“The best songs don’t get recorded, the best recordings don’t get released, and the best releases don’t get played.”
—Jim Dickinson
“Fun sticks to tape.” These immortal words were spoken by the late, great American record producer Jim Dickinson, who worked with everyone from the Rolling Stones, to Aretha Franklin, Big Star, and so many other artists that his touch has been felt on American music for decades. I met Jim only once, and it was so quick I don’t even remember the conversation and I’m sure he didn’t remember me, but I do remember his handshake—firm. His quote above, and a disheveled photo, were thumbtacked rather unceremoniously to the wall of the control room at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi, and every time I find myself back in this place, I am reminded of this eternal truth—fun kind of sticks to everything.
The music that came out of the American South, and specifically the Mississippi Delta, is the stuff of legends, but at a very historical and practical level, it is the fountainhead for most of the music of America. Almost everything we enjoy in popular music can be traced back to the delta, from the blues, to its mistress, jazz, and all of their children— rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, country, hip hop, and probably music of the future that hasn’t even been invented yet. I will admit at the beginning of this story that I never fully understood the deep musicology of the South, that is, until I started going there on a regular basis and experienced it personally. I’m heading there again now, my fourth time in a year, and it’s not just to play music, but also to learn about the people of the South and perhaps unlearn some of the biases and misconceptions I might have as a Northerner.
Instead of flying as I usually do, I have literally driven all the way from Seattle to Mississippi, which took about four days and nights as I tried to outmaneuver a snowstorm that was walloping the Midwest. I love a good cross-country road trip because I come alive when I see the landscapes of this magnificent country, and on this trip, it is in abundance. As I drove south from Memphis, I finally cross the Mississippi state line and read her warm greeting: “Welcome to Mississippi, the Birthplace of America’s Music.”
I find myself in Water Valley once again, where I bring my Chevy Impala to its final resting place. I am here to play drums on an album for a singer named Ironing Board Sam, born in 1939 in Rockhill, South Carolina, and 75 years old at the time of our session. His father had been a sharecropper, and as Sam described it, his family only went into town for salt and pepper, because they could grow everything else on the farm.
Sam has a beautifully aged voice, smooth like whiskey and more like a soul man than a blues man—he instantly makes you smile when he sings. He’s historically famous for having a young Jimi Hendrix play in his band on the 1965 TV show “Night Train,” right before Jimi moved to London to form the Jimi Hendrix Experience and reinvent rock & roll forever. Sam has recently signed a deal with Bruce Watson’s Fat Possum Records, best known for its revival of early-20th century delta bluesmen like R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, Pinetop Perkins, and CeDell Davis. Now it’s time for Sam to have his comeback.
These sessions have the same superb house band that played on CeDell Davis’ album, “Last Man Standing”—Jimbo Mathus is again producing and playing guitar, Stu Cole is on bass, I’m on drums and percussion, and Bronson Tew is engineering and playing the occasional guitar solo, or “Pentecostal tambourine,” as Bruce jokingly refers to it.
The sessions at Dial Back are a great learning experience for me because, as much as I have learned in my 50+ years on this planet, there is so much music that I simply haven’t heard, and this is a crash course in old soul and rhythm & blues. I do what all good students of music do, which is to put my ego aside and just listen, and I mean truly, deeply listen. We learn how to play these songs in a modern yet classic way, so that our new versions sound fresh and alive while still retaining the essential elements of the original recordings. More importantly, we have to adapt them to Sam’s voice and vocal range. It’s more like cooking really, and this metaphor rings true as the days go by and different band members either cook or bring dishes that their wives have made for us. This single, sacred act of cooking and eating together as a band while we prepare this new album has affected me profoundly. So much so that I begin to think about my drumming as a literal form of cooking, chopping and blending the ingredients, baking it all together, and then serving it up like a hot dish.
We’re cooking with gas, as the old timers used to say.
On the second day, Jimbo appears dressed somewhat like an eccentric Confederate General, with square-nosed boots, a red satin waistcoat, and a pocket-watch chain dangling from his vest pocket. He’s also donned a white Stetson festooned with pheasant plumes, making him look like he came directly from Robert E. Lee’s personal haberdashery. He saunters through the studio, all easy and careless, and he totally sets the mood for the day’s music. Today’s songs will have serious style and swagger.
Sam has also emerged from the guesthouse wearing a three-piece velvet suit. It’s Santa Claus red, except that he’s wearing a black leather porkpie hat, which makes him look less like the deliverer of Christmas cheer and more like a dapper Ellegua, the African trickster-saint at the crossroads. Sam is bearing beautiful, musical gifts today and he’s in a very good mood, excited from the previous day’s recording. He tells me, “Music charges the battery of the heart, and the heart powers the mind. That’s why I’m happy!”
I hope I’m that cheerful at 75, and if I’m not, it’ll clearly be because I didn’t follow Sam’s sage advice.
These well-dressed gentlemen remind me of the old photos we’ve seen of the Stax Records and Motown musicians who would dress smartly for their daily studio sessions, even though they were working in a windowless environment. They knew intuitively that looking sharp made the music even tighter, in a kind of synesthetic-aesthetic. I regret not packing any nicer clothes for this trip, as I’ve always worn black T-shirts when I play drums, but I make a decision right then and there to dress better for every recording session I do in the future, even when I am sweating it out behind the kit.
The first thing you learn when you come to the delta is that music here is an extremely physical, visceral experience. It includes a cultural codex of muscular movements and sinuous gestures, all of which are expressed through dance and the physicality of the music itself. Bronson the engineer is particularly good at teaching me these “old feels” by doing a series of comedic but true-to-form dances. These dances are a combination of crouches, shuffle steps, and body spasms, all of which embody the hidden rhythms in the music. He dances a crusty shuffle, a stomachache funk, a churchy baptismal stagger (to go along with his Pentecostal tambourine) and he closes it down with a hangdog shake. I learn these delta rhythms from watching his movements and gestures and we all laugh heartily, which explains more to me about these people and their music than the 7 years I spent in college studying music.
That’s because music in the delta comes straight out of the Earth and goes right into your soul. It is retained by these extraordinary musicians in a kind of somatic, cellular memory, and they take it upon themselves to preserve it from memory alone. This is a truly remarkable ability—the remembering of music through the body in action, and it reminds me of the indigenous music I heard in Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Peruvian Amazon, where thousands of years of music is preserved in the living memory of each generation. It is no different here in the delta, where the people remember their music by living within the words and rhythms of their songs.
Sam sums this up perfectly in one of the many conversations we have during these recording sessions. He summarizes the alchemy of a hit song: “With a real hit, the beat and the rhythm always comes first, that’s the hot spot, man. Then the band kicks in to lay down the music for the singer, and he seals the deal with his voice. But the beat always comes first, that’s the prime mover—you gotta find that hot spot Bear!”
We work diligently like musical sharecroppers for several hours each day, cutting the rhythm tracks live, and most of Sam’s vocals too. This music has real soul in it—it’s alive and spontaneous, which is exactly what the old hits had before the onset of sterilized 21st-century pop. We’re recording on a digital platform, but we’re also playing old instruments going through even older analog preamps and compressors as we play like human beings have played for centuries—as one group, all together. Our reimagined old/new music swings and swaggers, my beats are steady, but they rise and fall slightly between the verses and choruses, just as the human body expands with breath and contracts with exhalation. In the cut and thrust of these muscular songs, it is simply impossible not to feel happy.
As we wind down the sessions on the final day of principal recording, Sam reads a poem that he recently wrote while in a mystical state. It’s a beautiful and heartfelt poem, as true and exacting as any passage from the Bible. Instead of god, Sam refers to the “Super Spirit,” which I think is the best phrase I’ve ever heard for describing That Which Cannot Be Named. I won’t reveal the poem’s message, as you should listen to Sam’s album and hear it directly. It’s titled, “Ironing Board Sam: Super Spirit,” it’s online, and you can hear his songs and beautiful poem for yourself.
Sam tells me that it is important for young people to hear this poem because, as he put it, “Peace will not come from guns, it will only come from what the young people decide to do.” I am moved by his statement because, indeed, why do we not listen to the voices of the young people more often? It is they who will inherit this mess of a world we are leaving them, and they should have quite a bit of say in the matter.
As I prepare to leave the delta and return to Seattle, I think about my father’s family from Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is not far from here. I was born in Washington State and my formal education was based in music, language, and culture. I used to think about things in terms of theories and the kind of academic analysis that gets drilled into graduate students—but it can often kill the soul of the very thing you love most. When I visit the Deep South, however, something very old comes alive in me. The contrasts here are striking, complex, and highly paradoxical. This is the land of Muddy Waters and William Faulkner, Nina Simone and Mark Twain, Maya Angelou and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Walker and John Lee Hooker. It’s also where CeDell Davis and Ironing Board Sam made their bones, as well as my extended family in Arkansas, over on the yonder side of the river. It is diametrically intellectual and full of wit, yet it’s also gritty, soulful, and full of sexual eroticism. It is a musical, poetic, danced experience, at least as important as any formal education found elsewhere in the world. Here in the Deep South, the traditions of music and storytelling reach far deeper into human memory than any textbook or classroom lecture. Only the body can remember what the mind forgets, because the body is compelled to dance, to thrust, to shimmy and shake, to teach, and to love that which is only knowable by being present in the right here, and the right now.
The Deep South is a great paradox to be sure, and it still has a reckoning to come for its dark history of slavery, systemic racism, voter suppression, and extremism that surpasses the pragmatic and the sane. Yet when I come down here, I feel a great opening in my heart and mind, and I realize that here too exist people with a deep understanding of what it means to be an American, with gentle humor, deep intelligence, and a magnificent, magical soul.
This soul exists in the traditional codes of a community with a social fabric as rich as the soil that grows the cotton you are wearing, and the corn, beans, and squash you will eat for dinner tonight. Here in the delta the seeds for each new crop of musicians are dutifully planted, rooted in a magical realm that exists between the worlds of music, landscape, and deep, deep soul.