North Mississippi Allstars

Name: North Mississippi Allstars
Start: 2025-10-09T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 1501 Long St., Chattanooga, TN, United States, Tennessee 37408

Schedule

Thu, 09 Oct, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

1501 Long St., Chattanooga, TN, United States, Tennessee 37408 | Chattanooga, TN

Doors: 6PM | Show: 7PM | 21+

Still Shakin’ is a celebration of our life-changing first album, Shake Hands with Shorty, which we released 25 years ago, and a love letter of appreciation to everyone who supported us and kept us in the game all these years. Touring this album cycle into 2026 will mark thirty years since we started North Mississippi Allstars, and we couldn’t resist being commemorating both of those anniversaries. Rather than focus on the old material, we decided to record new music in the spirit of our debut.
My brother Cody and I started the Allstars in 1996 as a loose collective of musicians from our North Mississippi home. We were inspired by our father, Jim Dickinson, as well as by our neighbors and musical elders: RL Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Otha Turner, and Fred McDowell. Our first national tour was backing RL on the Ass Pocket of Whiskey tour in 1997, selling out shows in the US and Canada. Kenny Brown hired us and showed us the ropes. That experience blew my mind. Cody and I have been on the road ever since.
When we started the Allstars, we played Mississippi music as straight and traditional as we could, but it evolved. While we were playing a residency on Beale Street in 1998, we realized we could incorporate our previous style of psych-rock improvisation and create our own sound. The idea of using folk and blues melodies and lyrics as vehicles for interpretation and improvisation made a lot of sense to us. We recorded our debut while we were still intoxicated from growing up and hanging out at Otha’s G.O.A.T. picnics and spending Sunday nights at Junior’s juke joint. We were under the influence of the Sacred Steel music, and those first two collections literally changed our lives.
The Allstars began touring in 1998, and the touring lineup has at various times included Cedric Burnside, Garry Burnside, Chris Chew, Berry Oakley Jr., and Oteil Burbridge. Currently the band features Joey Williams of the Blind Boys of Alabama and Ray Ray Hollowman, guitarist player for Eminem. We’ve been fortunate to share the stage with countless legends, including Phil Lesh, Mavis Staples, Robert Plant, John Hiatt, Buddy Guy, Snoop Dogg, and Jon Spencer. By the time we made Shake Hands with Shorty, our recipe was Mississippi Hill Country and Sacred Steel cross-bred with our stoner/punk/low-rent psychedelic jams. We started calling it Modern Mississippi Music.
We recorded Shake Hands with Shorty and many of our other albums at our family studio, Zebra Ranch, in Independence, Mississippi. For me music is an act of communion with the elders that transcends time and space, which makes Zebra Ranch—as Jimi Hendrix would have called it—an electric church. So that’s where we had to make Still Shakin’. We had to get some of that vibe. That’s where I wrote the initial riffs that became the album’s title track. It wasn’t planned, but one morning I woke up and realized it was the 15th anniversary of our dad’s passing. That inspired me to record the instrumental “Monomyth” on his baby grand piano.
Our albums have always been more a snapshot of where and who we are than an indication of where we are headed. The musicians in the current Allstars lineup served as motivation to record Still Shakin’. Joey and Ray Ray and special guest Kashiah Hunter elevate the band to new heights while still grounding us, and together we settled back into a new version of our old dynamic. This lineup wouldn’t exist without the kindness and community-building of Robert Randolph, who introduced us to Joey and Ray Ray. They in turn introduced us to Kashiah.
We ended up recording with them at home and on the road, but some of the most inspired moments happened in Mississippi. We recorded Robert Kimbrough and Duwayne Burnside at Duwayne’s juke joint in Holly Springs, which captured a real Modern Mississippi Music. Recording with our old friend Jojo Hermann brought back memories of the heyday of Fat Possum Records and Junior’s juke joint. He’s best known as the keyboard player in Widespread Panic, but he was a founding partner of Fat Possum, which released albums by some of those great Mississippi heroes.
We offer the album to the memory of Phil Lesh, another great mentor and a huge influence on the Allstars. Playing with him and second-generation soul brother Grahame Lesh in Phil and Friends was another life-changing music experience. We didn’t grow up playing Dead songs, but Phil and Grahame taught us by hand the songs but also the philosophies and intentions behind the music. Grahame’s bass playing on Still Shakin’ reassures me that the Lesh tradition lives on.
Over the years we’ve learned that the harder we work ourselves in the studio and the more DIY a record is, the better it feels and the better it captures the feeling we evoke live. So we like to record long and loose, quickly and painlessly capturing inspiration and raw performances, then we polish them a little bit and trim the fat. We let our current experiments, explorations, obsessions, and influences natural infuse the music on Still Shakin’. We plugged acoustic instruments into homemade tube amps, which we then plugged directly into the recording board, which created some amazingly fuzzy, funky guitar textures.
The Allstars also recorded to document our travels. Any time I come across a cool keyboard out in the wild, I’ll quickly set up and record with it and then add it to a song later. We also using our iPhones to create off-the-cuff breakbeats or field recordings. At one point I was complaining about a subpar audio standard when my kids turned me on to Steve Lacy and his iPad Touch recordings. It’s truly DIY by any means necessary. We worked on this record in the studio but we also took it out on the road. I recorded vocals in hotel rooms using my kids’ plastic karaoke mic. We took it to coffee shops and backstage dressing rooms. We worked on it aboard planes, trains, and automobiles. I love working on a long-term project a little bit every day, because it gives you new perspectives that can’t be faked.
Ultimately, Still Shakin’ is Modern Mississippi Music filtered through our musical instincts today. It has a lighthearted spirit of gratitude and joy and isn’t weighed down by concept or agenda. If you stay engaged, music will always be fascinating to you and your playing will always evolve. We also believe that the North Mississippi well never runs dry. There is always a song that I’ve never considered playing that comes into my life and has to be considered. And these musicians never fail to shine. They always have inspired contributions to make and serve up the proper portions of hometown funk. Even though we spend a lot of time on the road, our hearts are always back home: “It don’t matter what dirt is on my boots, I’m in a Mississippi frame of mind.”