauterbach. “Now the way the story is portrayed, the music overshadows the power. The music is really what most people think of when they think of Beale Street.”

More than a century after Handy’s public debut, few non-musical remnants of the era remain, save for a few old buildings and some parks that bear names like Crump and Snowden. Much like the rest of downtown Memphis, Beale suffered during the mid- and late-20th century, when white flight left downtown all but empty. The neighborhood decayed, its buildings left to rot and collapse.”

Even at its lowest point, however, the music continued to inspire subsequent generations of musicians grappling with these old sounds and their meanings. In the late 1970s, in an effort to fund the renovation of the nearby Orpheum Theater and to bring attention to Beale’s plight, a local musician and producer named Jim Dickinson produced an album featuring multiple generations of locals feting the famed thoroughfare — older blues acts like Sleepy John Estes and Furry Lewis alongside younger players like Teenie Hodges (from Al Green’s infamous backing band), Sid Selvidge, and Dickinson’s band Mud Boy & the Neutrons.

Listening to the album is like walking up Beale on a lively evening during its heyday, passing by all the bars and brothels, past A. Schwab, all the way up to the banks of the Mississippi. “Jim saw this record as a walking document of the street,” says Pat Rainer, who worked as a production assistant on the original album and oversaw the new reissue from Omnivore Records. “It’s really brilliant the way he conceived it and put it together. The original record had no grooves [between the tracks]. It just all flowed together, from one piece to the next, and that’s the way we’ve maintained it on this reissue.”

Until his death in 2009, Dickinson was one of the best advocates Memphis ever had for its culture and history. As a session player with the Dixie Flyers, he played on records for Aretha Franklin, Sam & Dave, and the Rolling Stones; returning home to the Mid-South, he produced albums by Big Star and, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Replacements, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Amy LaVere. Today, his sons Luther and Cody carry on the tradition in the North Mississippi All Stars.

For this aural history of the neighborhood, Dickinson recruited a range of locals, some of whom were old enough to remember Beale’s heyday and others who only knew it as empty lots and decaying buildings. One of the more unusual tracks is performed by a man known only as Alex, who sings “Rock Me Baby” accompanied by a series of loud thwacks. “I don’t know if you can tell,” says Rainer, “but it’s actually somebody chopping wood. Alex was Jim’s family’s yard man, so Jim got him to bring an axe over and they recorded that in his carport. You can hear chunks of wood fly off and hit the speakers.”

If Lauterbach resettles Beale back into its proper place in local and national history, then Saturday Night depicts a scene unmoored in time — less a geographic location than a collective dream of the city of Memphis. The Orpheum was fully refurbished and continues to host concerts and musical productions, yet Beale has suffered a fate some might say is worse than the wrecking ball. “You go downtown on a weekend, and it looks like Disneyland,” says Rainer. “It’s really a shame.”

Photos courtesy of The Library of Congress. See more images of old Beale Street right here.