Still Shakin’

Could it be that we have a random fan in Jackson, Mississippi, to thank for the dozen or so studio albums, plus numerous live releases, that the North Mississippi Allstars have created over their career? The group, founded in 1996 by Luther and Cody Dickinson, sons of Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson, was at first in it only for the playing, as Luther himself notes. “We were not ambitious, dude! I mean, we lived in a single-wide trailer at our parents’ Zebra Ranch, with our studio in the back, and we were just selling tapes! We were like rappers, selling our own tapes. And we were so intent on just hanging out with our friends and making music and jamming and doing enough shows to pay our little bills.”

His younger brother Cody agrees, and then mentions that particular fan. “That’s such an excellent point, and totally true. I remember we were playing this place called The Biscuit Company in Jackson, Mississippi, in the mid ’90s. The place was wall-to-wall packed, and I remember this one kid came up and said to me, ‘When are you doing a CD?’ And I was like, ‘What??’ He’s like, ‘When are y’all gonna make a record?’ I said something like, ‘Why would we do that?’ He’s like, ‘Man, I want a record. Make a record!’ I thought, ‘Okay, maybe we should,’ and that’s what became Shake Hands with Shorty.”

With that debut, their career in music was off and running, and they show no signs of slowing over a quarter century later. Their 2025 release, Still Shakin’, was ostensibly a tribute to their debut, but its exploratory flourishes ultimately revealed just how far they’ve come since then. Now, as they continue an ever-expanding tour to promote the new work (playing the Germantown Performing Arts Center on July 18th), they’re taking a rare look backward to consider how far they’ve come. 

The Hardly Can Playboys and D.D.T.

The two brothers were making music well before the Allstars were born, of course. How could they not, growing up in the shadow of a great producer and player like Jim Dickinson? Once they’d warmed to the idea of playing, with Luther taking up guitar and Cody on drums, their dad recruited them as his rhythm section when they were still in their early- to mid-teens. 

“We grew up playing roots music with our dad in The Hardly Can Playboys, but that was his thing. And we played Furry Lewis, Sleepy John Estes, and Bukka White, all that stuff,” says Luther. Cody, however, remembers a more varied approach. “The setlist was super diverse. We were playing like everything, from a Latin kind of feel to a ballad, then ‘Across the Borderline,’ then B.B. King. He was mixing up all the different kinds of feels, just to kind of get our feet wet.”

“And then,” Luther goes on, “we started being the rhythm section for Mud Boy & the Neutrons, which was a dream come true for us. We earned our stripes and proved that we could do it.” Mud Boy was, of course, its own kind of supergroup, wherein Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, Sid Selvidge, and Jimmy Crosthwait played rocked-up roots tunes with a counter-cultural rebelliousness. “That’s where Dad taught us the concept of ensemble improvisation,” says Luther, “and also the idea of playing roots music as a foundation for improvisation and interpretation. It’s also an excuse for not rehearsing! So we did that with Dad, and then later with Mud Boy. Meanwhile, we were rocking out with D.D.T.”

That power trio, which the brothers formed with Paul “Snowflake” Taylor on bass prior to the Allstars, was a proving ground for the Dickinsons. Decidedly non-rootsy, D.D.T. (an acronym using the players’ last names) was essentially an art rock band with a heaping dose of punk aggression. “We were a very hard rock trio,” says Taylor today. “We also were backing up Shawn Lane, playing straight-up fusion.”

In fact, they were all over the map, stylistically. “D.D.T., we just played experimental junk rock,” says Luther today. “D.D.T. was fun because we just experimented. We started by playing weird originals, and then when Chris Parker and Jim Spake and Kelley Hurt joined the group, we were studying Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, and that’s what we called the D.D.T. Big Band.” But in the end, even the expanded band couldn’t take Luther where he wanted to go. “It just got to where I couldn’t write that way,” Luther recalls. “I just lost interest in it. Everything I was writing or wanted to play had its roots here, or in the North Mississippi Hill Country, to be more specific.”

For a time, Taylor, who loved Hill Country blues as well, played midwife to the two brothers’ burgeoning new band. “D.D.T. had an alter ego that was the North Mississippi Allstars,” he says. “In that sense, I was kind of the first North Mississippi Allstars bass player. We also had the alter ego Gutbucket, which was our jug band.” Yet at the time, Taylor wanted to explore new directions. Once the Allstars began in earnest in 1996, Taylor moved on to a brief stint in Big Ass Truck while Chris Chew, who, Taylor notes, “was kind of on the scene peripherally, because he went to high school in Hernando with Luther and Cody,” took over on bass.

Taking Their Time

The newly minted North Mississippi Allstars then proceeded to cut their teeth on Beale Street. “When we first started NMA, I was trying to be as traditional as possible,” says Luther, “and we didn’t stretch out at all.” Yet as time went on, he warmed to the idea of playing the blues more freely. “We played on Beale Street at the Blues Hall from ’97 to ’99, I think, playing two sets a night to nobody. That’s when it dawned on me, ‘Oh wait a minute, we can use all of our psychedelic rock, low-rent stoner improvisation tricks in this music!’ It literally took me a couple of years to open up my mind to the fact that we can pull these songs apart and rebuild them in any way we want.”

Yet as the trio developed their own sound, they were happy to stay in place. “We were turning down these little tiny record deal offers,” Luther recalls. “We did not want to tour. We would tour regionally, from Fayetteville to Knoxville to Oxford, occasionally to New Orleans. That was our circuit. And I’m so glad we didn’t leave home right away, because that time at home in the Hill Country, when the elders were still alive, was so beautiful. I call it the lost years of extended apprenticeship.”

The elders they mingled with, partly through their dad’s connections, partly due to just living in the same area, were some bona fide legends of the blues, including Otha Turner, R.L. Burnside, and Junior Kimbrough. As Cody recalls, “going down to Otha Turner’s picnics and Junior Kimbrough’s club and stuff, or hanging out with Gary or Duwayne Burnside at the time, we were soaking things up just through osmosis.” This was especially true for Luther, who traveled with R.L. Burnside’s band as a youth on his first ever tour. Yet even as they soaked up the elders’ ways, they also hungered for something more, something new. 

“The older I get, the more I respect the importance of preservation and tradition and things. But when we started, man, I didn’t care about that stuff at all! I’m just glad that now I have a little more perspective on that.” Indeed, even as the brothers pieced together recordings at the family’s home studio for what would become their first album, a creative tension developed that still informs the group’s dynamic to this day. If there was a Saturday morning cartoon of NMA, it might feature Luther as the one fascinated with the deep traditions, with Cody as the forward-thinking futurist of the band, bringing samples and synths into the picture. 

“Our influences are so wildly different,” Luther observes. “What we do together, neither one of us would ever do. I’m more primitive and organic and old-fashioned, and Cody’s way more modern. Like those hype-man vocals that pop in on ‘Shake ‘Em On Down’, or the samples, the beats, he put those on there. So it’s a combination of my aesthetic and Cody’s aesthetic. I would never do anything like ‘Shake ‘Em On Down,’ left to my own accord. That’s the beauty of the brother collaboration. It becomes something different.”

“That’s the dance, man!” says Cody, reflecting on those roles. “That very first song on Shake Hands with Shorty, ‘Shake ‘Em On Down,’ is such a mishmash collage of sounds,” muses Cody. “There’s everything from heavy metal guitars and a five-piece drum kit to, like, Fred McDowell slide breakdowns. And that’s our first song on our first album! I feel like we’re still catching up, conceptually, and I’m glad that it was such a big palette to pull from. That helps a lot as time goes on.”

The Artifacts of a Good Party

Time has indeed marched on, yet the Allstars have paradoxically stayed both rooted and innovative through the years. Their studio albums contain multitudes, sporting styles as disparate as electro-funk, psychedelia, and old-school soul, but also in the sense of having many guests, features, and cameos. “My favorite records are just artifacts of a good party,” says Luther. “Like a family reunion.” And, with every album featuring a rotating cast of characters, the reunion seems endless. 

That openness to collaboration has made the Allstars arguably the most inclusive band of our time, and over the years they’ve featured guest appearances by the likes of Mavis Staples, William Bell, Jason Isbell, Lucinda Williams, Robert Randolph, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and, of course, fife master Otha Turner. Meanwhile, they’ve also served as the backing band for Phil Lesh, John Hiatt, and more. What other group has so successfully breached the barriers of age, race, and genre that keep most American bands so siloed? 

All the while, they’ve resolutely identified with Memphis, more so than your typical Mississippi band. “There are so many people in Memphis that we owe so much to,” says Luther. He calls out Judy Peiser, who gave The Hardly Can Playboys their first gig at the 1989 Memphis Music & Heritage Festival, and Karen Carrier, owner of Bar DKDC. “To this day, DKDC is our favorite place to play,” he notes. And the group has worked in some of the city’s great recording studios, from Ardent to Phillips Recording Service. But their deepest connection may be to Royal Studios. “Boo Mitchell is such a special cat,” says Luther of Royal’s man on the scene. 

“Cody and Luther Dickinson, those are my musical brothers,” says Mitchell, who worked with them on their 2017 album, Prayer for Peace, among other sessions (including Luther’s cameo on the Sinners soundtrack). “They’re such authentic and genuine human beings.” And, as Mitchell recalls, Cody changed his life. “That phone call from Cody Dickinson at nine in the morning definitely put me on a different trajectory, and changed my life forever. This was about a year after my dad [famed producer Willie Mitchell] had died, and you know, it just felt like my phone wasn’t ringing. It felt like people didn’t think I actually knew what the fuck I was doing, because all the major credits to my name were, you know, in conjunction with Pop, right?” 

Yet Cody had a project in mind that would combine old-school soul singers with contemporary hip-hop artists and others. It would eventually become the celebrated film, Take Me to the River, which spawned similar films shot in other cities, not to mention an entire educational initiative. “I was like, ‘Well, Cody, who’s the producer?’” says Mitchell. “And he goes, ‘Man, I want you to produce it.’ To hear him say that just really meant the world to me.”

The admiration is mutual, as Cody notes: “We both lost our fathers within a year of each other and became fast friends. And we both have ties to North Mississippi [where Willie Mitchell was born]. It’s hard to explain to people that it is a culturally enlightened place, but it absolutely is the truth, no doubt about it. The music proves it.”

And Mitchell is thankful that the band’s family reunion vibe has led him to work with some legends. “The biggest name was probably Robert Plant,” he laughs. “He was playing the Botanic Garden that week, and while I was in the studio, the phone rings. ‘Hello, is this Boo? This is Robert, and me harmonica got caught in a bag of incense. Do you know where I can get another one?’ I was thinking, is this a code word for weed or something? But he really did just need another harmonica! And later that day, we cut ‘Goat Meat’ with the Allstars, and Robert Plant is playing frickin’ harmonica on it!”

Beyond recording together with rock gods, it turns out that both Mitchell and the Dickinson brothers also have a commitment to bringing their homeland’s history to life for the younger generations. While Cody was the driving force behind Take Me to the River, Luther is also committed to passing his knowledge on to others, and both brothers take it far beyond teaching their own kids. As Cody explains, “Up in the Catskills, outside of Woodstock, Butch Trucks, Oteil Burbridge, Luther, and myself started a summer camp called Roots Rock Revival, about 11 years ago, and it’s been going strong. It’s really grown into this cultural event that happens every year.” 

As their education efforts have taken on a life of their own, the brothers’ own diverse tastes have come into play. As Luther says, “We’ve become friends with George Clinton’s grandson, who fronts a band with George, and he’s bringing P-Funk musicians to the Roots Rock Revival. It’s a fantastic evolution of the camp, which started as Allman Brothers-focused, then became more Grateful Dead, and now it’s more P-Funk.”

That’s now expanding to include the Luther-led Catskills Crossroads Blues Camp, which begins this August 11th. Yet even then, and even with his background with “the elders,” Luther is a little wary of the “blues” label. “I always say ‘roots music,’” he says. “I just am never comfortable with a genre of any sort, and I would never claim to be a bluesman or to play blues music, you know. Now ‘psychedelic folk rock’ I can completely get behind.”

In that sense, Luther can be considered in agreement with his late father. Reflecting on his sons’ accomplishments in the last pages of his posthumous collection of writings, I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone, Jim Dickinson observes, “The North Mississippi Allstars make no claim to being a blues band. Something happens when white boys play the blues. Rock-and-roll.”