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Review: South Memphis String Band
It was Luther Dickinson’s turn in Friday’s “guitar pull” at Antone’s. Dickinson and Alvin Youngblood Hart had just finished accompanying Jimbo Mathus on a jubilant song about Jesse James. Now, Dickinson wanted to do his own character sketch. He threw George Washington out to the audience as a possibility. Then he switched gears and started rattling off potential cover material. Robert Johnson. Jimi Hendrix. The Guess Who. “The whole American experience … under this lid,” he said, grasping the brim of his fedora and kicking into Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Travelin’.”
The American experience is the main unifier of this slap happy yet sureshot trio known as the South Memphis String Band. Each player is principally a bluesman but also well-schooled in country, folk and gospel. Indeed, they mined the roots canon with casual combos of steel and acoustic guitars, banjo, mandolin, harp and “jawbone,” an instrument that looks like a mini-Jaws’ jaws and produces a click-clack sound. The setlist included the Carter Family, Tommy Bradley & James Cole, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmie Rodgers, and Blind Willie Johnson. Recognize that takes much knowledge and wherewithal.
Of course, originals were also played, in between the foot-stomping, hand-clapping, and cutting up that otherwise constituted what Mathus kept calling his band’s “primordial psychedelia.” Dickinson, the little brother, played “18 Hammers” by his blues-rocking main band, North Mississippi Allstars. Hart, the buddha, picked his own arrangement of the traditional “France Blues” from his Delta blues-style solo career. Mathus, the court jester, scrapped his catalog — comprising the honky tonk and Tin Pan Alley days he spent in Squirrel Nut Zippers and His Knockdown Society — and played an altogether new one, “Yo Own Backyard.”
Its refrain, “Stop worrying about the whole world and start worrying about yo own backyard,” is the kind of song you wanna put on during a barbecue to rally your friends. But therein lies the problem. The String Band doesn’t have a CD — only T-shirts and a 15-date tour. Seriously, they’ve only cut two songs, both of which — “Yo Own Backyard” among them — are available only on MySpace. “We decided the South Memphis String Band will never be in a hurry,” Mathus said.
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