Deke Dickerson & The Whippersnappers @Tulsa VFW post 577

Journeyman musician/singer/entertainer Deke Dickerson is keeping America’s roots music alive by interjecting new creativity into genres that flourished in decades previous. Such efforts have rewarded him with the Ameripolitan Music Award for Musician of the Year, among other accolades.

Dickerson’s newest band venture is Deke Dickerson and the Whippersnappers. The Whippersnappers are an energetic backing band of younger musicians from Los Angeles: Bert Avalos on guitar, Zander Griffith on bass, and Dylan Patterson on drums. With Dickerson’s experience entertaining audiences worldwide and the Whippersnappers’ shot in the arm of rockabilly excitement, the band has been thrilling fans all over the United States (playing such festivals as Viva Las Vegas and touring the East and West Coasts) and Europe (at festivals like the Rockabilly Rave in England and the Rockin’ Race Jamboree in Spain).

The band released their debut album, Honky Tonkin’ Rhythm, in 2023 on Major Label Records and have been touring behind it since.

Dickerson has toured with various bands in the past, including the Dave and Deke Combo and Deke Dickerson and the Ecco-Fonics. His former band members have gone on to play with Social Distortion, X, Tiger Army, and Los Straitjackets.

Dickerson is the author of Sixteen Tons: The Merle Travis Story (BMG Books, 480 pages), the first-ever full-length biography devoted to Country Music Hall of Fame member Merle Travis, a brilliant, multitalented, and deeply troubled artist who is widely considered a genius. He has also had two books published by Voyageur Press, The Strat in the Attic and The Strat in the Attic 2. As a well-known historian of roots music, Dickerson has contributed liner notes to reissue projects for such labels as Capitol, RCA, Bear Family, and Sundazed, and has written for several guitar magazines.

Dickerson has provided rootsy music for a slew of television shows and movie projects, including scoring the music for Johnny Knoxville’s Paramount Pictures film Action Point.

“This is the great music of the American twentieth-century experience,” states Dickerson. “Rock and roll, rockabilly, Western swing, rhythm and blues, surf music, garage, punk. It’s every bit as vital and important as jazz or classical; it just hasn’t gotten its due yet. There has to be somebody out there waving the flag for this music. Wherever I go, anywhere on the planet, people love this music, yet it’s kept out of the mainstream media simply because it’s considered ‘old.’”

Dickerson has recorded with such luminaries as Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives, Canadian wildman Bloodshot Bill, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s original drummer, J. M. Van Eaton (at Sun Studios in Memphis). He released an album of vocal versions of surf instrumentals, Sing the Instrumental Favorites, with the popular surf act Los Straitjackets. He released an all-rockabilly album, Echosonic Eldorado, that sounds as if it could have come out of Sun Studios in Memphis circa 1956. He released an album with the legendary surf group the Trashmen, of “Surfin’ Bird” fame, Bringing Back the Trash, that is every bit as wild and crazed as the Trashmen’s recordings from the early 1960s. And he traveled to Memphis to record the EP Soul Meets Country with blues/R&B sensation Nikki Hill, backed by the Bo-Keys, an all-star group made up of legendary Memphis soul musicians and top-of-the-heap younger players.

During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, Dickerson produced a series of more than fifty “quarantine videos,” playing all the instruments in his home recording studio. The videos include Brian Wilson–style productions, Bakersfield country, and four-part harmony gospel numbers, adding to the wide swath of American roots music that he has performed and recorded over the years.

Host or Publisher Royal British Legion Oklahoma Branch 3719 & VFW post 577