The most recent guest on The String (Episode 340), the pedal steel guitar master Robert Randolph, has deep and direct ties to Luther Dickinson, with whom I spend the hour in Episode 341. Back when Randolph was plucked out of his native habitat, playing sacred steel guitar in his family’s New Jersey church, his introduction to the jam band circuit came in large part through his tours and recordings with the North Mississippi Allstars, who were only a few years ahead of Randolph on their roots-rock journey.
Now, says Dickinson, the latest personnel in the Allstars - Joey Black (of the Blind Boys of Alabama) and Ray Ray Holloman (Eminem) - can be attributed to Randolph’s extensive network. “Robert Randolph is behind the lineup because he introduced us all in different ways,” Luther says. “Ray Ray is Robert's cousin. They've played together in the Family Band in the past, and you know, we've known Robert since 2000.”
This helped me understand the connections between the Hill Country blues jam boogie so colorfully embodied in the Allstars’ 30-year history and Randolph’s gospel roots, where, as I suggest to Dickinson, “things move and flow and grow and fill the moment, and sometimes back off and accompany a preacher. It's a musical aura, right? It's musical time spent in this rhythmic space.”
“Man, you hit it on the head,” says the guitar-playing, songwriting veteran. “It's like we learned from our father to use folk music melodies and rhythms as foundations for improvisation and interpretation, you know? So we'll play the same song on different nights. Tonight, it might be slow, might be fast, might be long, it might be short. And those guys (the band) are there. They're in it, you know? They're not, like, tied up (by) the arrangement.”
This leads us into one of the stretches when Luther, some years ago, was ushered into music as a flow state. “I used to play with (drummer) Johnny Vidacovich and (bass player) George Porter at the Maple Leaf (in New Orleans),” he says. “And I would be so nervous, because not only did they not want a set list, they didn't even want to play songs. You just have to go play two sets out of the air just and I was like, oh,I've never done that before. But they taught me how to roll, as they call it.”
This kind of insight and these deep connections to several precious regional roots traditions is why I invited Luther back for a third turn on The String. He’s also celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Allstars’ debut album Shake Hands With Shorty with the June release of Still Shakin’, an 11-song “love letter of appreciation to everyone who supported us and kept us in the game all these years.” They cut much of it at the Zebra Ranch, the studio built and maintained by their late father, the Southern music legend Jim Dickinson. Among the shrines of authentic music - Sun Studio, the Ryman Auditorium - Zebra Ranch, though more hidden away, is one of them.
We’ve covered the band’s history in a past episode. So here, I wanted to focus on Still Shakin’, as well as on the many side projects that Luther’s been pursuing in the last few years. He tells us about 2024’s Mississippi Murals, a set of instrumentals inspired by and played live in a small museum of art named for Walter Anderson in the Gulf Coast town of Ocean Springs, MS. The band on this one touches many chapters of Luther’s life, with keyboard player John Medeski, drummer Vidacovich and bass player Dominic Davis (Jack White’s band). We also talk about Mem Mods, an enthralling electronic project that Luther produced in the Covid years with fellow Memphis music scion Steve Selvidge.
But front and center is a rich (and rolling) collection called Dead Blues Volume 1, a co-bill with singer Datrian Johnson, a new collaborator in Luther’s world. “He's from North Carolina. He's the son of a preacher,” says Dickinson. “Just a beautiful, beautiful soul and a moving singer like I've never experienced before. Like, he walks on stage so unassuming and then all of a sudden the audience is gasping. What he does is so intense and raw and emotional and real and just truly moving.”
The story behind the album fills us in on Luther’s years working here and there with the Dead’s late great bass player Phil Lesh during his “Phil Lesh And Friends” era. That leads to meeting Phil’s son Graeme (himself a kingpin of the new soul jam universe) and a project that interprets the traditional blues repertoire that made it onto the sets, across decades, of the Grateful Dead. Songs like “Minglewood Blues” and “Sitting On Top of the World” take on new life with Luther’s guitar and Datrian’s profoundly interpretive voice.
So dive in. We cover a lot of ground, because so has Luther Dickinson.
