Coldwater, Miss.: These Hills Are Alive

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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?