Last month, the Drive-By Truckers released their 8th studio album, The Big To-Do, a typically excellent collection Southern rock character sketches and story songs. The Georgia-based band — whose co-founders, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, once lived in Memphis — has often peppered their music with local and regional references, including songs about Sun Records founder Sam Phillips and the night punk provocateur G.G. Allin played the Antenna Club.
- The Drive-By Truckers (Patterson Hood third from the left.)
And The Big To-Do continues the band’s Mid-South connection, the album dedicated to late Memphis producer Jim Dickinson and featuring a song about the notorious 2006 murder case in near-by Selmer, Tennessee, in which Mary Carol Winkler shot her husband, a local minister.
Ahead of the band’s scheduled Saturday night set at the Beale Street Music Festival, I exchanged e-mails with Hood about some of the band’s more recent Memphis and Mid-South connections, among other topics:
Flyer: The Big To-Do is dedicated, in part, to Jim Dickinson, and you reference your relationship with the Dickinson family in the liner notes. Can you elaborate a little on your connections to the Dickinsons and what Jim means/represents for you?
Patterson Hood: Jim was very much a hero of mine and to some extent the whole band. Not only the work he did but how he did it and the point of view he represented with it. I met him many years ago when [co-frontman Mike] Cooley and I were in Adam’s House Cat. We were managed by [Memphis Grammy chapter director] Jon Hornyak and he introduced us. I really wanted him to produce that band and actually always wanted DBT to work with him too on some level. In later years, I’ve become good friends with [Dickinson’s sons] Luther and Cody, who I also admire so. Luther and I had this idea to form a side project band with my Dad and Jim. Between the five of us, it’s a pretty kick-ass band and covers the bases. Not long before Jim got sick, we all convened at [Dickinson’s studio] the Zebra Ranch for a couple of days and tracked a few songs with the intention of making an album. Of course, between DBT’s schedule and the many irons Luther and Cody have in the fire, getting all of us together is next to impossible so it never got finished. I still hope to finish it all at some point and maybe turn it into a tribute to Jim and what he meant to us. Jim and my father had their own history together which made it all even cooler.
Also, Big Star’s 3rd [which Dickinson produced] is one of my desert island discs and “Kangaroo” is one of my all-time favorite songs. Jim told me the cowbell story and autographed my vinyl copy of 3rd.
